Every Problem Looks Like a Full Dishwasher
The skill of being able to effectively and efficiently use a hammer is still valuable, but perhaps less frequently needed than it used to be. Nails and hammers have largely been replaced by screws and cordless screw guns, so the idea that every problem could look like a nail is becoming ever more antiquated. (The need to occasionally smash things with some kind of hammer is perennial, however, which gives me solace.) I would posit that in these days of ubiquitous computing and relative isolation, almost every problem looks either like a login page or Tetris.
The login page is self-evident: nearly everything that we used to do in person in order to trade money for goods or services is now done with the computer as a facilitator. Everything we need to do requires an online account of some kind—even if the service is free. Thus, the login page and attendant username and password.
Every other problem we face, it seems, is some variation on the game Tetris. Tetris is a video game challenge of correctly orienting and positioning colorful shapes on the ground that fall from the sky in order to form that most prized configuration: a perfectly flat surface which then disappears, preventing a growing pile of colorful but distressingly disorganized shapes not unlike the mountains of laundry that parents are regularly faced with. The strategy is, of course, to make these sometimes awkward shapes fit together in the most efficient, continuous form possible.
It is the familiar problem of trying to schedule another Zoom call with all the people whose schedules are already filled with Zoom calls. It is doing dishes for the 3rd time between the 7th and 8th Zoom calls of the day. It is packing endless scraps and leftovers into the refrigerator. It is stuffing a seemingly self-reproducing supply of Tupperware and Pyrex and disposable/reuseable/not-very-environmentally-responsible food containers into the god-dammed cupboard. It is getting the first load of laundry started early enough that the 3rd load of laundry will be dry before bed. It is wedging another 3 dishes into the dishwasher so that there is no need to wash dishes by hand for the 5th time today. (It is, sometimes, the very happy problem of not quite being able to fit all of the M&M cookies into the cookie jar.)
A password manager or a simple pad of Post-It Notes solves the problem of login pages, but we will need to build a hell of a robot to offload all our Tetris problems.