I may go so far as to say if you don’t like The Big Lebowski, stop reading this blog.

(I’m just kidding. Come back. P-please?)

One of the amazing things about the Coen Bros’ story is the way The Dude experiences epiphanies that ultimately enlighten no one but him. He’s like this sub-Philip Marlowe upon whom nothing depends and the only useful realization he forms is that he is the mark. Before expressing his final epiphany, he begins, “My thinking about this case had become very uptight,” a line that’s become a kind of mantra for me. How often, for example, do you express an opinion about something then immediately catch yourself with the thought, “I’m positive I don’t have all the facts.” I skew gullible so for me the answer is, quite often.

Take the Apple Watch, for example. I was ready to join the chorus that this was a luxury item, a status symbol, and a sign that Apple was moving into a high-end product niche for only its richest clients. It’s also clear that it’s impractical to use for typing messages and/or browsing and utterly dependent on the iPhone. None of these things is untrue but none of these observations can be reverse-engineered into a proper motivation for the Apple Watch’s existence. In courting these criticisms, I had no perspective on the motivation for creating such a thing. Which given the amount of money and effort it had to involve, was unlikely to be slight.

I’m sort of appreciating this after reading this incredible Wired piece on the behind-the-scenes thinking and tinkering that went into designing the Apple Watch.

Look, I’m as disappointed as you are that this post turned into me saying, “Actually the Apple Watch is kinda cool?!?!” but hear me out…

The TL;DR of the thing is that Apple is trying to revolutionize and tier our interactions with push notifications. The watch notifies you of different events in different ways while offering a dynamic array of interactions with those notices by sensing your movements. And apparently you’re not meant to actually text with the thing (it’s interesting—read the piece). What these guys tinkered into oblivion was a new way to keep you from looking at your phone. That’s what the fucking Apple Watch does. And that’s…kinda great?

Yes, spending $400 on a thing that keeps you from being enslaved to the thing you bought for $700 (and pay $100 for monthly) is next-level first-world problem solving. But that’s not the point nor what I find interesting about this whole thing. What’s interesting is the idea of intention and how mangled it gets. I don’t want an Apple Watch (not now, anyway) but the amount of love and care these guys put into an electronic watch (well, actually a supercomputer on your arm) made me think of recording sessions where a short space of, say, four seconds and perhaps 50-odd tracks gets belabored with stupid levels of intensity. In that moment, that four seconds becomes your world. And when it’s finally right, it becomes this massively powerful detail in your experience of the music, as a creator.

That detail is almost never meaningful to an outside listener. That’s why when I’m listening to something that isn’t really clicking for me, I try to give it that generous ear, try to isolate and expand one of those expansive four-second cross-sections the band and engineer just labored and argued into being. Sometimes I still hate what I’m hearing. But sometimes, I get it.

That detailed moment is literally everywhere. It’s in the design of a doll’s tiny felt cape or even in the location of the zip ties that braced it to the cardboard. It’s in the load-bearing strength of the guard rail hugging a canyon road and in the plotting of the grade of said road. I’m constantly surprised by what happens haphazardly, just the result of throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks with users/consumers/etc. and what is the result of painstaking consideration. It’s not always obvious.

What’s obvious is almost never worth the trouble, not in the long-term certainly. The surface experience of reality is not only boring, it’ll probably lead you to being exploited at some point. Like The Dude.

“My thinking about this case had become very uptight.”