In an effort to make typing easier, Dean Hachamovitch invented AutoCorrect, while working on the Word team at Microsoft in the 1990s. The first word to ever be autocorrected is ‘teh’. His goal was to make typing smooth as speaking from a teleprompter. Ken Kocienda later created the original iPhone’s autocorrect system and the rest is history as autocorrect became part of our lives.
Journalist Gideon Lewis Kraus is fascinated with autocorrect: “Invoke the word autocorrect and most people will think immediately of its hiccups—the sort of hysterical, impossible errors one finds collected on sites like Damn You Autocorrect.
We know autocorrect is there as a brace and cushion, we’re free to write with increased abandon, at times and in places where writing would otherwise be impossible. Thanks to autocorrect, the gap between whim and word is narrower than it’s ever been, and our world is awash in easily rendered thought.”
Damn You Autocorrect
A friend shared that she sent her husband a text a few years ago: “I am back home. I am knackered and going to bed.” When he read her text, “I am back home. I am naked and going to bed,” he ran home as fast as he could. But she was fast asleep in bed when he got there. And he found himself confused by the mixed message.
There is a whole site dedicated to hilarious, embarrassing and laugh out loud faux pas where autocorrect strikes with abandon. We all have a funny autocorrect story that makes us giggle.
I used to type ‘teh’ all the time and I remember doing search and replace to correct them all. I never formally learned how to type, and yet I type very fast, so today any ‘teh’ automatically transforms into the as I type. And with AI, it’s not just words that get corrected but thoughts and intentions are automatically transformed when we type.
But in life, we can only say ‘damn you autocorrect’ when we are typing or dictating a message. There is a whole, entire other autocorrect that happens from our societal conditioning.
What if No One is ‘Doing it Wrong’?
Wanting efficiency in our online world, and typing abilities, autocorrect is loved and hated. Our relationship with autocorrect depends on whether it gets us into hot water, or not. And whether we choose to be offended, or not.
There is a deeper practice we humans have, which is the need to correct ourselves and each other. It is an endless point of contention and division between people, which starts when we think we are doing something wrong or someone needs correcting. There is a constant need for perfection and automatic human correction.
But the truth is that this is a learned behavior. We don’t need to correct behavior in the name of perfection. Why can’t it be simple to accept ourselves and each other as we are as long as we are not causing harm? What if we’re not doing anything wrong because we accept ourselves?
It’s important that we become aware of our need to compete and compare ourselves to others. There’s always resistance that pushes us forward, as it helps us reevaluate our true purpose. It’s an opportunity to understand our level of negative self-talk and where these beliefs of being better than anyone else stems from.
The old paradigm programmed us to judge ourselves based on how we compare, based on criteria of perfection and societal conditioning. And it taught us to correct when we are doing things deemed ‘wrong’ and let others reprimand us when we do something unacceptable like put our feet on a table in a public place or say the wrong thing.
Imagine if there’s no one else to take down or compare ourselves to—how would your life be different? What if the decaying paradigm is set up, by design, to make us feel less than or like a failure?
When we trek into the unknown, we not only take risks, we reap the benefits of getting closer to our mission, which can be as simple as living a healthy life. And what is acceptable is up to us as long as we don’t cause harm.
No autocorrect required; just flow and alignment with everything nature offers us.