Also, Modern civilization is making a lot of things "frictionless". Less friction is indeed more convenient. However, it makes us forget that a lot of "real-life" frictions (difficulties, challenges, Human interactions...) are what make us grow. Our "higher selves” who crave that "personal growth" are never contented with that bland/rippleless experience.

So, we are left in the middle in superficial satisfaction and security, with deep fulfilment (both lower and higher) always out of reach. I wonder if the "mental illness" epidemic has something to do with this, as a psychological mechanism to get us out of our virtual stupor.

I am in my mid 20s, working as a software engineer. I have never worked in an office. I live alone in a city where I don't know anyone.

I haven't talked to another person in real life since Thanksgiving.

Will there be bad things about the office? I am 100% sure there will be. But for me the decision to not be remote wasn't even a want, but a need. I am slowly losing my mind, locked up in my apartment, 23 hours a day.

Before someone comments about "go to a rock climbing gym" or "go to a coffee shop" - I tried all of those things. It's not that simple. An office job is a very consistent way to talk to another human person in real life.

Then my manager quit. Or a power-hungry executive starts targeting your area, creating chaos. Or the company doesn't raise the funding it needs.

So, you quit, or get laid off, or fired. That family culture, and friends you saw every day and bonded with are either no where to be seen or the dynamic shifts so dramatically it becomes practically unbearable.

Each job I seem to stay in touch with 1 or 2 coworkers regularly, and am on good terms with a few dozen more. But in terms meeting your social needs, it ends up hurting a lot more when you realize you were all alone the entire time and your coworkers were just paid to talk to you.

This is part of why you see a lot more people in their 20s attending company functions or working in startup "family" cultures, and fewer in their 30s, 40s, or 50.

It's good that you're finding something to help address your loneliness. I would encourage you to try to find a few work friendships that you can take offline and outside of work to start building a social network that's divorced from where you're working. And if you have a difficult time doing that, then that's particularly a skill you should work on developing -- because as someone in my mid-30s, it's only going to get harder to make and maintain friendships from here on out.

Definitely true, but it's a completely different kind of value than what you get from a stable circle of friends outside work. If you have the latter sorted out, than the former is a great addition because overcoming challenges together and spending a ton of time together leads to bonding, if shallow, and I've had lots and lots of fun with my "work besties" especially early in my career. Plus, since most people do spend a lot of time at work, might as well make that as pleasant as possible, and being well-connected and well-liked never hurts.

But if your social network is just your colleagues, then this sort of thing becomes liability since in all likelihood you'll lose all of them, possibly quite abruptly, possibly even when you actually need support. A lot of workplace friendships tend to not outlast a common place of employment for long, if at all, so changing jobs means you'll also ditch your social circle, and having to start over again and again isn't fun after the third time or so, nor is discovering that some people become icy once they're sufficiently ahead in the rat race. Workplaces tend to be an environment well-suited for relatively shallow but fun connections, but quite badly suited for forming deep, long-lasting ones, and a healthy social life needs both.

Hence I second grandparent's advice to focus on building a stable social network outside work (possibly even from work friendships where there is a strong connection and a common hobby or the like, but that should happen outside the office and over non-work topics). It does get harder to make new connections later in life (at least I find it so); better not tie those that you manage to make to a workplace that may well try to foster and exploit this exact thing because it serves the interests of the business to have you depend on their office for social warmth.

That's also not necessarily tied to WFH or from an office; some people may find it easier to do this in a WFH setting, others will be very successful mining the office for actual friends to go hiking with on the weekend.

Many of the comments/responses to me seem to be missing the original context. Yes, all friendships come and go. Yes, interaction isn't family and family isn't interaction. Yes, you can carry on friendships with people after you quit.

Everyone is saying true things. But as someone who has moved cross country to work at a startup, treated the startup as my social life, and then left that job... I was devastated by the number of people who I thought were close friends who basically didn't talk to me after I left the company. I learned that lesson in a really rough way at 26.

Now, I take my own advice, and when I meet people through work that I get along well with, I try to move that friendship outside of work so hopefully it has a chance to outlast the job and be an ongoing social connection. That also opens my network up to their friend network. It also gives me social support beyond someone to gripe about work with.

That's all I'm saying. When you have no friends or support, having daily interactions is good/necessary, but try to use that to solve the main problem: having no friends or support.

Someone in a place like that should take whatever socializing they can get, because such a situation is dangerous in itself, loneliness kills and the lonelier one becomes, the harder it is to get back out, socializing is a muscle that wants exercise. Certainly not arguing against an office job and coworkers as a first step, just don't leave it at that, is what I'm saying (as are you)

Yep. Moved for a job, only real social circle that "stuck" there was coworkers. When people started leaving and the company started to fall apart, my "social circle" fell to bits.

A lot of friends have similar stories, and a lot of companies in tech try foster this environment where everyone in the office is a whole ecosystem of mates. Which makes you not really bother put the work in to make friends outside of work.

I found this to be especially true in academia ... I spent about 10 years at the same university in different groups and have not kept many of the friends I made along the way.

This goes both ways, I spend a lot of that time in one group and got to see several "generations" of students and colleagues come an go ... After a while you just stop trying to have deep connections because most are there only temporarily.

(Also at some point students just become to young to befriend :-) )

I work remote now and making new friends has become significantly harder because I no longer have consistent repeated contact with anyone. Outside of works, meeting a new person tends to be a one-off far more often than not.

You said: >Each job I seem to stay in touch with 1 or 2 coworkers regularly,

You're describing the same thing - you will keep a friend or two from your old jobs, but it's not a whole social group.

> So, you quit, or get laid off, or fired. That family culture, and friends you saw every day and bonded with are either no where to be seen or the dynamic shifts so dramatically it becomes practically unbearable.

As well as the distinction between work friends and a real social network was what I was attempting to counterpoint. It's little confusing because they backtrack at the end and say to use work to build a social group, which is what I'm promoting.

If OP is feeling better because they can go to bowling night with their team, and feel connected and bonded... then that's not sufficient long term. If they meet one or two people who they seem to jive with and suggest meeting up outside of work for bowling... then that's a good way to start a social network that'll outlast their job and potentially not land them in the misery they were in originally.

Startups, especially in the Bay Area, will often promote the former to make people feel engaged in their work and to scratch that itch for connection. But in some ways that works against your own longer-term social needs.

Yeah, exactly - you'll probably make a few good work friends who you'll convert to just friends and then keep in touch with afterwards, but for the rest the common link is the work and once that's gone so is the connection.

Friendships made in the workplace aren't better than friendships made in other contexts, but they aren't necessarily worse, either. A lot of coworker friendships may end when the working relationship ends, but it's possible to carry on a friendship with a former coworker after you are no longer working together.

So here I am, commenting that I feel exactly the same way as you. This is the reason I went back to the office

I used to think I was someone who did NOT like the light social interactions in the office. After the pandemic lockdowns I thought I'd continue working from home. After six months of that I realized that I did enjoy the office.

Turns out I don't like small talk, but I like having a small group of people I can bond with over a meal or whatever. Its a lighter interaction. It's still professional, but it helps me.

And before anyone asks I do have that outside of office. That wasn't enough for me.

But I'm also mindful that the reverse has applied to a lot of people both throughout history and the present day, who had to be away from their families for work. Or situations where a couple have to choose who gives up their career in order to live in the same place. Or people jammed into overcrowded apartments because that's all they can afford in order to get to where the work is.

No easy answers, but the people who say remote work has been liberatory for them aren't lying.

(I'm grateful that I can have a partial-wfh experience where I go into the office two days a week, I think that's a compromise that works for me. I like being in the office, it's a nice office, I just don't like commuting.)

I felt like I was in my own prison, made even worse by moving to a suburb where the nearest non-chain coffee shop is over two hours by foot. It drove me nuts.

What I did that seems to be working really well is this:

- Drive to a gym that's about 30 minutes away from a coffee shop, walking distance

- Work out

- Walk to coffee shop

- Work for a few hours

- Walk back to my car

- Drive back home, or (likely) to some other place

- Close my work day.

However, I'd prefer to commute to an office, work in the office, walk somewhere interesting during lunch break, walk back, gym, then home.

I'm at a new firm now, in a better role, but also in office - and I'm constantly shocked by how much I enjoy going into the office. Like you, I'm in my 20s, and I do have an active social life outside of work whether WFH or not. For now, I prefer being in the office (on a good team, with a good culture and work-life balance, on a good project) than being WFH at a cool company with a mediocre culture.

You can feel yourself swing a pick or cut through an onion, pay attention to the minute physical, aural stimuli, experience how small adjustments to the angle or force or whatever affect those feelings and the outcome of the next motion. Nearly all kinds of work have this embodiment in some form, even things like washing the dishes have so much sensory experience in them.

Coding just... doesn't. It has analogs to those things, in refining techniques or "honing" "tools" but without the embodiment something essential is missing from my connection to the work. I swear I think this is why mechanical keyboards are so popular right now.

And yeah it's also true that I have a lot of other places to experience those but there seems to be something important about it tied up with my experience of work per se. Being in an office doesn't help me at all because it's not a social problem really.

A few months into the pandemic I overheard someone who eventually become a friend, a welder, ask "do you have a computer job or a real job?" It's a dismissive way to phrase it but I knew immediately that this is what he was talking about.

I've spent the majority of my professional life fully remote. The few years I have spent in an office, I've really appreciated. These days, I do miss the meat-space office and having in-person interactions with coworkers from time to time.

Pros and cons for sure, and I guess the factors that tipped me to still being remote again can be summarized as

* country and location where the lifestyle suits me

* stimulating and rewarding work where I feel I can make an impact in something I believe in while working with skilled people

* not moving every couple of years

* not spending half my free time in commute

If my current work magically had an office in town tomorrow I'd 100% start going there.

My guess that it'll come down a lot to the people you'll be working with.

Anyway, sounds like you made the right call! Good luck and hope you found something that brings you joy!

I went remote when I turned 30. I am very grateful I spent that time working in the office, making friends, and hanging out. It was a lot of fun.

I've kinda fell into that trap myself during the pandemic. Both my team and our customers are really cool, and I spend a lot of time on calls, so I didn't feel any need to meet people outside of work.

But then I took some time off and realized I barely have any friends in my city. I fixed it since then and met some great people, but at the time it wasn't a pleasant experience.

     An office job is a very consistent way to talk 
     to another human person in real life.

I have made many genuine lifelong friends this way, but "forced proximity to another person whose finances depend on their presence" is not always going to be the healthiest basis for human relationships.

     Before someone comments about "go to a rock 
     climbing gym" or "go to a coffee shop"

The real key is to join groups who do things together, whether it's gaming or hiking or volunteering or whatever. Those are true shared passions, interests, and experiences.

Forgive me if I've misunderstood your words. Perhaps you already tried things like that, e.g. you were part of a group at the rock climbing gym or something like that.

There's something to be said for joining a club or joining a church if so inclined.

It's much easier to create a community once you get rolling, but very hard to get started.

Getting a job in an office is good, it'll help build friendships. I'd just caution against that being the only community you're apart of. I personally try to be apart of 3-4 communities, it keeps me busy and makes my life more robust if one community is impacted.

"Rock climbing", "going to a coffee shop", isn't a community - those are effectively solo activities. You may get some human contact, but it's not someone you can call when you're sick.

I disagree with this one, though. It depends on how you look at it. Rock climbing CAN be an activity you go to, put earbuds in, and block out the rest of the world, and sure, many do... but if you approach it with an open mindset, talk to others at the gym, make friends, then you are already ahead of the game, because those friends already share your same hobby (vs. finding a friend at a social event).

Anecdata:

- My cousin started rock climbing because of her fiance. His entire wedding party was made up of rock climbing friends

- Another two friends I know from the gym met at said gym and got hitched

- Dissatisfied with the "phone number whiteboard", I started a local discord group which now spans two gyms, we chat online but meet up when convenient. I found one of my very good friends from that group.

It really depends on your interests, but there's bound to be something where people gather on a regular cadence and you can join.

Many people move to cities from the suburbs of their hometown where everyone they knew just happened because they were already around them for the specific reason that they had to be around them day in and day out, like an office job in a way.

My biggest recommendations would be to explore the area and be open to trying new things, and then also to meet your coworkers and their friends eventually, if you can.

So many people I know back home have only ever made "friends" with their coworkers, and if that job went away, so would their "friends", because they are linked in only that way. If you meet your coworkers friends somehow though, the only reason that relationship would flourish to the point of friendship is that you each felt that it should, because you discovered common ground or realized you both had chemistry.

Likewise, another thing I recommend to people who feel isolated, is to try and find something you like doing for 2-3 hours a day, once or twice a week, somewhat around other people. Could be the gym, could be hanging at a coffee shop, could be many other things, you just need some common faces regularly so you have the opportunity to discover if you vibe with them. It's important that you'd do it regardless of anyone else being there too. You need to be down for it, and anything else that happens should be considered a lucky side-effect.

So yes, it's not that simple, and you're absolutely right.

Nobody dislikes reading about how someone finds value for themselves in going into the office.

Some people would greatly dislike reading about how everyone should go into the office.

Yes and no. Living in a city defeats the purpose of working remotely. If you're remote with no dependants, you have ultimate freedom. Pick an outdoor activity and move east from your working timezone. Stay at a hostel, they usually have private rooms. Do said activity in the morning, work during the day, hang out with people from the hostel at night.

If you're in the city, then yeah, go to an office. Preferably one that is walking distance from a good pub or a good music venue.

Not all climbing gyms are exactly social spaces.

Some have a good culture of being a social space etc, others don't.

I've been a member of both types - the current place I climb (the only one in my current city) really lacks the social element.

I suspect there's a survivorship bias esque thing happening where people only really report on the sociable climbing walls, and nobody talks about the others.

If you woke up tomorrow and found you were the only person left on the world, would you be inspired to create? I wouldn’t.

why not go skiing on the weekends. My eyes and body was degenerating from sitting in front of screens all day. I had crazy cervical degeneration and poor eyesight from using computers all day. Skiing is helping me manage the constant cervical pain and helping my eyes relax.

Escape the screens before its too late.

There are so many activities out there that require specific geography. Normally you have to choose, a long commute to the office or a long commute to nature. But when you're remote, you can move somewhere near an activity you want to do!

Working remote and living in a city where you don't know anyone is almost definitely the wrong choice.

Plus, triathlon is inherently so much more interesting to talk about. You get all the bike gear stuff, there's talking about good routes to both run and bike, there's destinations to go to for training and racing.

Finally, you get to interact with swimmers, who are frankly the most fun and accepting of the three, I think owing to the fact that it involves people that are basically spending time together naked wearing only the thinnest, smallest amount of clothing possible.

Plus you're destroying the planet commuting every day.

Sure, just don't push your preferences on other people. That's really the issue of work remote or not.

So, you are choosing the cheapest/easiest of the options out there: to talk to people that are forced to see you in person every day of the week. To that, I can only say: good luck.

You aren't going to like everyone you meet, but you need to cooperate with them. And some can't be cooperated with, and you need to handle THAT.

Mental health consequences include:

- Anxiety about minor unpleasant things.

- Catastrophizing them.

- Ruminating on inconsequential aspects of one's life.

Also, living a dull life probably has other adverse mental health effects.

Physiological health consequences include losing physical readiness through lack of (uncomfortable but necessary) exercise. And we'll likely discover a lot of harmful physiological effects of a live-at-home lifestyle that remote work, online shopping, telehealth, and social media now enable.

While I can see some glaring negatives of living a life devoid of discomfort, there are likely many more. Psychologists and other health professionals should pay more attention to this.

Recently it feels like the stuff that’s frictionless are the distractions and time wasters and all the important stuff I’ve been trying to do are well guarded by walls of bureaucracy.

I don't really know how to get out of it. I take ice-cold showers every morning and it's now more or less "easy". Doesn't really feel like a big step though. I guess I just keep going, trying more and more difficult things.

I feel this. People I interact with all day everyday remotely I have trouble relating to.

Where I’ve made new friends recently we have gone out maybe once or twice, shared some personal opinions on life etc and quickly I feel an emotional connection to the point where I care about their well-being and want to support them.

It’s happened a few times like that in the last year, various gender identities and ages.

Isn't this why a lot of furries exist? (I say this as a DID system where all members happen to be furry creatures.)

I would debate this. Everything seems to have more and more friction to me. There was a sweet spot about 10-15 years ago where things were mostly frictionless, and it's been intentionally made worse because people believe it improves their numbers (without actually understanding what the numbers mean, I suspect).

Some examples:

- I want to read a blog. 2 paragraphs in, the screen is taken over by a popover trying to trick me into giving them my email (by making the "Cancel" control not a button, in an odd place, smaller, and a different font). I do one of 3 things that does not help the person who put it there - I give a fake email address and continue reading, I do the work and find the close/cancel button, or I simply close the tab because it's not worth my time. I suspect many people either enter a fake email or enter their real email address then mark the first few "newsletters" as spam and forget about them once their spam detection recognizes it regularly.

- I order a simple product like a gallon of milk or a light bulb, or have a routine visit to the dentist or eye doctor. I get an email imploring me to write a review of this revolutionary product or service. I ignore it. They send me several more. Annoyed, I write a scathing review of their stupid hounding efforts after buying something so mundane and give them the lowest marks. Sometimes this backfires and they want to "make it up to me" and offer me some sort of small discount on more of their products or service, or they want me to give more information "so they can improve my experience". Having the ability to write a review is great for when something goes really well or poorly, but who has time to do this for every single bank transaction? Like all I did was pay a bill. It worked exactly as expected. There's nothing to say. It wasn't spectacular, it wasn't awful. But if you do write a review and give them only 3 out of 5 stars, you'll hear about it, thus wasting more of your time.

- I want to watch the next episode of my favorite show. There's a trailer for a different show from the same service. If it's related, maybe I'm interested. Just let me tell you whether I want to see these or not in a preference. Don't make me skip it every time. But most of the time it's something they're pushing that's unrelated and not interesting, or that I already saw 5 times when watching the last 5 episodes, so usually I hit the skip button. Then there's a title card about downloading their podcast about the show. No thanks. Then a title card to "stay tuned after the episode to have it mansplained to you". Then, finally, there's the opening credits. Then after the show, there's the closing credits, followed by the credits for all the people who did voiceovers in other languages that you didn't have turned on, followed by mansplaining the episode. "When Jeremy yelled at Sally, he was angry with her!" You don't say! (Yes, I usually bail out shortly after the closing credits, it's just ridiculous how much other junk they put in there. Plus, sometimes if you don't watch it all, the episode remains in your queue until you mark it as watched.)

No one of these is terrible on its own, but it's the death by 1,000 paper cuts. I just want to accomplish some task and someone or something is constantly interrupting me to try and extract more data or money from me. It's incredibly irritating.

You can log into amazon and order millions of items to your home without getting up off the couch, but amazon only shows you the same products over and over and what you get is probably counterfeit or broken because amazon doesn't care about quality and they've made reviews useless.

You have endless entertainment for free on youtube, but it's all data collection and an algorithm dedicated to amplification of the worst aspects of your psyche. It'll entertain, and recommend you toward extremism. Don't even ask what it's doing to your kids.

You can use social media to stay in touch with everyone you love, but mostly it will make you depressed, and you'll need to self-censor and craft your social media profiles to best promote your "brand" to satisfy the future potential employers who will google the shit out of you before hiring.

You can have a tiny powerful computer in your pocket but it's designed primarily for tracking and media consumption. The engagement it's designed to extract from you comes at the cost of disengagement with the loved ones around you.

We have more choices in our grocery stores than at any point in history, but that choice is largely an illusion since every brand is owned by one of a handful of corporations. Those corporations can be caught literally and knowingly poisoning you and your children and they'll not only stay in business, but they'll stay very profitable.

It's really not the convenience of things that are the problem though, it's that none of the things we have are designed to serve us. Everything you buy* or use is working for someone else (often against your interests) and companies are dedicated to delivering the barest minimum required to sucker you into forking over your money, your data, and your control.

Give me something that works great and works only for me and I'm perfectly satisfied with it.

*it isn't yours.

My spouse and I never use the YT homepage, where these recommendations are made. We have two use cases: search for something specific 5% of the time, view videos from subscribed channels 95% of the time. The subscriptions feed shows a nice, clean timeline of all videos ordered by upload date. So we get none of the “recommendation rabbit hole effect”. I do wish that one could have multiple named lists of subscriptions so that we could separate things out by interest.

FWIW, this is the YT app on AppleTV.

And, even more hurtful to any trust one might have in such a party (it's not unique to US or Amazon), seeing the reviews being introduced with great promise, serving their purpose for a time but almost imperceptibly degrading to being an antithesis almost od their promise and purpose. Even if execution is great, such technological "solutions" to complex problems end up degrading to zero net value add, or even a net negative over their time of being "live".

You can't watch a really good movie with a satisfying conclusion, they are all written for a sequel.

You don't just buy things, you have to subscribe to them.

You take a vacation, but also 3000 pictures.

Relationships don't end, they have long lingering deaths of less and less a contact on social media.

You never get the moments of walking away from prison a free man, it's just an endless series of half way houses.

This only applies to the Disneyfied mega-blockbusters that represent a large share of production dollars but a small share of movies created overall.

It’s never been easier to find and access good movies, new and old. No matter if they’re from Iowa or France or Korea, practically anything is available on streaming a few clicks away. The problem is really the overwhelming abundance of choice. Given the choice of “The Batman” and “The Northman”, people will default to the familiar title and then complain that it’s derivative and anticipates a sequel.

In fact, there are hundreds of movies made every year and many are very good. Enough that it's kinda hard to watch all the good ones, unless you spend a whole lot more time than most people do watching new-release movies. All I can figure is people come to this conclusion because they're just looking at the blockbusters and what they see advertised everywhere, and figuring those are the only movies that exist.

This might be my age showing but movies used to be both blockbuster hits and completely unique storylines. Those things somehow became mutually exclusive and people never figured out how to explore the underground movie scene. When I was younger, even now to some extent, I sought out underground music as my interests were not popular. Yet, I have no idea how to do that for movies; it's just not a skill I ever acquired. When something new and "indie" shows up on my radar, I feel I am more likely to default to a feeling that it's a waste of time than something special I should invest some time on. Perhaps also due to run time differences, it's easier to "check out" some new music than a new movie.

Music's a lot easier to check out quickly than movies, so yeah, it's just easier to keep up with, especially these days with Spotify and such. I've found TV easier to get into lately because there are sharp cut-off points pretty regularly—I hate having to leave a movie unfinished and return to it. Fortunately, there's been a ton of great TV in the last couple decades. I've also been really appreciating when I can find a tight 90-minute film instead of a 2+hr monster, which is way more common outside blockbuster-film territory.

Finding a critic with taste similar to yours, who writes frequently enough to cover plenty of non-blockbuster films, helps with discovery. I've personally also had luck watching basically anything A24 puts out. Very rarely been sad I watched one of their pictures.

However, it is the case that some aspects of big blockbuster movies are simply worse now, more often than not. The original musical score situation in particular is notably dire, as has been much-commented-on and the causes analyzed in great detail by film-nerd Youtube. So-so directors and editors have arguably too many knobs they can cheaply and easily fiddle with now, leading to things like heavy-handed and poorly-motivated color grading that looks like crap. A lot of CG still kinda sucks, including cases when it's replacing relatively-simple practical effects and not doing something that would have been nigh-impossible otherwise. And Disney discovering the sweet spot of just-bad-enough-to-save-a-lot-of-money, but just-good-enough-to-sell-well with their films has probably been a bad thing overall, especially since they own half of popular culture now.

https://www.radiotimes.com/movies/hollywood-sequels-remakes/

Key chart:

https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2...

[EDIT] I've actually looked into this before and if you have better data on it I'd genuinely love to see it—I couldn't find any.

[EDIT EDIT] What I was most interested in was seeing whether there was a major change in this in the 60s-80s when director-as-auteur trend took over after the Studio System was broken up—arguably we're kinda trending back toward a Studio System sort of arrangement, so it'd be interesting to see if a ~century-long graph that includes wider-ranging data looks U-shaped.

I love shows like that where the creator has a beginning, middle, and ending in mind from that start and so it can't just be stretched out forever until they've run out of ideas or the audience gets bored and ratings drop off. It's just better storytelling to have a compete story. In TV animation that sort of storytelling isn't as common here as it is in anime which helped Avatar stand out, especially compared to what other shows were airing on the channel at the time

I've long been a proponent for the idea of taking your hobbies outside of the digital world to something physical. So many programmers have Gaming, Twitch or more programming as hobbies. I think there's a rut that comes with distancing yourself from the physical world and I've long since believed the lacking element is "failure". To lose at a game is often just a state. You retry until you win, nothing is lost, perhaps time? Much of programming is similar, there's no risk to the failure of a buggy program. You debug and try again. But something physical has consequences. Using tools to build a cabinet shows you every shortcoming and every failure along the way. The result is not always perfect, but if it was something you poured heart and soul into it is loved despite the flaws.

Without the discomfort of failure. Of risk. Of stepping outside the comfort zone the reward is lessened. I've seen what I talk about summed up as urging people to "Create something, even if it is an experience for others" and I think that rings true to me most.

EDIT: I know others may poke holes in some of this. You can create things with programs. You can share experiences digitally. There's risk and loss in both, and that's true to an extent, but I'm a programmer first, perhaps a writer (ranter?) second so it's just difficult to articulate what the differences are. There's something physical missing from our lives when we center ourselves digitally and I think it's healthy to recognize that we're physical creatures still and need that "real" attachment to the world.

I was a gamer before I was a developer, tbh. I started with a CS elective in high school, because "If I'm going to be on the computer all day, why not make them work for me?", suffering GridWorld by day, and binging CoD most evenings. I was a C student, except for CS and some other things.

Less games interest me as I've gotten older. If they don't actively fill some enjoyable niche, have an element of challenge that feels satisfying to overcome, and/or involve my friends, then they don't get bought or played.

My last Rimworld game was laid to rest when I'd built a massive wall around my base. I realized that I'd achieved the 80 of 80/20, since I was now secure enough to do almost anything I wanted with 1/3rd of the map, while weathering the consequences of my colony's wealth factor counting all of the marble tiles I'd been putting in.

I can't play Minecraft anymore, and have not responded to MS's emails about account stuff. I get in, build my base, establish food and resource security with the tried-and-true-enough methods that are burned into my brain. Then, I raid caves until I start forgetting to log in. Like above.

Valorant is probably the only multiplayer game I'm willing to play with pure randos from the matchmaking servers. I can screw around and be aggro, or tactical and precise, and I sometimes play on the ranked ladder. It's not a very meaningful reward to explain to people, but it gives me a representation of "mastery" I can think about. It's also a mechanically precise game with a short feedback loop, which gives me a clear 'thing' to get good at. Like, bringing my crosshairs up by a millimeter may make me more effective, but I have to train myself into it.

But at $CURRENT_AGE, if I don't have personal contact with physical humans, my social perspective gets wonky, and I get antsy. I'd choose a real party over a Valorant party most of the time.

There are countless examples. In the arts, artists would literally start with a blank canvas and fill it with imagination. Trad media are almost infinitely flexible. You can paint extreme photo-realism with oils, or extreme abstraction, or something between them. The limiting factor is imagination, not the medium.

Photoshop, Illustrator, and AI art generators are far more limited. You start with a set of standard tools which force you to approach creativity in standard ways. If you're in a hurry you can click-bang with a plugin.

Behind this are uniform corporate expectations of how art and design are supposed to be styled.

Example: currently images are supposed to be generic flat cartoony characters doing useful things. There's plenty of inoffensively tame corporate blue and/or green, some nice rounded maybe slightly quirky sans serif fonts, and standard layouts and sections. Sites that want to seem a little more exciting use red and orange - still pale though - and perhaps some actual photos.

It's all so tame. So is corporate productivity culture - to do lists, self-improvement, efficiency, fitness. And so on.

There's almost no randomness, unscheduled weirdness, surprise, or creative passion. (Real passion, not corporate "yes I'm passionate please hire me.")

When was the last time anyone was genuinely surprised by something they saw online? Not in the "Cool meme!" or "OK quite edgy" sense - but in the "Who ordered that and where did it come from, actually this is amazing" sense.

There's a sense in which all of this is like Newspeak. It actively trains people not to be too original or imaginative. I don't think that's a good thing.

In film, you can have sanitized homogeneous filler made by a a corpo focus group, or a genuine artistic statement from a single visionary director.

So what we could use more of, in independent software developers willing to be bold.

There was a time when Apple was the bold and transgressive one. Or at least they wanted you to think they were. Compared IBM it’s not that wrong.

Call any support line, get a robot suggesting you chat with another robot over some messenger app. Both the voice-call robot and the chat robot proceed to bombard you with ads. Not very convenient, that.

Even the stuff that was digital to begin with constantly degrades in quality. Certain apps on my Windows 10 box decide to autostart and can't be uninstalled (by conventional means, anyway), the latest example being "Xbox toolbar" or something to that effect. Published by Microsoft, wanted by absolutely nobody, not on this machine anyway.

EDIT: Have a look at baremetal's response to this. Volunteering on a site may still be possible, if you ask!

Want to look at Yellowstone? It’s a natural park with lodging, tours and all that. Make a holiday of it and go visit it.

Want to listen to Vinyl? Barnes and Noble sells records and players.

None of this is remotely off the table. There’s just options now we didn’t have 40 years ago.

I think this is the actual root of the issue right here. 40 years ago this "liability" thing was vaguely talked about and rarely, if ever, enforced. Everywhere in society - from letting a kid hop on a construction site and help out for cash, down to not allowing retail employees to interfere with shoplifters. Things continue to get more and more useless as we amp up this ridiculous concept.

The "liability" gremlin has more to do with this massive loss in social interaction than anything other than suburban style living and the Internet in my mind.

You won't get onto a high-rise project or such, but you can still get places you probably "shouldn't".

Seems like half the US legal system is basically built on a lack of trust between people. I do acknowledge many legal remedies try to address the situations where trust exists but no one knows how to proceed so its not all bad

I think lack of trust between people is the entire foundation of legal systems.

Considering that this just recently resulted in an employee's death (at Home Depot), I can certainly see why it's a concern.

also workmans comp insurance, at least the provider i have, includes coverage for volunteers.

That's pretty awesome, actually. Thank you for taking advantage of it!

Back in the late 90s I was looking for a CD copy of Primal Rock Therapy by Blood Circus. I went around to all my independent record stores to browse their used bins and talk to the staff, and checked trade-in stores/thrift shops etc whenever I saw one when I was out. Looked on and off for two years, and I remember to this day the exact moment I found it in a half-price bin in a bookstore.

I have trouble replicating that same feeling by browsing ebay listings; it's not an adventure, just a transaction. Like the dozens of other transactions I make every day. Comfort and convenience are nice, but they're not things that stir emotions and create memories.

It reminded me of when I was a kid. I'd subscribe to the Lego magazine. And save my pennies until I could order something. I remember one time I ordered something that took so long that I was completely surprised when it finally came. I had completely forgotten I had even ordered it.

Just order little useless things off AliExpress. Guaranteed you'll have forgotten about it by the time it comes.

"You don't know something now? Wait 2 seconds and you will know it. There's not time for mystery and wonder."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4o1N4ksyQ

I feel like I spend less when I have to wait longer, since I end up leaving things in the cart until I have enough to justify the 'work' of putting the order in and updating my budget spreadsheet, and lack free access to the impulsivity of "order by Wed to get by Sun".

I want to start ordering from more independent online shops eventually. I feel like getting used to a wait will make it easier to deal with.

Each to their own of course, and if I was on the clock and doing this for money I think I'd love to be able to click a button and create an authentic-sounding Motown bassline or whatever, but for me... while it does sound great, and somewhat depressingly is almost certainly better than what I could create by myself, I find it quite an empty and unsatisfying way of working. I loved it at the start — look how fast I can make a track! — but I've been slowly moving away from this sort of thing, and I'm back to having more fun as a result.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4

For what it’s worth, my dad and I generally agree that things have gotten both more convenient and satisfying on the handyman front. Far more tasks are DIYable now. Expertise isn’t a limitation and I’ve been able to do even more projects than he was able to. There is an incredible amount of satisfaction in learning and solving a problem yourself.

I’m not convinced this is universal. I think there are definitely cases where convenience is a thief of joy.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33904360

Things like banking, visa registration, and digital payments have gotten more convenient and accessible and make time for better experiences. I'm glad to have autopay for many recurring expenses and not have to worry about writing a check for every one of these. Making books and notes more portable has improved my contentment.

I have sometimes seen that once things have been made convenient and need to be optimized, they become less convenient than the original service. Customer Service over chat or tickets is oftentimes horrible, and every action you take needs your confirmation. Automation introduced in the customer service over phone is even worse than it used to be. I've started to see ads presented before watching videos on Youtube, and even before being able confirming an Uber or Lyft Ride. That time when you are focused to stay on the screen until they are ready for your decision are neither convenience or satisfying and worse than what originally existed. Here, convenience is being exchanged for profit.

And it’s not just technology, there are many other ways to distract oneself, which the previous generations used as well, but I emphasize technology because technology exists for that sole reason, and unlike anything before it, it is only going to increase exponentially. For most things, technology only provides a band-aid solution for the human condition without fixing the root cause, and people end up applying ten thousand band-aids, and then wonder why they still are still broken inside and need more band-aids.

In the end what this means is you need to reduce things in your life that you do out of avoidance of discomfort, and increase things that you do because you want to, despite any discomfort that they may bring. You can use social media if you want to. But if you are using social media where your want is borne out of avoiding some other itch in your life that you can’t seem to scratch, it is better to not use social media. Same applies to any other comfortable distraction. What matters, is not just the specific thing you are doing, but rather the intent behind it.

My take is take any kind of technological advancement comes with trade-offs. In the book I mentioned, the author talks about a traditional Japanese toilet and how the way it is designed lets the light come in just the right way that it makes for some interesting shadows on the walls. The traditional toilet is not as clean as a modern toilet and inconvenient, especially in the winter, but its white and sterile tiles miss out on the beauty of the traditional wooden toilets.

That book was written 90 years ago, so it's pretty obvious this is not a new feeling.

I myself still buy The Economist in print, every Sunday morning at my local convenience store. My girlfriend always makes fun of me for doing so. She says I should just get a subscription. It would be cheaper and more convenient to do that, but I would miss out on other things I truly enjoy: I wake up early on Sundays and go for a walk at a nearby park. I get to see some dogs playing around, squirrels carrying nuts as they make their way up the trees, etc. I then walk over to the convenience store where I greet the cashier (which at this point is as used to my routine as I am) and we exchange some banter as I order "the usual" and then head home.

I have the similar relationship with the girl at a coffee shop near my house, where I always stop at around the same time. She sees me come to the door and laughs as she looks at me and asks "The usual?" and I laugh back and say "yeah, double espresso again". I could easily make that espresso at home, but I get value from my walk to the coffee shop and from chit-chatting with the people working there. I also sometimes get a free chocolate which is always a nice bonus :)

None of these things are convenient but I derive value from them. Technology will always advance and bring trade-offs with it. It's up to you to choose what you make use of.

Us humans have been developing an immensely complex social system for thousands or even tens of thousands of years, and this simply can't (and shouldn't) be replaced by Facebook, Instagram, etc.

The example demonstrates an offline situation where you see (feel, hear, smell) what happens physically, which is infinitely richer than watching a video. Next, the youngster participates in physical labor, which is very engaging. You feel it. You contributed something meaningful and this is immediately validated by real people. Senior people that you look up to. Body and mind feel accomplished.

The video alternative is fully passive. You didn't do anything or interact with anybody. Simply put, you didn't experience anything.

In general you could say we've become incredibly good in servicing our wants, whilst completely ignoring our basic needs. And frankly, most of the wants are made-up, a result of marketing and peer pressure.

With human needs in this context I mean your body needing to be physically active outdoors. We're not designed to sit in a cave in artificial light in poor quality air. We're not even designed to sit at all. And, we need to spend a LOT of time with physical people, not digital ones. We are a physical social species.

All of that has become optional. You can live, work, connect, entertain yourself and have anything shipped to you, nothing requires you to leave your house, get physical or talk to real people. That's wonderful, because with all this time saved...one can spend even more time in the house, sitting.

It's a hard pattern to break because it requires willingly becoming inefficient. As dinner time approaches, I can open an app and tap on whatever comes to mind. Or, I could cycle to the store, hand-select ingredients, might meet/talk to somebody, cycle back, prepare dinner, eat, clean dishes.

Quite a lot more steps, but you'll definitely feel more accomplished. You moved, got out into the world, saw/met real people, produced something of your own.

I had the most fun in WoW when things weren't known at all, but then thottbott and friends came out and I became the "quest whisperer" in my group. It was even more fun as there was a feeling I didn't miss anything; but then those all got integrated into the game via add ons and then into the game itself, and there was no reading of quest text at all and the fun evaporated.

Puzzle games with a walkthrough are performative; there's not much difference between that and just watching someone, and the latter doesn't have the "aha" satisfaction of finally figuring it out.

But avoiding the walkthroughs and hints may mean you get stuck on part of the game for hours/days/months.

That said, there's still a mall where I live, and it's becoming popular again. There's also many other places for teenagers to hang out at.

I see reports citing massive declines in mental health, especially in young people.

Hard to generalize because digital-virtual-experience being better/worse than in-real-life depends on the situation.

For example, I used to travel to many developer conferences but I now much prefer Youtube videos of the recordings. I can watch many more at 2x speed and skip around to the segments that are interesting. Youtube is not only a substitute but actually superior to real-life because I don't have to get on an airplane and listen to someone speak too slowly and thus get bored.

On the other hand, even watching Yellowstone videos in hi-res 4k on Youtube will not convey the same peace and contentment as actually visiting.

But back to the digital convenience producing enough contentment... I needed to know how to disassemble an appliance to replace a heating element. There was the perfect Youtube video of someone showing how to do it step-by-step. At the end, it wasn't like I wish he was actually here in person so we could have an emotional bonding moment or anything like that. I was perfectly content with the digital virtual instruction because it empowered me to fix something on my own without calling an expensive repairman.

I guess it ultimately depends on what aspects of the experiences are important to you as to whether digital substitutions will leave you discontented.

That said, I do appreciate being able to watch sessions here and there from events I wouldn't normally attend anyway.

It is a common belief that as technology advances and life becomes more convenient, people may experience a decrease in overall satisfaction or fulfillment. This is often referred to as the "hedonic treadmill" or the "hedonic adaptation," which is the tendency for people to quickly adapt to new levels of pleasure or pain and return to a relatively stable level of happiness.

One reason for this phenomenon is that as people become accustomed to a certain level of convenience and ease in their lives, they may develop higher expectations and desires, which can make it difficult to feel truly satisfied or fulfilled. For example, a person who is used to being able to instantly order food or clothes online may find it difficult to be satisfied with the same level of convenience in other areas of their life.

Additionally, the constant availability of technology and the pressure to be constantly connected can also lead to feelings of burnout and exhaustion, which can further decrease overall satisfaction and fulfillment.

Overall, it is difficult to say whether things are getting "more convenient but less satisfying" in general, as this can vary greatly from person to person and is influenced by many different factors. However, it is important to be aware of the potential impact of technology and convenience on overall satisfaction and well-being, and to take steps to maintain a healthy balance in our lives.

"Other technical inventions enrich only the life of the inventor himself; they represent a gross and ruthless theft from humankind’s common reserve of experiences and should invoke the harshest punishment if made public against the veto of censorship. One such crime among numerous others is the use of flying machines to explore uncharted land. In a single vandalistic glob, one thus destroys lush opportunities for experience that could benefit many if each, by effort, obtained his fair share."

A couple of Zapffe quotes on how we aren't thinking enough about the effects of the technology we deploy. I don't agree with his statement against 'flying machines' but he is correct about theft of experience. People are robbed of experience and motivation by being able to go on Youtube and watch others do what they could likely do themselves with motivation and time.

Before, if you wanted to meet hippies you'd have to go outside and find them - usually in a park or at a concert.

Now? Find their Discord.

Before, if you ever wanted to be a hippie you'd have to talk to hippies, hang out with them, debate them, and relate to them.

Now? You spend 2 hours on a search engine and realize they're full of shit.

Now no one wants to be a hippie, but a lot of people wish they did.

For basic entertainment, I don't think it's entirely true. To me at least, a great home theater and gigantic back catalogs of damn near everything ever made available in my living room is a flat-out better experience than waiting and hoping for whatever is worth watching to be available in a nearby theater. Learning about the history of a musical genre I get into from AllMusic and Wikipedia, and being able to find the music more or less instantly on Spotify is far better than having to find old issues of New Musical Express and Rolling Stone somewhere in print and then scouring every record store in the city hoping what I wanted was there.

For human interaction, absolutely. You guys are great and all, but back in the high school/college days of hanging out late in a room talking the whole damn night about current events, philosophy, whatever topic we cared about, those resulted in far stronger bonds with people whose faces and names I actually knew. Sometimes friendships. Sometimes touch. Sometimes sex. Lots of basic human needs being met that are not all that well met by reading and typing text.

I don't know how far to take this, though. Remember you're romanticizing the experience of a guy who grew up in the Great Depression. Both my grandfathers are dead now, but they lived until I was at least in my late 20s, so I remember them fairly well, and have learned quite a bit more about them talking with my own parents now that I'm in my 40s and we can talk as adults. Their lives were not great. They suffered through incredible hardship that scarred them terribly. They were closed off, withdrawn, emotionally distant, and abusive to their own families. They killed people and witnessed enormous numbers of their own friends getting killed.

If you ask me was the pre-digital age better than now, you're asking me if my childhood was better than getting old. Of course it was. Everything was new and magical. I was healthy and got better at things and learned quickly. Life now is a boring grind. Is that because the world has gone digital or is it that I've gotten old?

Take fuel injection as an example. You used to need to adjust carburetors for altitude, environment, performance; today, an engine's computer auto adapts. It can be modified but the specialization required is much higher with much less reward.

Take computers as an example; 30 years ago, and updating an OS took hours and a dozen floppy disks, installing a new program took purchasing it, installing via floppies, now we have app stores and wifi. (Installing apks not from store is an example to still get this technical detail and satisfaction).

Take networking; a single access point is solved, but if you explore into mesh, or figure, hey, i stream 4k there a lot, i should use cat5, it's exciting when you solve the problem.

I have an 80" tv myself and I can attest that it is LESS satisfying. I can see so many details in the film now that almost every movie looks low budget. No one wants to "come over for movie night" ..they have their own 60+ TV at home. It's easier than ever to watch a movie, but boring as heck for sure.

Just an anecdotal part of my life that is as you suggested - more convenient but less satisfying.

When you finally got that game of AOE2, or Starcraft or Quake to work, it was like magic seeing you and your friends playing in the same game.

Much easier to play with friends (or randoms) now, but not as satisfying if I dont have to figure out what my IP should be and manually putting it in my network settings.

Overall, I don't like the fact that everything is on the computer now. Work, traveling, watching movies, making music, paying your taxes, communicating with friends... I'm on holiday at the moment, It feels I spend as much time online as when I'm working.

This is your fault.

In my day to day life I am on my computer pretty much every waking moment. But when I'm on vacations I only am on an electronic device (my phone) a couple hours in the evening, at most.

If I'm paying hundreds a day for a plane ticket, lodging, etc. you better believe I will cram every second with cultural visits, tours and activities that I cannot do where I live.

It's the ease with which digitalization and disembodiment open avenues for eroding my ownership of things and for making my things actively work against me that decrease my contentment.

Kindle is a great example. I like the hardware, I love being able to haul a lot of books around and not break my back, but I loathe Store UI part that is being pushed to me all the time.

One of the most fundamental teachings of any religion is that we are a composite being of both a body and a soul. We have both a physical essence, and a spiritual essence, of what we are. Your daughter cannot be quantified by her body alone, as that ignores the wonders of her mind.

Many of the issues I see with the "frictionless" society (where everything gets more convenient but less satisfying) is that there is an increased focus on only one or the other - but not both. Bitcoin has a spiritual essence (as does paying with, say, a credit card), but no real "body" representing its worth. ChatGPT as well could be viewed as having a spiritual value, but no physical "body" representing it. Physical media (CDs, DVDs) are, in my view, ideal as a media distribution method because they are a body, and a soul, together. Why is an eBook so much less satisfying than a real book? Conversely, why are blank pages with ink smudged all over so much less satisfying than a book that's well-written? Why as an original console much more interesting and nostalgic at parties than an emulator?

It's just a thought on one potential reason for this. The best things, it appears, are a composite of both physical and spiritual realities; and something is missing when one or the other is lacking.

> does it produce convenience at the expense of contentment?

I don't understand those who have a constant/ambient need to interact with whoever is near them--seems to be a vehicle to relieve boredom. I don't want to talk to people while I buy groceries, renew my driver's license, or do other mundane stuff, and if someone is just talking to me because they are bored, that is something they need and I don't - honestly, it's not my job to entertain you. So I'm very glad of these conveniences such as online shopping, etc. and I am fine with it happening at the expense of those who use me for their own boredom relief/contentment without regard to mine.

Recently, I've started switching my note taking to being more aligned to the ideas in the antinet zettlekasten. (See https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/). Basically, I handwrite notes into images that I store. This basically makes it less "convenient" to search, but I've found that doesn't matter - I seem to recall things that I handwrite far, far better than anything I've ever typed. And I can make pictures. But it's still pretty nice to have it on my tablet vs a card index (though I can still transfer between the two formats pretty easily using a scanner or my phone camera).

My sense isn't that there's this strict "convenience vs satisfaction" thing going on, but that there's more of a bit of a UX mismatch between how people kind of naturally interact with the physical world and the very limited interactions we currently have with the digital ecosystem. I find handwriting to be much more engaging, even on a tablet, versus typing anything. Though it still feels like we've barely scratched the surface here of what you can do with digital interaction.

Maybe AI improves on this, making these more physical interactions easier for machines to understand. Like, in my note taking example, maybe my handwriting could be used as input to a recommendation system for new books. Or, instead of thinking about YouTube as a replacement for physically being on a construction site, you could have shorter, contextual videos sent to something like an AR system while on a site, and then ask more significant questions of people when you get stumped.

Needless to say I installed VLC on my iPhone and imported my FLACs…

Independent of how you think of the rest of Marx's work, I think it's useful to examine this specific concept in the modern era. What you are describing is a classic example of alienation from society - as our society turns increasingly to machines to create and deliver entertainment it's easier for us all to just... stay separated and isolated. Machines tell us marvel movies are profitable, so we get marvel movies, etc.

And I know hn is not a fan of Marx, generally, but this concept I really think is applicable here.

The problem might be less "capitalism" and more the rise of large highly specialized bureaucratic nation states.

Stalin sucks, flat out. Any socialist or communist who thinks Stalin was good should not be listened to.

You know what is satisfying? Watching a 10 minute video on how to replace my cars brakes and it taking me less than an hour to do it successfully the first time around. Or my dryer blowing cold air and finding a reason within minutes to have a part arrive at my home the next day.

It is both convenient and satisfying. I can focus more of my time and effort on my meaning as a human.

No one is complaining that their bills are paid automatically, saving us from standing in line at the post office everyday or that we can avoid the Christmas hassle of endless lines in stores after a busy day work. Technology is a tool, how we use that tool is up to us and a good way to start is to view your phone, computer, car or TV as tools. You put them down when the work it done.

Reflecting on my own experiences, I believe picking the bad parts might suggest unhealthy relationships with these tools, which can be improved if one has the awareness and strength to do so.

Let me try: Have you ever purchased currency from an in-video-game shop? Did you feel like it was freeing to be able to then purchase everything in the game, and be a god amongst the NPCs? Did you feel later like you were bored, because you had already unlocked everything?

I have purchased currency a few times in games. Each time, I realize it was a mistake, because it took away from the hard work and the resulting payoff once I achieved my goal. By bringing out my wallet, I simply bypassed the game mechanics, thus removing the fun part of the game for me. Some people might find that convenience freeing, but for me it was boring. I think sometimes that we make things too easy, and it removes the challenge from life, resulting in lack of that feeling of achievement. Same with easy jobs, for some of us, which make us feel like we're useless.

Loot boxes can screw off. Valorant skins can be expensive, but some of them make me enjoy the underlying item more, since I have a tendency to covet "the shiny".

The only bad trend is the cost of housing, less space and no backyard/garage means I can't do a lot of hardware/physical stuff that generates noise/fumes but someone here recommendes storage units and I've been looking into those.

I think age also matters a lot, generally people want or expect different things and interactions at different phases of life.

It's almost anticlimactic.

(Speaking of which, I found a Roomba in the dumpster. I'm thinking of putting a costume on it and calling it done, but that would be more of an art piece than a real litterbot, eh?)

- - - -

Anyway, contentment comes from within, it's not intrinsically dependent on any external condition whatsoever.

There's an abundance of consumption streams where, like what you described, you can watch something 10 different ways and get that instant gratification. But not much where you do things alongside others and create a sense of community, a sense of actually doing - something that is a core part of being human.

In my opinion, there's still a ways to go to make the web feel more human, and we're actually very hopeful for the future of it.

[0] https://doubleapp.xyz

The end result is a progressively more boring world.

the teen at the construction site was acquiring knowledge that wasn't otherwise available to him. the teen in front of youtube only sees previously available knowledge.

we're wired to be excited by doing new things - we like a positive first derivative (available knowledge increasing). the absolute amount of available knowledge is less important to us.

see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

Obviously the kid wasn't the first to discover how to dig a ditch, but the kid discovered it for himself, figured out how it works for himself. Personal discovery.

Like the difference between accomplishing a sports achievement personally vs watching a picture of someone else accomplishing a similar goal.

For a HackerNews audience, it's like saying that using apps on a phone means you are technology fluent versus creating an app and delivering it via apk to a phone. To be more inclusive it's like being able to read on a kindle versus write a document in word.

For the Youtube example; There is a difference between watching a video for entertainment, here's how to change the suspension in a car, versus watching for discovery - here's how to change the suspension, wait, where's that bolt, I'm doing it on my car too.

Society really hasn't changed that much, though the discoverers were likely more likely to survive in wars and subsistence -- though they were also labeled witches .

So the question really goes back to fabricators, menders, and consumption. Society could go a far way if we focused more on mending than consuming.

Also, everybody was a different definition of convenient and most of the time it means giving up control for it. I'd much rather have control and keep things a bit more complicated.

At home we use a cordless Dyson which is convenient but damn does it pale in comparison, despite the convenience and it cost 3-4x more than the "Henry" does.

We've made things convenient with engineering, but they often suck in comparison to older technology.

Well, one does want one's vacuum to suck.

I have perhaps a dozen photos of those trips, but I have lots of memories seared into my brain.

Today my phone "reminds" me of experiences I had by showing me some of the dozens of photos I took.

These are totally different experiences, and it's hard to say the more modern one is less satisfying. Perhaps over-satisfaction is a malady worth considering.

10 years ago, that meant renting an office, hiring cool people from your city and hang out with them every day.

Today it is more effective to work remotely.

I’ve been involved with a few startups at the “handful of people in a room together” stages, and did feel that the setting made a difference. Working late in a shabby but cool office, gathered around the whiteboard, excitedly sharing ideas, stepping outside to the buzz of NYC at night. I’m romanticizing, but there’s an energy to it that I’ve missed in the past couple of years doing it remotely.

A kid loves Christmas because of the presents, ritual, food.

But if you made every day like Christmas, it wouldn’t make the kid happier overall. The kid would get sick of it and move on to the next new thing.

I think however that with these conveniences, we're able to achieve much more satisfying things though. I certainly couldn't do half the things I do if I didn't have those convenient guides online.

Obviously new generations won't notice, they probably won't complain yet or add nostalgia to their experiences, but there's a lot of thing that without effort there is no purpose in doing, and thus no joy in it. Remember when something cost you a lot of efforts? that was the real important thing, and when you achieved it or passed it, remember the joy you had? now with so many experiences, options and things within a hand's reach, theres no fun in doing anything, because it doesn't require your effort, and I think our brains weren't developed for an easy, overjoyed, overstimulated life.

Poking about a vast news stand at all the magazines was very satisfying too. This activity, a hollow shadow of its former self. Very sad.

My personal opinion is that this is due to a lot of things besides digitization though. Regulation is one thing -- I think regulations sometimes do increase safety but then decrease access which is critical to experimentation and discovery.

Some of it is the nature of capitalism too. If you have a product, at some level you have to get the purchase to the point of sale (or at least to the point of no return). So that leads to a lot of selection for product characteristics that get the product to the point of nonreturnable sale, many of which increase convenience and superficial aspects of immediate satisfaction, at the cost sometimes of long-term satisfaction. Pushing back against this requires a longer-term process of not returning to a seller, or complaining about it, which is less immediate than refusing a purchase outright.

Add in monopoly and monopsony and things get even more complex.

I think what you're mentioning -- convenience allowing for short-term benefits that then miss the less convenient but long-term more satisfying alternative -- also definitely plays a role. I just think it's part of a mix of things that are separable but not necessarily totally independent.