This morning I’m thinking about those instances where the trees briefly and helpfully blur, allowing the forest to momentarily come into view. I’m thinking about living in the future: Present me is working in a way that Past Me would find, well, staggering.

I’m a man of a certain age: young enough to have embraced the digital age at its beginning, but old enough to have worked for years as a writer and editor prior to it. In terms of technology, I tend to be highly adaptable—when something new comes along, I happily incorporate it into my workflow if it proves to be useful. Which is Very Good, I think—especially when I compare myself to other people my age grappling with tech. At the same time, however, it also makes me a little it like the proverbial frog in that hypothetical slowly warming pot of water: I tend not to notice just how much my workflow has actually changed.

But this morning for some reason, I suddenly thought about How It Used To Be. Present Me is a thoroughly modern writer—on this gray, very wet morning, I’m sitting in front of a MacBook Pro that in terms of the early 1990s is unimaginably powerful. It’s simultaneously playing Max Richter’s Three Worlds and presenting me with my work in Ulysses—the writing application of the gods—which runs in splendid isolation on its own desktop.

Ulysses has freed me from worrying about lost formatting—something, when I think about, which is rarely, thrills both the writer and the editor in me. Extended Markup has made my work infinitely exportable, even while indicating to me that it’s formatted the way I’ve intended. And the minimal writing environment ensures that Ulysses fades away, leaving me with only my writing.

When needed, a contextual attachment sidebar slides in from the right offering the notes, URLs, and graphics I may need for what I’m currently writing. I can also embed there links to OmniOutliner, OmniGraphics, Evernote and DevonThink Pro—my research database.

With a key combination, Wirelesshead’s estimable Paste app slides up from the bottom, a perfect match to Ulysses’ interface, and offers me 50 of my most recent clips from any of my Macs

Sliding my fingers to the right on the track pad reveals other parts of my manuscript in a sidebar, while sliding to the right again takes me to a further sidebar list of all my projects. Dragging and dropping allows me to quickly reorganize the piece at hand—down to paragraph level, if necessary.

And, of course, the MacOS’ built-in dictionary can be popped up at anytime.

This is in no way how it was in the analogue days prior to 1984—and, truth be told, even for a while after 1992. Same guy, same job—but with a breathtakingly different toolset, access to research and method of composition. Hell, the machine in front of me even plays my working music—even the obligatory mini-stereo on a nearby file cabinet has been swept away.

My work life today is made possible by advances in chip design, miniaturization, the evolution of the Web and, of course, wifi. Collectively, this is the infrastructure of what I do. But all of this fails to describe the actual impact. My work slinging pixels as opposed to ink is now integrated, organic frictionless, and astonishingly faster than in 1983. Writing started on my iPhone in a Starbucks is instantly on my MacBook Pro, waiting for me on my return home, and if I wake in the middle the night, the current revision is also on my iPad waiting for tweaks. I can ask Siri to pull up further research and sip my coffee while I wait for it to appear.

Frictionless: Present Me no longer deals with the staggering amount of impediments that made the concept of flow almost a joke. Gone are the Exacto knives, the scotch tape, the index cards, the stickies, the physical galleys, the trips to libraries, the research assistants, the bulletin boards, the multiple pens with multiple colors of ink, the fax machine, the post office, the traveling to do interviews, the special deliveries from the typesetter, the conference calls dependent on suitably equipped boardrooms, the secret wifi network I personally bought and set up without telling IT so my magazine staff could move about our floor at will, the three-month waits for reader feedback, the physical comprehensives of art directors and—yes—the necessity of keeping a duplicate set of cassettes and/or CDs at the office for music—the special sauce in my writing.

All of this stuff went away—got the hell out of my life—leaving only me and the work at hand. Well, mostly.

On this grim, wet morning, as I write, sip coffee and listen to Richter, it occurs to me that I’m moving through the sort of workaday, almost banal future that William Gibson took pains to create: Tech as the mostly unnoticed background to the characters’ lives, and not a shiny end unto itself. I’m very okay with that.