So Steve Jobs died last week, and I’m sitting here trying to figure out what the hell that means to me, this guy I never actually knew but who was always just… here.
Growing up in Palo Alto, I couldn’t escape him. Not in the celebrity sighting way, not in the “oh look, there’s someone important” bullshit that makes people pull out their phones and act like idiot assholes. It’s more intimate than that, more ordinary, which makes it stranger. He was part of the landscape. I’d see him. He existed. He occupied the same few square miles of overpriced California real estate that I did.
My mother has an art gallery, and sometimes he’d stop in. Alone, not making a production of it. Just a guy looking at antique prints. He lived around the corner from me. I’d pass his place driving home from campus or on runs, huffing past while he was probably inside somewhere, in recent weeks dying, though none of us knew it yet. That’s the thing about proximity without connection, you share space but not lives. You’re neighbors in the most literal, meaningless sense. I never knocked on his door, the security guards sitting in parked cars on the street outside his house no doubt would stopped me. We were strangers who happened to orbit the same patch of earth.
And now he’s gone, and I realize I’m going to miss him. Not because I knew him, because I didn’t. But because he represented something about this place, about the relentless fucking optimism and the gorgeous arrogance of believing you can remake the world from a garage in Palo Alto.
He was proof that it wasn’t all bullshit, that sometimes the mythology is real.
The thing that gets me is how many other people will miss him too. All these people leaving apples on his fence. And the millions who never met him, never passed his house, never saw him quietly contemplating art in a gallery. They’ll miss him because he gave them something, beauty, utility, a different way of seeing.
I guess that’s the real trick, isn’t it? Mattering to people you’ll never know.