An unwelcome consequence of living in a world where everything is “easy” is that the only skill that matters is the ability to multitask. At the extreme, we don’t actually do anything; we only arrange what will be done, which is a flimsy basis for a life.
There is no shortage of hard problems left to solve. If everything in your life looks uneasily easy, raise your eyes to something harder before gamifying your routine with deliberate refusal to use a microwave oven.
Before big government-funded science programs started in the 20th century, people born into affluent families were greatly over-represented in the sciences, because you can't theorize or research if all day is spent on routine chores. The same goes for composers, mathematicians, and authors.
I find it kind of sad if people liberated from routine chores choose to use their new leisure time exclusively on TV and Facebook. But I'm certainly not going to tell them that they should wash clothes by hand to break out of the entertainment rut. That's a waste of a life too, admittedly one with a lengthier historical pedigree than binge-watching.
Even if you lack the inclination or the skills to advance the frontiers of art, mathematics, or science, there are plenty of rewarding activities that are orthogonal to convenience technologies. Hiking, biking, fishing, birdwatching, learning to sing or play an instrument, woodworking, cooking food that a microwave simply can't make, playing sports, gardening... I do think that people suffer physically and mentally if the only parts of their bodies they use are their fingers and their eyes. A sedentary life spent entirely looking at electronic displays isn't good. (Even reading paper books all the time without using the rest of your body isn't great, and I say that as a serious bookworm.) The best way to fill excessive time freed by convenience technologies is to take up leisure activities that use the rest of yourself, not throw away labor saving machines and start beating rugs like your ancestors (or ancestors' servants).
On the other hand, after working for 8 hours a day, is it really reasonable to expect people to be enthusiastic about pursuing their own intrinsic questions about how things work and how they could make or improve something? Just because they don't have to spend a couple of hours on rote labor like doing their laundry by hand and cooking?
I want the answer to be yes, but it's like my favorite quote says, "as soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up."
A better question might be why we're okay with this state of people being largely anesthetized once they get home. But the same thing has been said about television and movies, and pulp fiction before them; maybe the problems are built-in and we just don't have it in us to meaningfully improve.
Sorry for being off topic here, but I just wanted to express my admiration for such a great use of a Terry Pratchett quote. Vimes is my favorite Discworld character and I'm delighted to see his wisdom used so well in a discussion.
Aw, thanks - he's definitely one of my favorite authors.
I think that when you're deeply cynical about people and are never given any reasons to think otherwise, it's easy to start acting like a jerk and generally lose sight of the fact that other people still share the same foibles and flaws and fears and insecurities as yourself.
Terry Pratchett writes the sort of books which remind you that even though you might completely despair of them, there is still something in everyone that is inherently worthy of compassion.
Too bad that human compassion and judgement tend to be the first casualties of all this convenience, huh?
My contrarian impulse leads me to ask whether for a small portion of people, having a short period of time in which they wash clothes by hand, and afterwards go back to the more convenient and efficient way of doing it might have some benefit by resetting something.
But I'm guessing the answer is "probably not, and if so, probably for exceedingly few people. If something like that was a good idea, washing clothes probably wouldn't be the ideal form of it."
Clothes washing machines do seem to be one of the unmitigated "goods". Machines use less water, less energy, are gentler on clothes. Reportedly, manual clothes washing is also very hard on the body- physically laborious combined with scalding water and caustic chemicals. There was some article here on HN a little while ago in which the authors were surprised that women of decades past voted the clothes washing machine as the single greatest invention & engine of their emancipation, instead of planes or semiconductors or medicine or-
By all means though, gardening, cooking food, human-powered travel, repairing & making things of all kinds, etc I do believe can have great value.
I don't think machine washes are gentler on clothes. Maybe gentler than the traditional whack-against-a-river-rock technique, but certainly hand-washing is generally less physically abusive than a machine wash, in my experience.
Americans still inexplicably prefer the top-loading washing machine, rather than the front-loading type that dominates the market in nearly every other developed country. The agitator in a top-loader makes mincemeat out of delicate items, versus the much more gentle lift-and-drop action of a front-loader.
A sweet spot might be things which are 'harder' but have other advantages such as cost/health. Commuting by bike, instead of car is one example, though not possible for all.
Reduction of traditional food preservation methods that didn't require refrigeration has been a very large health benefit.
Traditionally, during the many "out of season" months a large part of your diet would involve pickled, cured, salted, smoked, etc products, in quantities much larger than nowadays. These preservation methods are quite carcinogenic - over last hundred or so years we've achieved something like 80% reduction in stomach and colon cancer simply by mass use of refrigeration causing people to eat less of those highly processed foods than they did. Those types of cancer used to be very "popular", but the lifestyle change caused by refrigeration has made them quite rare - and intentionally returning to traditional methods of food preservation is likely to be bad for your health (in the long run) and should be done with deliberation.
Given that people are urbanizing, urban densities are increasing, family units are shrinking and people love convenience, I believe the end-game is people living in apartments without kitchens and eating out or eating takeaway food most of the time. This would save a lot of waste as well as carbon waste through supermarket shopping trips. In the future, a kitchen will be seen as a luxury... after all, who has time to shop, cook and clean?
There were quite a few affluent people who did not do science or anything like that. And quite a few who did science still had time to socialize and relax. Most employed people now, especially those with families, especially Americans, do not have all that time to do hobbies that require effort.
They are tired and stressed when they come home and need something easy to unwind. I am not even sure why fishing or birdwatching would be superior to watching a movie on TV.
They are tired and stressed when they come home and need something easy to unwind. I am not even sure why fishing or birdwatching would be superior to watching a movie on TV.
I've seen quite a few studies that indicate exposure to nature is beneficial in reducing stress. So is physical exercise, even non-strenuous, which you'll get more of by fishing or birdwatching than by sitting on the couch. Maybe these studies are just more non-replicable junk; I don't have time to do a deep dive to check right now. They do line up with my personal experiences and anecdotal observations of others. (Which means I should probably be extra-skeptical, since it's easiest to fool yourself when a result aligns with your prior intuitions.) But that's how I developed my list of examples, with a lot of outdoor activities and activities that will use different parts of your body.
>There is no shortage of hard problems left to solve
Yes, and there never will be. The problem of life is which one to choose. This problem is getting harder in the sense that there's more choice now. (In the old days if peasants didn't labour as their fellows did then they mostly died. Simple choice.) But even though we have choices now this doesn't imply it's possible to live a life of distraction and convenience. The illusion that this is possible leads to nihilism, despair and mental disorder. Which are themselves hard problems.
I only mildly agree; because it is indeed possible to live a life of distraction and convenience. This is easily provable by by observing that there are people doing this already.
In my opinion most of the nihilism and despair stems from the fact that distraction and convenience, for all their superficial attractiveness, are the happiness equivalent of a Big Mac. It's a quick fix, but it does not last...
Exactly. It ends with addiction, bad health, senility, crippling alimony or something else nasty. Thus hard problems are inevitable. Better to choose something meaningful ASAP.
I'm not going to get upvotes for that, but some of humanity's most profound achievements happened during times of slavery and feudalism. At times even majority of population labored so that the privileged few could pursue philosophy, science, architecture and art. Ancient Greece, Rome, medieval cathedrals, sculptures and paintings. Great wall of China. Oppressive regimes can throw incredible numbers of people at the problem (although recent research suggests the pyramids of Egypt were built by paid workers).
My point is that substantial achievements happen even when the privileged people are largely lazy, spoiled and delegate tasks. It's different kind of achievements than in a more egalitarian society (like a republic), perhaps scientific progress is the biggest casualty.
Majority of history was feudalism. So, I guess of course?
Through, medieval sculptures and paintings are quite odd choice of profound achievement. They are just sculptures and paintings and buildings, really. There is nothing profound or moving about them.
We are generating a lot of art, philosophy and what not right now, more then they ever did. Same for science, it is moving much faster now then it moved under feudalism or slavery.
But the convenience itself becomes the drudgery. Does everyone love to drive a convenient car, even though it leads to traffic/congestion, bad posture, poorer help (Which , now you have to go to the gym), and environmental collapse? Have you ever noticed the public space we give up to the convenience of the automobile? How much of your town/city has been paved over?
That's romanticizing the past. Before cars horses (and the infrastructure to support them) caused massive environmental problems, people had all sorts of physical ailments from riding, and their corpses occasionally littered the streets.
That specific bikes-vs-cars example is actually pretty good, IMO. When I was in graduate school I spent all day in a classroom or in front of a computer, but I was still in good physical shape because I biked to and from the campus each day. I would have had to go into debt to buy a car.
My officemate and fellow grad student had car payments and paid for a gym membership to offset his similarly sedentary day. I used to laugh at that. I laugh a little less now, knowing how much risk cyclists are exposed to from cars, but that problem itself is a symptom of American cities that are built in an excessively car-dependent, car-first way.
Those are no longer our problems, and to the extent that they were, it's barely related. Corpses on the street were a consequence of communal poverty, not a consequence of not having cars to haul them off.
Tearing down the city and rebuilding it for the car, which happened in the majority of American cities 40s-70s was an ideological program, and part of what drove it was a collective obsession for utility, or convenience. This was the era of unbridled optimism when there were technological solutions to all societal challenges. This article refers to that same postwar mindset with regards to food preparation and other household chores.
It is also not romanticizing the past because we can tell the difference today. You can, right now, live in a walkable city or town, and compare it to a life where you have to drive everywhere. For many, the inconvenience of having to walk everywhere is minor given everything else you get in return. In fact, so much so that invariably these places are more expensive to live in.
I would say horse vs. car is a strange comparison ('cause you can walk you know), but OK.
Did travel-by-horse, any time in human history contribute to GLOBAL climate change, rising sea levels, unpredictable weather patterns, etc, etc, that the rise of greenhouse gases like CO2 from the combustion fossil fuels seems to be doing? I'm guessing not.
Conveniences have created a population explosion, and we're slowly snuffing out our existence because of it. Convenience is just another pattern of the Luxury Trap that authors like Yuval Noah Harari talk about. We have more of things at lower qualities, which allow us to spread more suffering around.
> “In vacant lots, horse manure was piled as high as sixty feet. It lined city streets like banks of snow. In the summer time, it stank to the heavens; when the rains came, a soupy stream of horse manure flooded the crosswalks and seeped into people’s basements. Today, when you admire old New York brownstones and their elegant stoops, rising from street level to the second-storey parlour, keep in mind that this was a design necessity, allowing a homeowner to rise above the sea of horse manure."
That's unappealing, but car fumes, noise and using up 1/4th of the city isn't all that appealing either, not to mention accidents are worse. You just get used to it if you live in a big city, probably like how people got used to horses and manure.
The first mistake was committing to civilization in the first place. Hunter-gatherers were probably happier and healthier than any of us before we started moving into marginal habitats and resorting to agriculture to survive.
I don't think the Mongols or Comanche had "massive environmental problems". Steppe nomads don't need any more infrastructure than the steppe. They also manage to kick the asses of any "civilization" that hasn't managed to invent machine guns yet.
Don't know why this got downvoted. The archeological record demonstrates that the first agriculturists are worse off than the Hunter-Gatherers who preceded them.
Good comment. I think it's important that we examine our reliance on conveniences but people have been warning us about life becoming too easy since the ancient Greeks.
> there are plenty of rewarding activities that are orthogonal to convenience technologies
The gulf of understanding that many tend to forget or perhaps deliberately dismiss: The vast majority of real people out there would understand nothing or very little of the quoted sentence.
>Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true preferences.
It's a good dystopian trope, and one of the more uncomfortably plausible ones. A streamlined pipeline from cradle to creche to college to a cycle of job->transit->housing->transit until you're too expensive to keep around anymore.
It's probably where we'll end up. The constant message in society today is, "you're on your own," and the constant message from other people is, "go away." It hurts, but that's dystopia for you.
Yes this very true.
I used to volunteer at a suicide prevention center before my twins were born. I dealt with a ton of college grads who couldn't find jobs, and were depressed, suicidal and deep in debt.
They said they felt alone, and their parents just thought they were lazy.
Society has become a dystopia with a hall of mirrors and flashing lights for many kids. They feel more alone then ever, even with all the social media.
I have a strong suspicion though social media is making it worse, since you are constantly bombarded with beautiful and successful people (or people faking it).
I never quite thought I'd be linking this here, but in Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto[1] he wrote, amongst many other things (plenty certainly to be found controversial), that there exists an intrinsic need for humans to undergo a 'power process' that allows us to exert power over people or processes in order to fend off purposelessness (the Manifesto is separated into numerical subsections, he makes this point in the section entitled 'DISRUPTION OF THE POWER PROCESS IN
MODERN SOCIETY' which is paragraph 59). The entire thing is worth reading, for historical significance alone.
Industrial Society and Its Future isn't a good moral justification for mailing bombs to people, but it's still an interesting set of ideas that's difficult to refute.
The author seems to be trying to make an issue where there isn't any.
The many conveniences I enjoy in my life allow me to circumvent rote tasks that offer no enrichment and no sense of accomplishment. What do I do with my free time? Difficult activities that give me a sense of accomplishment and enrichment.
To tack on the concern that people are falling back to "screen time" to fill the time left by convenience is a problem more to do with people not led to explore other facets of the world they're not familiar with, or a sense of inability from being coddled while raised.
I think he's making a good point but arguments it poorly.
A better argument would be not that "it makes us less human" etc, but that it teaches people to be lazy and avoid problem solving. It's the "there's an app for that" attitude. The calculator attitude, the GPS attitude. You're trained to avoid any difficulty, and I can imagine a person trained to only use ready solutions will just give up if he can't buy/download/solve it in browser. It's not just about being washed away on a remote island or emergency events like wars. It's also loss of resourcefulness.
That's like saying modern transportation and easy access to lots of calories isn't a concern, because some people are motivated enough to get enough exercise and not overdo it on the sugar and fat. Meanwhile some countries have a majority of the population overweight.
Especially when it comes to products, consumer convenience often seems to be at odds with consumer well-being.
Take everything from McDonalds's fast food, to Facebook's engagement optimization, to overprescribing of antibiotics and painkillers. The products that sell the most, are the ones that cripple the users ability to independently operate, and keep them coming back for more.
consumer convenience often seems to be at odds with consumer well-being
I've begun to think that's intrinsic, not anything nefarious.
We long for convenience, laziness, sugar, etc. We're meant to want them, but never get much of them. As far as we can tell, our minds & bodies run best on a diet of exertion, activity, and whole foods, which are the very opposites of the things we crave.
For the record, if you've ever tried to go on welfare/unemployment (in USA) you'd know that it's anything but convenient. I had to fill out paperwork, meet deadlines, show up for in-person meetings that took an hour longer than they ought to have, remember to re-apply each week... definitely not as easy as checking Facebook for the millionth time this morning.
It's also a bit disingenuous to say that these services cripple your ability to independently operate - when I was on the dole I was having a blast going hiking and biking, drinking wine, writing music, and playing Nintendo Switch. That's about as independent a life as I could ask for, frankly.
Yes. What the article and the GP miss is the importance of design. Tailing off benefits gradually makes the most sense from the perspective of providing an incentive to work and earn more, but (a) government seldom looks at how the incentives actually work across the whole set of support programs (tuition assistance, CHIP, Medicaid, housing assistance, etc.) and (b) when you tail things off gradually, you will have people doing fairly well on their own still getting some subsidies, albeit small ones, and that's politically challenging to explain.
Although there is a non snarky way to say what i was implying, i don't think it would have made much of a difference. I do feel there is an apt comparison in there if you try to apply the same critique to government services. No reason to single out private services.
Maybe it would've made a difference. Your comment was downvoted because it put words into the author's mouth that were obviously not his own, about a topic that's going to be known to be controversial, and followed it up with absolutely zero substance. Many folks would happily debate the merit or lack thereof of welfare programs if they had some substantive opinion, statistics, or really content to debate about. Your comment was nothing but snark, and to dismiss the downvotes as downvoting the subject matter and not the snark is a second piece of disengaging snark that is also not contributing meaningfully to the discussion.
To me you came across as one of the types who blames government for everything reflexively. I also think your comparison is not accurate. Going on welfare is not convenient in the sense of the article.
> Struggle is not always a problem. Sometimes struggle is a solution. It can be the solution to the question of who you are.
I'm convinced that people derive meaning from restrictions they have to overcome. In the land of perfect convenience, everything would be instantly possible, and nothing would be valuable, so nothing would be worth doing. What would make people tick?
In this vision, convenience merges with powerlessness, leaving no options. At some point, we could observe that making things easier doesn't benefit society by freeing up time, but harms it by removing meaning.
As a believer in a transhumanist future, this possibility concerns me.
It's interesting on Star Trek how they avoid that with various challenges for the crew, including holodeck malfunctions. But you have to wonder how people back on cozy planet Earth outside of the highly motivated Starfleet types are able to stay away from the total convenience and immersion of holodecks, replicators and transporters.
I've mentioned it on here before, but this is a topic in some Peter F Hamilton novels, notably the Commonwealth saga. There's an interesting take on immortality plus backups, where you can elect to archive certain memories. That way you could e.g. read Lord of the Rings over and over for the first time.
I really enjoy that Hamilton envisions a world where the entirety of society has become suburbian and just kind of gently utopian and boring. Then the events of books awaken humanity's desire to explore again, and civilization starts expanding and doing exciting things.
Virtual reality exists now. Perhaps the exit is in it, and within rules and restrictions which people would apply to themselves to have something to do.
People grind for something as inconsequential as Steam achievements.
Seems to fit the description! Future philosophers, please cite my name as "rhn" :)
Looking at Wikipedia's list, I'd put it behind 9. The colonization explosion. As long as there is something to do - discover, colonize, compute - there will be a part of humanity that finds outside challenges.
I saw "WALL-E" as a sobering critique on the "progression" of civilization.
Maybe walking to the well to get water is an inefficient, time consuming task when you could just use plumbing. But maybe the ones performing this routine throughout their entire life would have healthier blood pressure, or less risk for osteoporosis, because of more frequent physical activity.
>> But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free.
Does the author talk to his students? "Getting music free" is more prevalent than ever. Many just go to YouTube to get their music.
Once upon a time the accepted tradeoff was between quality and cost. Now it is between quality, cost, and convenience. This is why things like bottled water can cost more than fuel. It's also why Apple can charge a premium for it's products (the convenience of "it just works"). People will pay a huge premium for convenience and are also willing to almost ignore quality in some cases (e.g. food).
It seems that if you want to be successful in today's market you have to prioritise convenience. Just consider how many startups are based on the idea of making something 'easier' as opposed to 'possible'.
First, how do I, an individual, use convenience in my life, without getting drawn down bad paths? I commute by a McDonalds on the way home, when I'm hungry and exhausted. Perhaps I make alternatives easy (yummy leftovers I can pop in the microwave), perhaps I fortify myself to resist temptation (eat an apple at my desk so that cheeseburger doesn't seem as tempting), perhaps I remind myself that cooking with my spouse is part of the fun and imagine her smiling as I wield that frying pan.
Second, and different, how do I as a benevolent dictator manage convenience for those I'm responsible for? For instance, as a teacher, I want to make certain things easy (access to the right texts and helpful videos) and other things (problem sets) just the right amount of "difficult" to keep students engaged, learning, and successful.
We actually know how to do this, in general. Intensive care units are there to make everything "easy" for really sick people, but few people get trapped forever in the ICU.
The "tyranny of convenience" is a sexy title, but people always are drawn to what's easier, even before the washing machine arrived. There's probably a general cycle - we go nuts on the easy alternative, and then discover that there's more to life. E.g. "slow food", custom-configured PCs, "back to the land", etc.
Convenience also weighs in to make it hard for people to push back on things, by design. “Oh, creating an account is one click; to cancel your service you have to call, wait, listen to a spiel, etc.” Or: “What’s this extra $1.25 on my monthly bill? Well I could spend time inquiring but I guess I won’t bother.” I am much more worried about these abuses of convenience.
It's a bit subtle, but Frank Herbert's Dune universe is based on the premise that spoiling convenience is outlawed, and punished by death:
---------------------
In Terminology of the Imperium, the glossary of 1965's Dune, Frank Herbert provides the following definition:
Jihad, Butlerian: (see also Great Revolt) — the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
Herbert refers to the Jihad many times in the entire Dune series, but did not give much detail on how he imagined the actual conflict.[4] In God Emperor of Dune (1981), Leto II Atreides indicates that the Jihad had been a semi-religious social upheaval initiated by humans who felt repulsed by how guided and controlled they had become by machines:
"The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed."[5]
In the series, Herbert illustrates how the Jihad leads to many profound and long-lasting effects on the socio-political and technological development of humanity. The known universe is purged of all forms of thinking machines, resulting in not only a ban on the re-creation of similar devices (which remains in effect throughout the periods described in the original six Dune novels), but also a great technological reversal for humanity. The chief commandment from the Orange Catholic Bible, "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind", holds sway, as do the anti-artificial intelligence laws in which the penalty for owning an AI device or developing technology resembling the human mind is immediate death. This leads to the rise of a new feudalistic galactic empire which lasts for over ten thousand years, until the rise of the God Emperor Leto II in 10,217 A.G.[6]
To replace the analytical powers of computers without violating the commandment of the O.C. Bible, "human computers" known as Mentats are developed and perfected, their mental abilities ultimately honed to the point where they become superior to those of the ancient thinking machines. Similarly specialized groups of humans which arise after the Jihad include the Bene Gesserit, a matriarchal order with advanced mental and physical abilities, and the Spacing Guild, whose prescience makes safe and instantaneous space travel possible. Fringe societies such as the Ixians and Bene Tleilax eventually begin to develop mechanical and biological technology that, if not actually transgressing the commandments of the Jihad, at least come extremely close. Prohibitions spawned by the Jihad also include artificial insemination, as explained in Dune Messiah (1969) when Paul Atreides negotiates with the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, who is appalled by Paul's suggestion that he impregnate his consort Princess Irulan in this manner.[7]
Herbert's death in 1986[8] left his vision of the actual events of the Butlerian Jihad unexplored and open to speculation.[4]
The author is correct. Maybe he should start by stopping the use of a computer to write articles and columns. I mean what is more convenient that typing an article into a word processor that makes it easy to edit and change words and checks for grammar and spelling mistakes. Also, did he use Google to look up any facts? How awful!
Once Tim Wu goes out cuts papyrus, pounds the papyrus into paper. Gets a feather from a bird and fashions a quill with that, then makes ink, and rewrites his column until he gets it perfect, then hand copies his column and walks to my house and delivers it to me, then I will take him seriously.
You criticize society from within society, not from some cave in the desert. Well, maybe if you can leave a scroll for future generations to misinterpret. Also, just because you find some things wrong with society doesn't mean you want to ditch all of it.
There is no shortage of hard problems left to solve. If everything in your life looks uneasily easy, raise your eyes to something harder before gamifying your routine with deliberate refusal to use a microwave oven.
Before big government-funded science programs started in the 20th century, people born into affluent families were greatly over-represented in the sciences, because you can't theorize or research if all day is spent on routine chores. The same goes for composers, mathematicians, and authors.
I find it kind of sad if people liberated from routine chores choose to use their new leisure time exclusively on TV and Facebook. But I'm certainly not going to tell them that they should wash clothes by hand to break out of the entertainment rut. That's a waste of a life too, admittedly one with a lengthier historical pedigree than binge-watching.
Even if you lack the inclination or the skills to advance the frontiers of art, mathematics, or science, there are plenty of rewarding activities that are orthogonal to convenience technologies. Hiking, biking, fishing, birdwatching, learning to sing or play an instrument, woodworking, cooking food that a microwave simply can't make, playing sports, gardening... I do think that people suffer physically and mentally if the only parts of their bodies they use are their fingers and their eyes. A sedentary life spent entirely looking at electronic displays isn't good. (Even reading paper books all the time without using the rest of your body isn't great, and I say that as a serious bookworm.) The best way to fill excessive time freed by convenience technologies is to take up leisure activities that use the rest of yourself, not throw away labor saving machines and start beating rugs like your ancestors (or ancestors' servants).