I recently updated the operating systems on my iPhone and Macbook Pro, as usual waiting a while because the folks behind some of the software I use drag their heels on getting confirmed-compatible versions of their offerings out the door. I also try to the avoid the worst of the new-release bugs that hide in every OS upgrade across every possible computing platform, these days.

The new versions of both OSes are pretty terrible. I’m sure this feeling isn’t universal, but the general consensus seems to be that Apple stumbled on this, producing strangely ugly, slow, disarrayed base-layers for their two most important platforms.

Some of the apps I use every day are now borderline unusable, lagging and sputtering under the weight of all the unnecessary decorations and doodads that have been crammed into this “upgrade.” My outdated phone, after years of amiably puttering along like a fresh device, is suddenly acting its age, creaking and sighing every time I ask it to perform even the simple of tasks.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m not happy with all this. And the incessant insistence that I upgrade—please upgrade, don’t you want to upgrade, you must upgrade now—delivered by popups and other dark pattern elements splashed across my screens, only add insult to injury.

They forced this on me, and I’m irritated about it.

That said, in these sorts of moments I try to remind myself that new stuff will almost always be irritating or terrifying at first, at least to some portion of the intended audience. And the older we get, the more likely we are to be thus disarrayed by novelty, because we become more set in our ways, more prone to exploit rather than explore, and more latently skeptical of the unfamiliar (on average, at least).

I also try to remind myself that truly wonderful next-step evolutions seldom arrive fully baked and perfectly conceived. In most cases they’re partway there; an interesting vision bundled up in an annoying, detrimental, maybe even confoundingly bad wrapper. It can take a while for the good to be identified and amplified, and the bad whittled away.

This isn’t just true of tech giants and their products. Every good thing I’ve ever made, all the incredibly valuable, fulfilling, healthful next-steps I’ve ever taken, have been processes, not one-shot pivots. And almost always we have to break things in order to make things: we can patch and suture the old for a long while, iterating on what works. But at some point that awkward collage of ideas will need to be reassessed and, ideally, reborn as something new; a fresh canvas to tweak, refine, and over the course of years revise into its own patchwork masterpiece (which will then be destroyed and replaced).

This isn’t always a fun thought, but it’s this or stagnation.

That’s what I tell myself, anyway, as another app fails to load and another digital tool I rely upon to do my job stutters and shuts itself down, the machines running them collapsing under the weight of un-asked-for tacky UI elements and yet another, buggy software update.

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