Life Hacks (or, Solutions to First World Problems)

Fellow [occasional] blogger Jen posted a link to this list of “50 Life Hacks to Simplify Your World.” In a previous era, “life hacks” were referred to as “Hints from Heloise,” but that’s another topic for another time.

Anyway, after skimming through the article, I started wondering what future extraterrestrial archeologists might glean about our culture, assuming the list survived after our world’s inevitable extinction caused by a lethal combination of Honey Boo Boo and zombies.

I think the first thing they’d find is that we were obsessed with mastering our electrical and electronics cables, a task that was apparently more challenging than it looks. Six of the fifty deal with taming unruly cords and cables. We should forgive those future investigators if they arrive at the conclusion that we were ultimately throttled to death by our own devices.

We also couldn’t be bothered with conventional ideas of food preparation. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be skewering strawberries with soda straws, or concocting confections in our coffee cups, or doctoring discards with dollops of dairy. On the other hand, they would doubtless approve of the recipe for bacon pancakes. There’s not a force in the ‘verse that doesn’t endorse bacon as a delicious alternative to actual nutrition.

Finally, we will be judged and found wanting by our textiles. A race that needs step-by-step instructions for folding its bedclothes has obviously earned its destruction to make way for a more intelligent life form.

Future historians may discern that humans were never able to conquer poverty, much less cure the common cold, but by George, we did finally overcome the inherent limitations of those little paper ketchup cups, and that’s not nothing.