Diferent: better or worse?

My friend Seth tried out new speaker cables. They were definitely different—a fact in itself that surprised him—but were they better? Apple just unveiled its new operating system, Big Sur. Better or worse? Well, on the one hand, they have completely hosed their mail app and its ability to work with Exchange (forcing me to abandon it after all these years). On the other hand, the integration with their apps and desktop programs is better. Different doesn't always equate to either better or worse. What we can say is that different often requires us to adjust our brains, routines, and lives to accommodate. After time we discover the new is better in some ways, worse in others. Sometimes different is immediately better or worse: fully supporting our current mojo, or so far away as to be alien. This sometimes happens when evaluating equipment—clear and unequivocally one direction or another. But more often than not different is a mixed bag of improvements that challenges our abilities to adapt and forces us to question whether or not its worth the time and energy to find out. For me, I work hard at offering different time and space enough for proper evaluation.