The typo make us humna 

In our ever-changing and seemingly chaotic world, the typo, that simple yet ubiquitous mistake that everyone everywhere makes occasionally, is still too often deemed as the ultimate death knell for too many potential hires, projects, and deals. 

As the dyslexic son of an English teacher and a librarian, the importance of proper grammar and spelling has been metaphorically beaten into my brain since early childhood. “Food is good . . . You do things well . . .” was an all too common saying around my eastern North Carolina childhood home. 

The older I’ve gotten and the more that I’ve tried, these pesky, frustrating, and often hilarious mistakes still manage to creep their way into literally every single thing I do. It’s both maddening and inevitable, but also nearly always funny. 

What makes us unique

Everyone has a special, unique, and key talent. Mine is inevitably inserting typos at the exact wrong point and being unable to spot them after the fact . . . until, of course, it’s too late and I’ve sent my now mortifyingly unsendable error. 

For most of my life, this has been a near-crippling fear. It’s slowed down productivity, inhibited timely responses, and very likely affected friendships and professional relationships. 

In a shocking (but obvious) sense of self-realization during a conversation about AI recently, the need for perfection—and the ever-blurring line between technology and humanity—I finally realized just how little these this actually matters in the grand scheme of things. And how these all too human mistakes show our quirks and personalities in ways that ever-evolving AI can and never will replicate. Let’s stop pretending otherwise. 

While I’m fully aware that my english teacher mother is likely looking down at me from beyond the grave unamused and shaking her head in disapproval at my self-realization, I do in fact believe that as a society we should be embracing our quirks more fully, as these are what truly make us human.  

For clarification, I’m not arguing for an age of not caring. I’m just arguing for an age of caring within reason. At the end of the day, life is far too short and there are far too many other things of higher importance that demand our attention than to needlessly worry about such things. I mean seriously . . . fukc it . . .

William Dodge is cofounder and artist at A Gang of Three and founder and design principal at p-u-b-l-i-c.