God Is Dead, Old Friend
It’s late. MacBook Pro balanced on my lap, iPhone on the nightstand, a row of Apple biographies close enough to reach without getting up. In a desk drawer there’s a blue iPod nano—old generation, uncharged for months now. The neighbors have finally stopped arguing in the stairwell.
Then the first tweets come in.
What hit me wasn’t grief exactly—or it was, but not the kind I was prepared to explain in public. It felt ridiculous to mourn Steve Jobs the way you’d mourn someone you actually knew. And yet. He had accompanied me through more decisions, private and professional, than any teacher or ideology ever managed. Not through anything he said directly to me. Just by existing and having been exactly that relentless about the things he believed in.
I remember the kitchen-table presentation I built for my mother. Slides, talking points, rehearsed delivery—the full performance—to convince her we needed a Mac in the house. I was maybe sixteen. The argument was half-practical and half-religious. Bill Gates had won by making computing gray and utilitarian and without a soul, and I refused to participate in that. Fuck the gray box. Fuck the beige plastic. I was going to live in a different world.
What drew me wasn’t purely design, though the design mattered enormously. It was the biography. Dropped out of college after one semester, stayed on campus to audit a calligraphy class because it interested him, worked factory jobs, went to India, came back with something he couldn’t quite name yet. Vision plus recklessness plus a weird, genuine aesthetic conviction. He took LSD and read Zen texts and then went and built the most commercially successful technology company in history. That combination never stopped being strange and compelling.
He was, by most available evidence, genuinely awful to the people around him. Bullied his teams to the point of cruelty. Denied his own daughter for years. Screwed over business partners and rewrote histories to suit himself. I’m not trying to rehabilitate any of that. But the whole picture—the genius and the ugliness together—was instructive in ways the sanitized version could never be. You could look at it honestly and still find something worth learning.
The 2005 Stanford commencement address is the obvious reference, and it’s obvious because it holds up. He talked about death as the most clarifying thing he knew: Almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
I’ve returned to that passage more times than I can count, usually at moments when I was in the middle of being a coward about something that mattered.
What I’ll carry is the habit I developed without quite noticing it: asking, when something felt difficult or unclear, what he would do in this particular moment, with this particular problem, to make the situation his. It worked. Not always, but often enough that it became a private operating principle.
The battery indicator is almost red. Music in my ears going quieter, softer. Twitter cycling through condolences, then quotes, then the same four photographs on an infinite loop. God is dead. Get some rest, old friend.