I saw this post on a social media page: “Why is everything a ‘hack’ all of a sudden. Vinegar hacks, cooking hacks, curling iron hacks. What does that mean and how did it start? I don’t remember hearing it before a few weeks ago. Just one of those weird things that drive me crazy.” The commenter attempted to take the edge off the mini-rant by finishing with the ubiquitous “LOL.”
One of the definitions of “hack” in the Oxford English Dictionary is to “Gain unauthorized access to (a computer file or system or the data held in one).” It is noted as a colloquialism which came into common usage between 1970 and 1999. We know that definition well, from recent attacks on the computer systems of the healthcare provider Anthem, Sony Pictures, and retailers such as Target. Many years ago, I was drinking beer with a man who had computer skills. Our conversation drifted into the newly highlighted phenomenon of computer hacking. The man contended that hacking was a good social contribution. I took a swallow of beer, then, a negative position about hacking. The man told me that hackers were actually doing a good service to owners and operators of computer systems. “When hackers break into a system,” he said, “they expose flaws and weaknesses that the owners can then fix.”
“So,” I said, “if I steal a man’s car, that helps him? Shows him the weakness in his door locks?” My logic frustrated the man and he opened another beer. “Hacking is good,” he belched. Judging by the current, additional definition of the term, he may have been right. “Life hacks,” as best I can divine, are shortcuts, ways to do daily and tedious chores better and more efficiently. I don’t know when or how the term came into vogue, but the English language evolves, and man is helpless before the process. (Even those who do not believe in evolution.)
I have a friend who has a series of those so-called hacks. She has limited mobility and lives alone in a large, old house. To circumvent the challenges presented to her, she has devised unique tools and implements. When her 6’ 5” husband was alive, he could reach up to flip the handles to open the steel casement windows. Now, at 5’ 1” (“and shrinking”) she needs another way to reach the windows. She uses a device that she designed and her friend constructed of PVC pipe. A bent nail driven into the end of a long dowel rod became a device to dig the weeds from between the cracks in her driveway. A garden sign taped to the end of a pole is now a gutter cleaner. In the corners of her house are tools that she has crafted to help her live a better life.
The term “life hacks” names the latest fad, and has nothing to do with “life.” The ways in which people deal with the challenges of moving through a difficult world are the real “life hacks.” My mother could not afford a typewriter so that she could pass a course that led from welfare to a nursing degree, and I listened as she practiced typing on a piece of cardboard: “ASDFGHJKL semicolon.” When the bus does not take a man all the way to his job, he walks, and when my friend cannot reach the gutters of her house, she invents a tool to help her.
Real “life hacks” are merely the ways in which people address the challenges of the day.