The Nature of Reality

Aaron Pace
4 min readMay 9, 2023
Photo by Gaetano Cessati on Unsplash

MapQuest was a technological marvel. In the early days of the internet you would. . .

  • Visit mapquest.com,
  • Enter your departure address,
  • Enter your destination address,
  • Print the turn-by-turn instructions produced by the system,
  • Take your printed directions and find your way to your destination following the directions.

Remarkable as MapQuest was, its limitation was clear: it was on paper.

If you took a wrong turn or were just really bad at following directions, you could still get hopelessly lost; perhaps even worse off than you would have been following your Uncle Steve’s verbal directions scrawled hastily on a napkin.

The functional limitations of MapQuest in its early years are a good parallel to life. We make plans — sometimes sketching them out in painstaking detail — only to be derailed by the unforeseeable: changes in employment opportunities, health, or family circumstances.

Alan Watts offered a revision on the tired refrain “life is what happens when you’re making other plans” when he said:

They fail to live because they are always preparing to live.

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Aaron Pace
Aaron Pace

Written by Aaron Pace

Married to my best friend. Father to five exuberant children. Fledgling entrepreneur. Writer. Software developer. Inventory management expert.

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