The simple life

Henry David Thoreau once said, “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify!” I’m not sure how seriously I should take a man who communed with squirrels and had a beard that looked like their mutated cousin; but then, his Wikipedia entry is huge while mine is nonexistent, so who am I to judge? The naturalist and author of “Walden” may have been onto something.

Since Thoreau lived in the 1800s, it was naturally easy for him to sequester himself in the Massachusetts wilderness to subsist on a diet of wood chips and loneliness. When he submitted himself to nature to write, the big technological innovations of the day were shoe horns and breast pockets for monocles. Today’s gadgets, with their brightly-colored screens and videos of skateboarders injuring their genitals, would have made the teeth fall out of his head, and into the campfire where he cooked his badgers.

They’d also have made him question whether his call for simplicity is even possible.

I’ve been thinking about Thoreau lately, and not in a jealous, I-want-to-spoon-with-bears kind of way. Rather, impulsive technological purchases have made me think of simplifying my life – and of how difficult the task will be.

So I’m laptop shopping. (Yep. I’m going from Thoreau to computers. Strap in for a wild ride.) It’s a frustrating pursuit. Depressing as it is to admit, computers have become as much of a necessary staple as milk, or comfortable underwear. They’re wonderful inventions in a lot of ways – what else would allow me to write e-mails, watch The Daily Show, and Photoshop images of my head onto the bodies of Greek gods? – but they’ve also insinuated their way into daily life with the inextricable persistence of a benign growth. Not owning one would be as hampering to productivity as chucking my phone, or lopping off my hand with an Ottoman scimitar.

My current laptop is a joke, and not a particularly funny one. It does the basic things you would want it to – I can play music on it, and blog about my hatred of circus peanuts – but beyond that, it slogs its way through heftier applications with the plodding resignation of an arthritic dog. Even video-watching taxes the hardware on this disgraceful machine. Let’s say I want to watch the latest episode of the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert’s satiric jab at blowhard political pundits. The process goes something like this: Go to Colbert’s website. Click on “Full Episodes.” Select the latest video. Insert earplugs to drown out the clothes-dryer-calibur noise emitting from the overtaxed innards of the ancient beast. Sit through choppy commercials while the computer’s processor awakens from bear-like hibernation. Curse a lot. Watch episode. Kill self.

It’s an ordeal.

So the time has come for a new one, and that’s all well and good. Except, in defiance of Thoreau’s philosophy, I can’t bring myself to simplify. I expect a lot of my tired Dell’s successor.

Being enamored with video editing will do that. In college, I took an editing course in which my instructor assigned a final project seemingly designed to make the fanboy in me quiver with glee: A music video, to be shot MTV-style, and shown to the class on the semester’s final day. Since I generally consider music to be the greatest invention this side of canned cheese, I took to the assignment with relish, cobbling together enough embarrassing footage of my friends to splice together a video worthy of MTV’s heyday – back when it actually aired music videos, rather than mind-numbing reality shows starring loud-mouthed drug addicts and doughy ex-professional wrestlers.

It was a ludicrous masterpiece, capturing the zeitgeist of my college years and impressing my instructor, who gave me an “A” despite being visibly horrified during the screening. It set off an obsession, and soon, with a stockpile of new computer equipment and all the pretentiousness of a young Kubrick, I started dashing off projects of my own: Music videos, documentaries, YouTube-ready shtick, and in an alternate version of reality, a romantic comedy where I get to make out with Scarlett Johansson. (Physics tells us it’s possible to envision a parallel universe in which this does indeed happen. Reason number 257 why I love physics.)

As years go by, of course, priorities change. Videography took a back seat to more pressing matters, like finding employment, and mastering the Star-Spangled Banner on my plastic kazoo. But lately, the old interest is awakening, and it’s awakening to a world of Blu-Rays and high-definition and anamorphic widescreen. It’s time to chuck the steam-powered Dell and update my gear, but that in itself has entailed erroneous purchases and weeks of research that would intimidate the most diligent presidential historian. I can’t imagine Ron Chernow’s 900-page volume on Washington resulted in more gray hairs.

And for what? One last masterwork? One of the biggest problems with gadgets is there are way too many of them; each one a detail, frittering away life, bit by electronic bit.

It’s enough to make a guy want to chuck everything and go live in the wild, bathing in streams and teaching sign language to possums. As much of a video geek as I apparently am, I hear that mantra, echoing: Simplify, simplify, simplify.