I would never say I’m a purist, but part of me favors the decadence of simplicity. Freshly painted white walls, a solid gold band, 100% Kona coffee — all examples of how concision and focus make a simple product superb.

When I was very young, my Dad gave me a typewriter he had acquired as a hand-me-down from our babysitter’s family. It was an old, very basic machine; just a ribbon and keys. Heavy metals, stiff levers, and black-blue ink. Initially, I spent as much time typing on it as I did untangling the long arms of letters when they crossed. Not only that, but the ink was not erasable, so every click had to be intentional and true. Mistakes were annoying and unsightly to correct, so I learned to type gracefully and with a purpose.

As an older child, I was introduced to electronic typewriters (word processors, in some circles), which amazed me for a lot of reasons. First, they were much better at feeding paper, the whole key-tangling thing was never an issue, and many of them came with an especially exciting feature: the backspace key.

Backspace was a point of contention for me, though. Frankly, it felt like cheating. Any pride I had ever taken in my carefully coordinated typing was suddenly moot. Errors were incidental rather than ruinous. One could type with reckless abandon and never worry. In one easy tap, backspace could lift its eraser-y ribbon and stamp over the mistake, leaving only its ghost on the page.

My love for typing suddenly felt cheapened, and even a little hollow. What I had once considered a craft was now just a rote means to an end. Versus the heavy metallic slap of the typewriter, the diminished clicks of plastic buttons seemed to look up at me and say, “What’s the big deal?”

Oddly enough, I was reminded of this early disappointment today when a girlfriend of mine texted me in a flurry. She had gone out with a guy a couple times and given him her home address, right before he flipped a switch and turned into a supercreep. She started Googling him to confirm his identity, and found that he didn’t seem to exist online. This only served to freak her out more, and she was seeking advice on what to do next, all the while admitting that she had been too quick with her trust.

It made me wonder if the typewriter gives us all a big hint about life: that the best course of action for a desired outcome is slow, measured, and practiced, and adding features to hurry through life just waters down the simply sublime. Mike Powell addressed this beautifully in his New York Times Magazine article, Washing Dishes, where he debates the purchase of a dishwasher for his family over losing the lovely, normal ritual that washing dishes can be. In it, he recalls the solace that activity had been on occasion, and reflects on how mechanizing the mundane further disconnects us from the hidden gifts of ordinary life.

Life doesn’t have a backspace key, and even if it did, it wouldn’t completely erase our errors. Rather, it would just cover them up and move on like they never happened. The mistakes are obviously still there, though: butting curves up against lines; creating unintelligible symbols out of conflicting letters; subjugating the text you meant to write, but rushed through the first time.

Silently reminding you, with each finger stroke, that nothing you do is inconsequential.