Rubik’s Cube: Hands-on finds new meaning

Be honest now… how many of us have reached the point of despair and chucked a Rubik’s Cube across the room after being unable to solve the three-dimensional puzzle?

It’s been around for 50 years and many would rather it be forgotten – but it’s not only alive and well, it’s frustrating new generations of puzzlers.

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Millennials and Generation Zs are as nuts about Rubik’s Cube as their parents were and solving them is providing endless grist for the mill of YouTube.

Inventor Erno Rubik is amused. In a digital world “we are slowly forgetting that we have hands”, Rubik says.

But playing with the cube helps us tap back into something deeply primal about doing things with our hands, he said – “our first tools”, as he calls them.

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It’s not that you’re thinking, you’re also doing, he says. And that’s perhaps the most interesting achievement of the cube… that it can still be relevant and entertaining in the Age of Screens.

In doing so, it shows that perhaps the future of humanity – or at least a fulfilled humanity – may not only be dictated by a stream of ones and zeroes.

The analogue, manual ways need to be cherished and preserved, too.