Hedonic adaptation really is something. I have been deeply trying to appreciate these modern marvels more and more, but it's hard.
A hot shower, air almost 50 degrees cooler than the outside air coming out of my vents, communicating instantly thousands of miles away, it's all so easy to just forget and take for granted
We need a Netflix Chaos Monkey tool for modern life. Each week one modern convenience stops working for a day: indoor plumbing, air conditioning, electricity, wifi, automobile, air travel etc. after one day without, you will again appreciate those things for the next few years
Can confirm. As someone living on well water in an area with semi-frequent power outages in winter I have periodically been given renewed appreciation for the value of power, central heat and running water.
Now I have a great standby generator, though, so I'm sure I'll start taking it all for granted again soon.
I live in an 1850s farm house with a spring up the hill and a backup well with a pump for those Augusts where the trees pull all the water out of the ground (not quite this one!) Our main heating system is two wood stoves with a small propane heater as a backup.
The power goes out a lot in the winter but at least we are cozy, particularly with today's LED/Lithium lights.
Back when I had ADSL from the central office my internet would stay up when I lost power so I had enough power to run a cordless phone and one (of two) DSL modems off a small UPS -- so I could keep 21st century comms. Once I got fiber-to-the-node most outages would affect the node so I gave up on the UPS. They're supposed to get FTTH to my house soon but I have no idea how that is going to be affected by outages.
I also used to be affected by node outages on a cable network, but now I have Starlink and as long as I can generate some power, I can be online. I wouldn't go back; you might consider it.
> As someone living on well water in an area with semi-frequent power outages in winter
After a few of these outages and typically two to three nines of utility power availability, I got a portable generator for my well (we have an automatic generator for the house, but the well is on a separate meter); but we've also had a well pump fail. That was "fun", I think the well company came out the next day to troubleshoot, and then the 3rd day to replace the pump, which took pretty much all day because of the depth of the well. At least it happened during good weather.
I was in the same boat. When I bought this house it had a standby generator, but not on the same meter as the well and not enough power to run my central heating. I recently upgraded the generator to be able to power everything and switched the well onto the house panel. Such a huge improvement.
My well is pretty far from the house. Would have to trench a lot of large electrical cabling to get it connected to the generator. Too much hassle and expense for now.
I've been seeing aliexpress battery + hybrid charger deals that could probably support my pump, at least for a little while, will probably do one of those eventually, especially if we build a pumphouse.
I don’t know if I’m just weird, but my reaction is usually the opposite.
When the power goes out, and you’re forced to sit and talk to people or just enjoy the quiet of the night. I think about how much we’ve lost in the modern rat race.
One of the things that sits with me is that for all we’ve been given, most of us have lost the ability to just sit out in a field and enjoy the stars (light pollution, starlink, etc)
Yeah, OK but this is clearly romanticizing away the fact that you are deeply dependent on these services. See how long you can just sit and enjoy the stars when your indoor plumbing and refrigeration goes away, and more importantly when your neighbors go away, not to mention the billions of little moving parts that must operate flawlessly for something like the global supply chain that brings you those shorts you wear and that tea you drink sitting in the grass and staring at the sky.
I'm not trying to single you out but I am intensely annoyed by the light and airy disregard of an intensely complex graph of interconnected services that make life possible at the density and quality that we enjoy.
We've lost a great deal less than we've gained, and anyone who doesn't think so has not had the joy of involuntarily going without them for a significant length of time.
Fair enough, but I do think there are diminishing returns beyond the basics, and there’s a hierarchy.
We are very fortunate to have clean water and sewage. There are terrible stories in Victorian England of like workers popping in water systems and killing hundreds of people.
Electricity powers a ton of basics and maybe you think you could do without heating and air conditioning until a heat wave passes over Europe and kills hundreds of people. I do think beyond that you start to deal in a lot of tradeoffs. I hate they seemed to have systematically replaced wood burning fireplaces with gas. I moved out of a house with a wood burning fireplace and what a mistake,
Except automated bill pay. I swear I could go back and live in the 70’s if it wasn’t for automated bill pay.
I think it’s quite healthy to do that yourself now and then. Probably the most eye opening for me was fasting for a day.
Even small things are enlightening, when my slippers disintegrated I didn’t replace them for a month. It gave me a whole new appreciation for something I otherwise considered insignificant.
A trip to the third world or even easier to a ghetto/favela/poor rural area in your own country is realistically achievable and may lead to an even more profound appreciation. A real life Chaos Monkey is easy to interpret as gamified or temporarily slowed down modern life, so may even be fun sometimes.
That's the crux, isn't it? You aren't just dependent, you are dependent on a system that relentlessly stalks you with increased demands. You are tasked with keeping ahead of a pack of hunters who want to take you down -- and not only will your companions leave you for dead the moment that happens, the group will punish any suggestion that we might want to do something about this on a systemic level because they strive to join the hunters themselves.
It's grim and people are correct to behave like it's grim.
Today’s ways of living - no matter how challenging or disillusioning or alienating they may be - are largely preferable to literally being hunted and having your livelihood threatened by predators, compared to the figurative hunters and predators you’re describing.
It ain’t perfect - and we’ll work to improve it - but it’s way better than the way it used to be for so many people. Civilization aint all bad.
I do prefer modern living, but when people describe the horrors of the past, they go for movie horror version rather then anything actually resembling what historians describe as past.
Or his companions need to get better. I interpreted...
>> You are tasked with keeping ahead of a pack of hunters who want to take you down -- and not only will your companions leave you for dead the moment that happens, the group will punish any suggestion that we might want to do something about this on a systemic level because they strive to join the hunters themselves.
...as referring to software engineers as a whole, because it fits.
We're laborers, but a significant fraction of us has misinterpreted having a comfortable salary now as being capitalists themselves, so bought into libertarian propaganda and behave like they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires (for instance, by strongly resisting things like unionization).
Unfortunately, too many of us who are actually interested in "[doing] something about this on a systemic level," are too pampered to have the focus to actually be effective, and get distracted and put all kinds of divisive stuff front-and-center (basically playing into the divide-and-conquer game of the bosses).
If you want to be a capitalist instead of a laborer then you can just go do that. There's never been a better time to start a company and be your own boss.
Good idea. We did have one a few years ago: the Covid pandemic. Societies around the world did not handle it well, or worse, many of those that did spawned smaller chaos monkeys.
Indeed that was a major disruption. If anything good came out of the shakeup, one of the thing has to be that supply chains are even more rapidly adaptable (even if they still aren't natively resilient).
If our education system, hiring processes, onboarding/skill transfer support, career development pipelines and similar systems continue to degrade, we should have something like what you're asking for before too much longer.
I don't know about others...but thats just home ownership or life in general ha ha
Life is a series of maintenance tasks + a few moments of rest and happiness followed by death.
I think millenials like minimalism for many reasons but some may be the trauma of having clutter in their boomer parents home as well as the idea that each item is a liability. Each item needs a place to rest, possibly time spent maintaining and repairing it, and possibly energy in the form of electricity/fuel etc. Less items = less potential chaos.
I guess the very wealthy don't feel any of these issues since while they are still there money can handle dealing with the entropy. How I envy them sometimes.
I just attended a 9,000-person medieval camping event, where most camps are lit with individual solar power. The only power grid usage by most of us was that site water was pumped by electricity. Due to high mineral content, few of us drink straight from the tap, and every camp has stored water, soft drinks, and so on.
The entire county lost power for about 8 hours. From the social media posts, you would have thought people were undergoing severe hardship, because they had to wait 1/3 of a day for their propane-heated showers. Also, some were angry that the county hadn't done more to plan for these situations... which happen maybe once every decade or so.
Hedonic adaptation is a very good thing. Culture or technological stasis is a death sentence for civilization. Open-ended progress is the only chance civilization has to survive (and even that's not a guarantee).
There is an infinite sequence of future problems to be solved. Each time you solve a problem, you don't reduce the total number of future problems, but you are left with one or more better problems than you had before. It's a very good thing that, as soon as you get accustomed to having air conditioning, you start looking for the next problem to fix.
“Visiting,” says a French writer, “forms the cord which binds society together, and it is so firmly tied, that were the knot severed, society would perish.”
I've never thought about hedonic adaptation as a positive, but that's a good point that it has some real value in the case of societal adaptations and driving further innovation. We usually view it through the lens of an individual over-adapting to niceties that end up being a drain on their lives long term somehow.
We are solving problems, but we're also creating more problems with those solutions. Greenhouse gases, global warming, oil spills, wars over resources, straining power grids, species extinction, worsening mental health, worsening social cohesion, widening inequality. All are the result of technological progress within our systems of government.
Hedonic adaptation prevents us from asking "is this worth the downsides, or should we go back to how it was?"
It's possible to mistakenly think you've solved a problem when you've actually made the situation worse, of course, and that's just plainly a bad thing. It's important to be able to identify specific things which we thought were solutions but were actually new worse problems, and roll them back if possible. [0]
But that's not really what the hedonic treadmill refers to! The hedonic treadmill is referring to the fact that, when a problem is solved, the level of pleasure or happiness individuals experience reportedly quickly returns to the pre-solution baseline.
[0] Crucially, this must not be conflated with advocating a general slowdown or pause on attempts at progress. That's the civilizational death sentence.
I feel that oftentimes our biggest problems come with the irresponsible scaling up of certain solutions, at which point it is usually too late to roll back because we have come to depend on them. There has to be some time between the moment we invent something great and the moment we make trillions of the thing and realize, oh, maybe that's a problem. But we don't pace ourselves. And if we keep plowing ahead heedlessly, we may very well end up burning everything and collapsing our entire civilization. It's a dangerous game to keep betting on the future without actually ever properly planning anything at all.
I don't think anything like a "general speed limit applied to experimentation" makes sense. In general we should move as fast as possible.
When there's a specific explanation why a specific experiment should move slowly (or even be prohibited), I respect that, but the explanation can't just be "we don't know all the bad things that might happen as a result of this experiment." That's the precautionary principle, which I staunchly oppose.
I'm describing a speed limit applied to production, not experimentation.
We can progress science, knowledge and technology all we want without necessarily committing every resource we can find to producing ten times more stuff than we need. Moving too quickly in terms of production can be detrimental to progress: first movers can and often do take over entire markets, leaving no room for the often better-designed second or third movers to shine. Moving more slowly allows for better maneuvering and making sure the best systems and technology can prevail. And it allows us to see problems coming before they hit us.
I think we could have made a utopia purely from fossil fuels if we had been more careful and restrained using them. In my view, the fact that we couldn't do that is a major indictment of our process.
> The hedonic treadmill is referring to the fact that, when a problem is solved, the level of pleasure or happiness individuals experience reportedly quickly returns to the pre-solution baseline.
That is not a fact or objective truth or even historical, that is a hypothesis and a theory.
And the distinction matters. It is not in fact true that all people in all setups and classes and historical periods and periods of their lives were equally happy. In fact, you can be unhappy, solve the problem and be more happy/content for the rest of your life. Overall peoples happiness go up and down.
Hedonistic treadmill is a theory. It is also a slight of hand argumentative trick to shoo away valid complains people have. It was worst in the past, but you are not completely happy accepting bullshit today, therefore you just dont know how good you have it, basically.
Global warming make quite a lot of people (like hundred thousands) miserable as they had to evacuate and then return back to non-existent houses. They literally lost everything except bank account and whatever fit into the car. The areas with high drug and alcohol use, high violence rates are in fact not full of people who have it too good. I could go on ... the inequality and accumulation of power is threatening to make most of us all worst off and it is not because we got spoiled by hedonistic treadmill.
N months ago I was like, "OMG, claude code can work on this code base with me and like, understand it, and do high level things that I tell it, this is magic, how can this possibly even exist?"
Now I'm like, "OMG, I can't believe claude code still needs me to explain XYZ, why is it so incredibly limited..."
I often say that everyone should be on a misery week once a year, where you live like our "ancestors".
I.e. like my grandparents, who grew up in the 1920s on a farm, only 1 heated room, privy outside, no running water, limited food options, hard work each day. As my granny used to say to anyone with nostalgia: no, things were definitely not better back then.
Misery week would greatly increase happiness for the rest of the year, add humility, and empathy with the less privileged.
Even just going backpacking for a few days highlights it. Despite access to some modern amenities (maybe a lighter, or a camp stove, and some food you bought and took with you) it's humbling.
Looking for water in the wilderness - even with access to maps - can be quite a challenge in and of itself!
lol a friend would go "camping" with his family and a few other families. They would all reserve the same group campsite every year.
When it would get near to the "camping" time my friend would be preparing giant battery banks, hotspots, and other tech with the right usb/hdmi cables and more...
its a fun adventure because your already know that your comforts and old life are just a flight away.
but regardless it not going to bring any meaningful humbleness because you will forget all about it.
i grew up in povery for first 20 yrs of my life in a desert but i have never think of that life and experience humbless in any different way than ppl who have never experienced it.
Misery week might greatly increase happiness during the week itself. An unheated room with an outdoor toilet, no running water, limited food options, and hard work is basically going camping.
It's true. The negative takeaway is that is no matter what miracles come in the far future (free energy, perfect health care, infinite resources, infinite intelligence), people will eternally be wanting, take things for granted, focused mainly on the things they don't have and can't do. It's the human condition.
I feel like in discussions about nostalgia, there can be this default presentish reaction which talks about all of the things that are better
But in the hedonic adaptation sense like - and comparisons are complicated - people aren’t by and large happier now (because of the hedonism this is sidestepping the argument of how well distributed it is, and I’m talking the past 50-100 years not compared to subsistence farming and the like early Industrial Revolution etc et al)
I do think a lot of the senses that things are better now are based on this adaptation, not thinking about would you be less happy if you didn’t know about some of the small things you were missing.
> people aren’t by and large happier now (because of the hedonism this is sidestepping the argument of how well distributed it is, and I’m talking the past 50-100 years not compared to subsistence farming and the like early Industrial Revolution etc et al
Funnily, this range contains WWII, great depression, run up to them and falldown from them. It all involved a lot of royally unhappy desperate people. It is also shortly after WWI and ex soldiers were in fact unhappy, traumatized and causing further traumatization to others around.
Also, at least in rural areas I know more history about, it involved society with high alcoholism rates, high domestic violence rates, prostitution by young teenagers (14-17) as a genuine social problem. A lot of us are happier then them. Trully. Not a wife of violent gambler and alcoholic today, but we have less wife's of violent gamblers and alcoholics today.
Maybe happiness is a different kind of thing from the pleasure/pain axis. Maybe it’s a different thing that’s tragically easy to mistake for the same thing.
I notice a lot of resistance and discomfort whenever someone says anything like this (“are you suggesting my pain doesn’t matter? How about the starving kids in xyz?”), and I get that. But it feels like there might be something to it.
That is interesting and I didn't know that, though the commenter said air coming out of their vents almost 50 degrees below the outdoor air temp, so I'm tempted to think they weren't referring to the outlet temperature.
If a comment gets flagged enough, it gets marked as "dead". There's a show dead option you can enable in your HN profile settings to still be able to see such comments though.
I've found that camping and hiking have the amazing benefit of restarting many of the daily pleasures like a good bed, a hot shower, a nice hot elaborated meal, a set of fresh clean clothes, etc.
Everyone reaches the hedonistic plateau, and fast at that. Except for people who sound like they just read a book from some neoliberal think smithy. They will have a euphoric fainting spell over the wonders of the convenience store.
Think about all those elated anecdotes about how someone used an inferior tool for a decade, was fine with it, then tried a better one and now “can’t imagine how I lived without it...” well it’s a bittersweet memory distortion innit.
The same on a smaller scale happened with modern consumer computing. We like to complain but
* have OLED screens and dark modes which are amazing after sundown,
* virtually everything works on Linux, especially all effectively mandatory/government services (at least here in Poland),
* and with some hardware selection Linux works everywhere,
* batteries last ages and everything can be charged via USB-C,
* smartphone cameras now finally exceed my own vision, have amazing zoom and take great nighttime photos (although not of moving stuff yet),
* the ecosystem allows to magically summon a car,
* can have an e2e encrypted multimodal (video, photos, documents, text) conversation with virtually everyone we know, wherever they are in the world, live or asynchronously,
* not to mention LLMs just doing things for you like a tireless assistant.
All of these were a dream when I first set up a home server in 2004. Some like OLED were a dream I didn't even know I had, the LCD glow just annoyed me.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. For the last month I’ve been living in a camper van, working and traveling, which I’m really lucky to be able to do by choice. It’s lonely to be sure, but I also feel mentally far more resilient than I have in ages, and I’m trying to figure out why.
Being in nature is good for us, so that’s probably part of it, as is the constant practice of being self-reliant.
Another theory is friction. I can’t just roll out of bed to the couch, and back. I don’t have a fixed place to shower, so I swim in a river most days, and usually it’s freezing. Camping alone was terrifying at first, but objectively not that dangerous and not worth worrying about. All these little moments are a chance to exercise that mental muscle to do uncomfortable things.
Modern life is devoid of this friction. I could try to take a cold shower every day, but a not-cold one is just a turn of the wrist away. I could try to make myself go outside a bit every day, but I don’t need to.
This isn’t a new observation, but I can’t believe how stark the contrast is. I’m getting stuff done that I’ve been procrastinating on for years.
Ha, Chris McCandless is to vanlife what Alex Honnold is to rock climbing: technically the same activity but with a very different level of consequence for failure.
but you might projecting deep purpose and meaning to your travails that you are subjecting yourself out of pure choice.
your heart knows that you can go back to comfortable modern life whenever you please so you wont really experience the pain that comes from hopelessness which i belive is really needed ingriedient to humble you.
My 87 year old grandma drives her Suzuki Alto from 2000 to her cottage on a hill in the forest. It's a log cabin, 200+ years old. No running water, no electricity except a gas driven generator that powers a pump, and sometimes power tools. There is a lake down the hill for washing oneself and candlelight.
Since a few years there is a gas powered tiny fridge, before we only had a cool concrete food storage basement. Now the sandwiches taste normal, storing butter in summer would give a light sourness to them. My grandmothers ex boyfriend installed a solar panel, just enough to charge phones.
Being there for a longer time and coming back to normal life makes you really see what is necessary and not. Also how much work life was in the olden times.
To put a name on what a lot of folks in this thread are describing (I didn't see the term mentioned in the article): Negative Visualization [1].
Basically imagining living life without a given luxury (hot water, infinite music on tap, functioning eyesight, etc), really internalizing that feeling, and then practicing gratitude for the fact that you do indeed have that thing.
This is an interesting premise, and I would like to read the article, but the weird scrolling makes that almost impossible; the pictures overlay the text to such an extent that I can only read a couple of lines at a time. I wish there were some browser feature that would force sites to use normal scrolling.
This is the issue with the naive narrative of progress isn't it? Today you can sit on your toilet and read a virtually unlimited amount of text, except some text has weird scrolling, some text is interrupted by self playing video ads, some text is AI marketing slop. It's jarring that despite the undoubtedly real technological progress, we still inflict these inconveniences on ourselves, not even out of necessity.
At least I never needed JavaScript to read text on a shampoo bottle.
For me, the images and text are out of sync; by the time the focus in the image has moved to the next item, the text is already hidden under the image.
For the last year I've been on well water for the first time in my life. High iron, manganese and iron bacteria - safe, but tasted eggy and ruined shower heads, dishwashers, clothes, washing machine, kettles...
I just finished installing a whole-house filter & softener system and everyone is delighted. I told my kids that once a month we're going to serve untreated well-water with dinner, so we stay grateful for it.
I like this form of parenting. Make your life better for your kids, but reintroduce some challenge so that they learn to appreciate the comforts of life.
As a fellow filtered well-water maintainer... just give it time. Even the best filtration systems break down. There are lots of moving parts to keep that water clean. Odds are you'll see or smell that brown water soon enough!
In a typical ion exchange setup, there isn't all that much. A big tank filled with resin to attract the minerals, and a big tank of salt to wash the resin clean.
Eventually, the resin will break down and need replacement, or the valve on the tank will fail. But neither of those are insurmountable to fix, and will tend to last many years.
Now, if you go with RO, that's different. Then you really need a pump and multiple filters which need regular changing. Those can be a bit more maintenance. (Not to mention all the wasted water)
Wonderful, and even misses a lot of things!
Glass windows that let light in but not cold and rain. Smokeless cooking. Mattresses that don't need to be fluffed up. We're accustomed to so, so many things. Toilets!
Many people in low income countries still lack every item on this list except for smallpox eradication and the sewing machine (indirectly, through imported second hand clothing).
One thing that I have found very interesting is reading what recipients of direct cash transfers do with the money: https://live.givedirectly.org
These are some of the worlds poorest people who get a transfer of several hundred to a thousand dollars via a charity called Give Directly. Although most of the money gets invested into business ventures, one interesting thing that comes up frequently is people buying straw mattresses for $20-30. The people who do this were frequently sleeping on hard dirt before getting the money.
I love the animation on the website. In a world where everyone is complaining about everything, it's nice to see a post like this. Also it reminded me how grateful I should be for the comfortable life I'm living, thank you for that.
I think about this stuff a lot. It's crazy how I, like, water plants with clean water that's literally on tap. Warm showers on-demand are a daily miracle.
Immediate illumination for why people don't quite feel like royalty despite all this would be achieved by replacing the aesthetic of this presentation with mis-matched uncomfortable and ugly furniture picked up off the side of the road, in a cheap split-level or ratty single wide with carpet that should have been replaced a decade ago and fucked-up window blinds et c., a kitchen table piled with a mess of homework and a pile of 20 medical bills and "EOB" letters and crap generated by a single brief visit to a hospital some of which are almost certainly in error and will take hours on the phone to correct, and so on. The presentation is upper-middle-class and comfy as hell. It's an aesthetic that my family is only slowly and haltingly and with much bargain-hunting (even Ikea is kinda spendy, IMO) struggling toward even with top-10% (for the US, let alone globally!) household income, and will never quite achieve because reality doesn't look like that. I know it's not the main point of the site, but the way they've elected to illustrate this notion is interesting in that it suggests a critique of, or elaboration on, the actual main point.
Like, I'm scrolling through this and my thoughts are on how expensive this environment is. I don't have my spices in cute well-sealing matching jars that look nice on a shelf... because that shit's expensive. Mine are mostly stale... because non-stale spices are expensive and take effort and education to track down. Hell some of mine are probably contaminated with heavy metals and I don't know it. Behind all of this is price-anxiety and ambient stress.
The core idea is sound and worth highlighting, but the reality of "so much is available extremely cheap in nearly unlimited quantity and variety! Isn't that fantastically amazing!" is exhausted parents doom-scrolling the Netflix catalog for an hour before going to bed having watched nothing, as they stress about whether their kids' dental appointment tomorrow is going to turn up anything so expensive they have to defer it and scrimp and save to pay for it.
>Mine are mostly stale... because non-stale spices are expensive and take effort and education to track down.
Not really though. The spices at the grocery store are not stale when you buy them, and will not go stale for 1-2 years once opened. If your spices are stale it's because you don't cook very often and you aren't using them up.
Also let's keep in mind that people had even less furniture in the past, and much of it you had to build yourself out of trees you cut down yourself. Healthcare was leeches and dental care was nonexistent. These "basic human rights" were incredible luxuries only a century or two ago.
But if the question is "why people don't quite feel like royalty despite all this" it's pretty obvious that "doom scrolling" might be a large part of the answer.
If we could somehow start getting the upper-middle class and the upper class, and the upper-upper class to appreciate the ordinary abundance, it might cure them of the greed that drives wealth extraction at the detriment of those in lower classes. Like if everyone in the healthcare industry, from clinician to supplier to R&D to administrators, were satisfied with an ordinarily abundant life, then those medical bills wouldn't be so high in the first place. We're technologically capable of giving every human this ordinary comfort, security against crisis, and 30 hour work weeks.
At least in whatever apartment you can afford you won't trip constantly due to each of the four rooms having slightly different floor heights. And you won't have a wall that extends into another room but somehow not take up the space, like you're in some perpetual "House of Blue Leaves"-esque horror. Your apartment will be real and not made by AI.
In the US, it's pretty easy. My wife used to live in the Tenderloin for $2400/mo and her place was nicer than this because she was good at putting things together. I don't happen to have a photo of the whole studio handy, but here's the view from the window: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/b/b7/Photo_-_San_Fran...
I know, I'm still curious because a lot of people I knew who also lived there were making like 45k to 80k (8 years ago?) So it's relevant to say their job and how much they were making becauase they might be a rarified class among evev SF...which very much defeats the point of the original comment.
$2400 a month is $29k per year, pretty affordable at the U.S. median household income of $83k. It's not uncommon for people living in big cities to spend a larger portion of their income on rent. And don't forget that many people have roommates.
> the future is a nice place to be, if our bikes still had pedals we couldn't hang them at the wall after commuting
It's not hanging, it's levitating. And modern phase-shift technology lets its handlebars sit comfortably inside the wall while still being outside of it.
Ordinary abundance.
----
I used to love pictures like that when I was a kid, someone put effort and care into every inch, so you could explore and find little treasures. Now when I see one, the thing's flimsy and falls apart on inspection.
evolutionaly, we are living in the "impossible valley", we are programed to be oportunistic, but the oportunitys never stop, and the threats we are designed to cope with never materialise, but humans bieng the omni beast can often do well, but for many it leads to disfunction, but evolution has yet to respond to such a fleeting trifling event, that we call "civilisation". And is it's own hint as to the real validity of all that we do, and what we must consider doing if we wish to take some measure of agency in our species fate.
I find it interesting that innumerable people just like the ones quoted in this article were able to lead rich lives and find happiness, despite the absence of these material things.
Take the first quote. If only we had music on demand, "the limit of human felicity" could be attained. Yet -- we now have music on demand and clearly it did not cause everyone permanent happiness.
What I take from this is that material things actually matter very little to the attainment of meaning. Meaning comes from elsewhere.
I have running water, it's true, but I'm still bothered by the AI slop art in this article. Funny thing, that.
Especially if you eat mindfully rather than stuffing your face to get it over with like many people seem to. I can eat like an Indian even though I'm in the UK: fresh vegetables every day and all the spices you can imagine. Meanwhile many people are still eating barely better than Shackleton's men stuck on the ice for months on end.
All true but a reminder that basic health care, natural foods and a safe environment are out of reach for too many. We have definitely improved on the distribution of foods and even safe environments, but there are insitutional blockages that would go a long way.
Sometimes I think that the truly wealthy and powerful are convinced suffering is necessary lest we devolve into universe 25
Health care is unbounded. Even the poorest people rarely die from common old diseases like TB and pneumonia, while even the richest people still die from cancer and heart attacks. We have machines that can keep you alive indefinitely without your heart or lungs working, but they're so expensive, we normally just let people die instead. I live in a country with public healthcare and the news is regularly filled with stories of people begging for money to buy treatments that the government decided it can't afford to fund. Some of these don't even do much - eg. a cancer drug that actually shortens your life compared to chemo but has less severe side effects.
Just want to notice that the author is a part of the effective altruist cult.
> I am an associate program officer in the Abundance and Growth Fund at Coefficient Giving, where I lead our grantmaking on Innovation Policy. In this role, I aim to identify and support efforts to safely accelerate scientific progress and innovation. I am motivated by the broader goals of improving scientific research, funding, institutions, and incentive structures through creativity and experimentation, and I am always excited to connect with others who share those goals (feel free to reach out at jordan.dworkin@coefficientgiving.org).
Effective altruists are a transhumanist cult filled with people that think an ML degree qualifies them to speak on subjects outside of their domain and make decisions on behalf of humanity.
A disclosure should be required next to anything they're working on.
Is that this person though? If you actually look at his website there doesn't seem to be anything about transhumanism. Seems like he's just a metascience/science policy guy
Like others I did think of the hedonic treadmill when I read this, but I also get a hint of "you should be happy". This supposes there are only two groups of people:
1. Those who are happy with what they have,
2. Those who are never happy and always want more.
But this is an oversimplification. Many people belong to a third group:
3. Those who understand we have nice things today, but aren't happy with how we got them and whether we'll be able to have them tomorrow.
Sadly I think the "you should be happy" people tend to bunch together groups 2 and 3. You can see this false dichotomy all over the place.
Reminds me of a funny scene in Netflix's mini-series Dracula between him and Kathleen:
> D: You’re clearly very wealthy.
> K: Wealthy?
> D: Yes. Well, look at all this stuff. All this food. The moving picture box. And that thing outside, Bob calls it um, a car. And this treasure trove is your house!
> K: It’s a dump.
> D: Kathleen, I’ve been a nobleman for 400 years. I’ve lived in castes and palaces among the richest people of any age. Never….never! Have I stood in greater luxury than surrounds me now. This is a chamber of marvels. There isn’t a king, or queen or emperor that I have ever known or eaten who would step into this room and ever agree to leave it again.
> I knew the future would bring wonders. I did not know it would make them ordinary.
on a side note: while our brains seem to be wired to forget about such abundance in our lives that prior generations gave us, almost every item there not just has no appreciation in our contemporary culture, but is even showered with moralizing vilification and resentment: whether it is using them (e.g. affordable flights, A/Cs), buying them (e.g. overseas produce), producing them (e.g. telegraphs: data-centers), or the shapes or contents they are supposed to come (e.g. the art).
Is this a variation of the old "don't fucking complain about the status quo, you have a telescreen, not even the kings of old had a telescreen watching them! How dare you question the titans of industry, whose minion's diligent effort has provided you a telescreen at an affordable price!"?
I think there's a middle ground where we can appreciate the great things we have while also striving to continue to get better and not lock ourselves into either constant animosity for "the system" or constant self loathing for not appreciating what we have.
That seems like an extrapolation to a pretty extreme conclusion. I don't see anything in the article that says anything like that. It's an appreciation of how much objective standards of living have improved over the past few centuries.
The status quo. Framing things in this way is something I first encountered in libertarian/capitalist propaganda (when I didn't know better and was basically a dogmatic libertarian). The message is basically: people should focus on the goods the status quo provides, instead of the political power, economic security, etc. that it doesn't.
I don't see why pointing out improvements in quality of life is "propaganda for the status quo" or precludes talking about political power and economic security. We can and do talk about both all the time.
> I first encountered in libertarian/capitalist propaganda
you should definitely look up the communist/socialist propaganda on East Germany and Soviet Union. In capitalism there is no such thing as what is provided by status quo, that's the whole point of capitalism, you can have whatever you want as long as you are willing do whatever it takes, unlike socialism/communism where you're allowed to have whatever the government mandates as the max (land, money, etc.) you can have
If you know anything about libertarian cranks, this doesn't make any sense and smacks of projection. They're not "satisfied with the status quo" qua political structure or economy.
There's a value in gratitude and recognizing widespread improvements in QoL, in large part fuelled by growth in the past century, and taking advantage of state capacity. That's not tantamount to saying there are no issues today, let alone that you shouldn't care. You can at least criticize accurately and take things at face value.
> If you know anything about libertarian cranks, this doesn't make any sense and smacks of projection. They're not "satisfied with the status quo" qua political structure or economy.
I didn't say anything about "libertarian cranks." I've only first (and mainly) seen this line of thought in "libertarian/capitalist propaganda."
And I think you can broadly break that propaganda down into (at least) two broad efforts, with somewhat different goals:
1. Preventing movement from the status quo in a non-libertarian direction. That's where this kind of thing comes in, because it can be used to distract from dissatisfaction.
2. Advocating that the status quo to change in a more libertarian direction.
Tautologically, libertarian "propaganda" would be pushed by libertarian ideologues. You've revealed that you're conflating libertarian and "capitalist", so I take it that through your interpretation, any remotely pro-market sentiment is "libertarian propaganda" (like plain ol' Liberalism, or, suggesting that zoning reform i.e. the govt getting out of it's own way can improve housing affordability). After all, no one comes out and says "this is propaganda", and you're telegraphing your yardstick.
> Preventing movement from the status quo in a non-libertarian direction.
The fact that you think the status quo is somehow in line with libertarian ideology, as I helpfully hinted at, tells me you have no clue what you're talking about. Developed countries broadly exercise a Liberal democracy with mixed-market economy and substantial government spending and intervention, which has mostly gone up over time. That's something libertarians whine about, not boast about.
Yes. There's (anecdotally) been an increase in "don't look at this mess objectively" type of content being put out lately. Presumably because a chair is about to be removed (or it's just garden variety psychological pressure to force a range of outcomes).
It would seem obvious to anybody who lived in the past that the goal of civilizational progress is to...progress. But in our current era, you're gaslit into feeling guilty for desiring basic things (or any form of enjoyment); all the way down to basic living needs.
It's a shame but there's no argument that you can present to others that won't devolve into either politics, straw man arguments, or just transparent abuse. Best to just ride the tiger and ignore it all as best as you can.
>It is to humanity’s credit that we remain restless in the midst of all of this progress. We continue to look forward, pushing the frontier further with new treatments, new tools, and new institutions that will help future generations in ways we can’t even picture yet.
Abundance truthers ignore that having access to more consumer goods is often orthogonal to happiness ("Hedonic treadmill").
But am I better off for all the trinkets I now have in my home if the alternative could have been better social safety nets, less wealth inequality, less social isolation, lower global emissions, etc.?
I often imagine WWIII, as I witness the bombs coming down to destroy everything we've built, wondering, "what conveniences would I give up for this not to be happening?"
And I also realize that this is more than a thought experiment for many people living right now.
Hedonic adaptation really is something. I have been deeply trying to appreciate these modern marvels more and more, but it's hard.
A hot shower, air almost 50 degrees cooler than the outside air coming out of my vents, communicating instantly thousands of miles away, it's all so easy to just forget and take for granted
We need a Netflix Chaos Monkey tool for modern life. Each week one modern convenience stops working for a day: indoor plumbing, air conditioning, electricity, wifi, automobile, air travel etc. after one day without, you will again appreciate those things for the next few years
Can confirm. As someone living on well water in an area with semi-frequent power outages in winter I have periodically been given renewed appreciation for the value of power, central heat and running water.
Now I have a great standby generator, though, so I'm sure I'll start taking it all for granted again soon.
I live in an 1850s farm house with a spring up the hill and a backup well with a pump for those Augusts where the trees pull all the water out of the ground (not quite this one!) Our main heating system is two wood stoves with a small propane heater as a backup.
The power goes out a lot in the winter but at least we are cozy, particularly with today's LED/Lithium lights.
Back when I had ADSL from the central office my internet would stay up when I lost power so I had enough power to run a cordless phone and one (of two) DSL modems off a small UPS -- so I could keep 21st century comms. Once I got fiber-to-the-node most outages would affect the node so I gave up on the UPS. They're supposed to get FTTH to my house soon but I have no idea how that is going to be affected by outages.
I also used to be affected by node outages on a cable network, but now I have Starlink and as long as I can generate some power, I can be online. I wouldn't go back; you might consider it.
> As someone living on well water in an area with semi-frequent power outages in winter
After a few of these outages and typically two to three nines of utility power availability, I got a portable generator for my well (we have an automatic generator for the house, but the well is on a separate meter); but we've also had a well pump fail. That was "fun", I think the well company came out the next day to troubleshoot, and then the 3rd day to replace the pump, which took pretty much all day because of the depth of the well. At least it happened during good weather.
I was in the same boat. When I bought this house it had a standby generator, but not on the same meter as the well and not enough power to run my central heating. I recently upgraded the generator to be able to power everything and switched the well onto the house panel. Such a huge improvement.
My well is pretty far from the house. Would have to trench a lot of large electrical cabling to get it connected to the generator. Too much hassle and expense for now.
I've been seeing aliexpress battery + hybrid charger deals that could probably support my pump, at least for a little while, will probably do one of those eventually, especially if we build a pumphouse.
I don’t know if I’m just weird, but my reaction is usually the opposite.
When the power goes out, and you’re forced to sit and talk to people or just enjoy the quiet of the night. I think about how much we’ve lost in the modern rat race.
One of the things that sits with me is that for all we’ve been given, most of us have lost the ability to just sit out in a field and enjoy the stars (light pollution, starlink, etc)
> When the power goes out, and you’re forced to sit and talk to people or just enjoy the quiet of the night.
Depends on what essentials need power. Furnace? Sewerage lift pump? Water pump?
Yeah, OK but this is clearly romanticizing away the fact that you are deeply dependent on these services. See how long you can just sit and enjoy the stars when your indoor plumbing and refrigeration goes away, and more importantly when your neighbors go away, not to mention the billions of little moving parts that must operate flawlessly for something like the global supply chain that brings you those shorts you wear and that tea you drink sitting in the grass and staring at the sky.
I'm not trying to single you out but I am intensely annoyed by the light and airy disregard of an intensely complex graph of interconnected services that make life possible at the density and quality that we enjoy.
We've lost a great deal less than we've gained, and anyone who doesn't think so has not had the joy of involuntarily going without them for a significant length of time.
Fair enough, but I do think there are diminishing returns beyond the basics, and there’s a hierarchy.
We are very fortunate to have clean water and sewage. There are terrible stories in Victorian England of like workers popping in water systems and killing hundreds of people.
Electricity powers a ton of basics and maybe you think you could do without heating and air conditioning until a heat wave passes over Europe and kills hundreds of people. I do think beyond that you start to deal in a lot of tradeoffs. I hate they seemed to have systematically replaced wood burning fireplaces with gas. I moved out of a house with a wood burning fireplace and what a mistake,
Except automated bill pay. I swear I could go back and live in the 70’s if it wasn’t for automated bill pay.
Imagine the air quality of even a small city where wood is the primary source of heat in winter…
I think it’s quite healthy to do that yourself now and then. Probably the most eye opening for me was fasting for a day.
Even small things are enlightening, when my slippers disintegrated I didn’t replace them for a month. It gave me a whole new appreciation for something I otherwise considered insignificant.
A trip to the third world or even easier to a ghetto/favela/poor rural area in your own country is realistically achievable and may lead to an even more profound appreciation. A real life Chaos Monkey is easy to interpret as gamified or temporarily slowed down modern life, so may even be fun sometimes.
This is called: "going camping".
Or "living in an apartment with affordable rent"...
> affordable
That's the crux, isn't it? You aren't just dependent, you are dependent on a system that relentlessly stalks you with increased demands. You are tasked with keeping ahead of a pack of hunters who want to take you down -- and not only will your companions leave you for dead the moment that happens, the group will punish any suggestion that we might want to do something about this on a systemic level because they strive to join the hunters themselves.
It's grim and people are correct to behave like it's grim.
Today’s ways of living - no matter how challenging or disillusioning or alienating they may be - are largely preferable to literally being hunted and having your livelihood threatened by predators, compared to the figurative hunters and predators you’re describing.
It ain’t perfect - and we’ll work to improve it - but it’s way better than the way it used to be for so many people. Civilization aint all bad.
I do prefer modern living, but when people describe the horrors of the past, they go for movie horror version rather then anything actually resembling what historians describe as past.
I think you need better companions.
The electorate is what it is, but yes, I hope we can change the currently prevailing attitude.
Or his companions need to get better. I interpreted...
>> You are tasked with keeping ahead of a pack of hunters who want to take you down -- and not only will your companions leave you for dead the moment that happens, the group will punish any suggestion that we might want to do something about this on a systemic level because they strive to join the hunters themselves.
...as referring to software engineers as a whole, because it fits.
We're laborers, but a significant fraction of us has misinterpreted having a comfortable salary now as being capitalists themselves, so bought into libertarian propaganda and behave like they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires (for instance, by strongly resisting things like unionization).
Unfortunately, too many of us who are actually interested in "[doing] something about this on a systemic level," are too pampered to have the focus to actually be effective, and get distracted and put all kinds of divisive stuff front-and-center (basically playing into the divide-and-conquer game of the bosses).
If you want to be a capitalist instead of a laborer then you can just go do that. There's never been a better time to start a company and be your own boss.
You are describing life in central Europe! At least when I was growing up.
I'm also reminded of a while back when the power went out in Spain, and people said it was like a time capsule to the 1970s.
People, outside, talking! Imagine...
Good idea. We did have one a few years ago: the Covid pandemic. Societies around the world did not handle it well, or worse, many of those that did spawned smaller chaos monkeys.
Indeed that was a major disruption. If anything good came out of the shakeup, one of the thing has to be that supply chains are even more rapidly adaptable (even if they still aren't natively resilient).
If our education system, hiring processes, onboarding/skill transfer support, career development pipelines and similar systems continue to degrade, we should have something like what you're asking for before too much longer.
We'll have vibe-designed houses, sewer systems, electronics and the like. Cheap, and almost work 85% of the time!
Plants crave Brawndo.
Go camping every so often if you can.
If you don't mind vectorizing these then they already exist and are called power outages.
I don't know about others...but thats just home ownership or life in general ha ha
Life is a series of maintenance tasks + a few moments of rest and happiness followed by death.
I think millenials like minimalism for many reasons but some may be the trauma of having clutter in their boomer parents home as well as the idea that each item is a liability. Each item needs a place to rest, possibly time spent maintaining and repairing it, and possibly energy in the form of electricity/fuel etc. Less items = less potential chaos.
I guess the very wealthy don't feel any of these issues since while they are still there money can handle dealing with the entropy. How I envy them sometimes.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering#Chaos_Monkey)
Move to Italy!
I just attended a 9,000-person medieval camping event, where most camps are lit with individual solar power. The only power grid usage by most of us was that site water was pumped by electricity. Due to high mineral content, few of us drink straight from the tap, and every camp has stored water, soft drinks, and so on.
The entire county lost power for about 8 hours. From the social media posts, you would have thought people were undergoing severe hardship, because they had to wait 1/3 of a day for their propane-heated showers. Also, some were angry that the county hadn't done more to plan for these situations... which happen maybe once every decade or so.
Hedonic adaptation is a very good thing. Culture or technological stasis is a death sentence for civilization. Open-ended progress is the only chance civilization has to survive (and even that's not a guarantee).
There is an infinite sequence of future problems to be solved. Each time you solve a problem, you don't reduce the total number of future problems, but you are left with one or more better problems than you had before. It's a very good thing that, as soon as you get accustomed to having air conditioning, you start looking for the next problem to fix.
>Hedonic adaptation is a very good thing. Culture or technological stasis is a death sentence for civilization.
Actually, it's the other way around. Thanks to technology, civilization has become unnecessary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS2N4VWIbCI
“Visiting,” says a French writer, “forms the cord which binds society together, and it is so firmly tied, that were the knot severed, society would perish.”
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39293/39293-h/39293-h.htm#CH...
I've never thought about hedonic adaptation as a positive, but that's a good point that it has some real value in the case of societal adaptations and driving further innovation. We usually view it through the lens of an individual over-adapting to niceties that end up being a drain on their lives long term somehow.
> Culture or technological stasis is a death sentence for civilization
Why?
We are solving problems, but we're also creating more problems with those solutions. Greenhouse gases, global warming, oil spills, wars over resources, straining power grids, species extinction, worsening mental health, worsening social cohesion, widening inequality. All are the result of technological progress within our systems of government.
Hedonic adaptation prevents us from asking "is this worth the downsides, or should we go back to how it was?"
It's possible to mistakenly think you've solved a problem when you've actually made the situation worse, of course, and that's just plainly a bad thing. It's important to be able to identify specific things which we thought were solutions but were actually new worse problems, and roll them back if possible. [0]
But that's not really what the hedonic treadmill refers to! The hedonic treadmill is referring to the fact that, when a problem is solved, the level of pleasure or happiness individuals experience reportedly quickly returns to the pre-solution baseline.
[0] Crucially, this must not be conflated with advocating a general slowdown or pause on attempts at progress. That's the civilizational death sentence.
I feel that oftentimes our biggest problems come with the irresponsible scaling up of certain solutions, at which point it is usually too late to roll back because we have come to depend on them. There has to be some time between the moment we invent something great and the moment we make trillions of the thing and realize, oh, maybe that's a problem. But we don't pace ourselves. And if we keep plowing ahead heedlessly, we may very well end up burning everything and collapsing our entire civilization. It's a dangerous game to keep betting on the future without actually ever properly planning anything at all.
I don't think anything like a "general speed limit applied to experimentation" makes sense. In general we should move as fast as possible.
When there's a specific explanation why a specific experiment should move slowly (or even be prohibited), I respect that, but the explanation can't just be "we don't know all the bad things that might happen as a result of this experiment." That's the precautionary principle, which I staunchly oppose.
I'm describing a speed limit applied to production, not experimentation.
We can progress science, knowledge and technology all we want without necessarily committing every resource we can find to producing ten times more stuff than we need. Moving too quickly in terms of production can be detrimental to progress: first movers can and often do take over entire markets, leaving no room for the often better-designed second or third movers to shine. Moving more slowly allows for better maneuvering and making sure the best systems and technology can prevail. And it allows us to see problems coming before they hit us.
I think we could have made a utopia purely from fossil fuels if we had been more careful and restrained using them. In my view, the fact that we couldn't do that is a major indictment of our process.
> The hedonic treadmill is referring to the fact that, when a problem is solved, the level of pleasure or happiness individuals experience reportedly quickly returns to the pre-solution baseline.
That is not a fact or objective truth or even historical, that is a hypothesis and a theory.
And the distinction matters. It is not in fact true that all people in all setups and classes and historical periods and periods of their lives were equally happy. In fact, you can be unhappy, solve the problem and be more happy/content for the rest of your life. Overall peoples happiness go up and down.
Hedonistic treadmill is a theory. It is also a slight of hand argumentative trick to shoo away valid complains people have. It was worst in the past, but you are not completely happy accepting bullshit today, therefore you just dont know how good you have it, basically.
Global warming make quite a lot of people (like hundred thousands) miserable as they had to evacuate and then return back to non-existent houses. They literally lost everything except bank account and whatever fit into the car. The areas with high drug and alcohol use, high violence rates are in fact not full of people who have it too good. I could go on ... the inequality and accumulation of power is threatening to make most of us all worst off and it is not because we got spoiled by hedonistic treadmill.
It's so hard to stay in awe and wonder.
N months ago I was like, "OMG, claude code can work on this code base with me and like, understand it, and do high level things that I tell it, this is magic, how can this possibly even exist?"
Now I'm like, "OMG, I can't believe claude code still needs me to explain XYZ, why is it so incredibly limited..."
I often say that everyone should be on a misery week once a year, where you live like our "ancestors".
I.e. like my grandparents, who grew up in the 1920s on a farm, only 1 heated room, privy outside, no running water, limited food options, hard work each day. As my granny used to say to anyone with nostalgia: no, things were definitely not better back then.
Misery week would greatly increase happiness for the rest of the year, add humility, and empathy with the less privileged.
Even just going backpacking for a few days highlights it. Despite access to some modern amenities (maybe a lighter, or a camp stove, and some food you bought and took with you) it's humbling.
Looking for water in the wilderness - even with access to maps - can be quite a challenge in and of itself!
lol a friend would go "camping" with his family and a few other families. They would all reserve the same group campsite every year.
When it would get near to the "camping" time my friend would be preparing giant battery banks, hotspots, and other tech with the right usb/hdmi cables and more...
its a fun adventure because your already know that your comforts and old life are just a flight away.
but regardless it not going to bring any meaningful humbleness because you will forget all about it.
i grew up in povery for first 20 yrs of my life in a desert but i have never think of that life and experience humbless in any different way than ppl who have never experienced it.
Misery week might greatly increase happiness during the week itself. An unheated room with an outdoor toilet, no running water, limited food options, and hard work is basically going camping.
The hard work (and drink) makes those kind of weeks all but miserable.
thats not useful because then you immedetlily forget all about it.
It's true. The negative takeaway is that is no matter what miracles come in the far future (free energy, perfect health care, infinite resources, infinite intelligence), people will eternally be wanting, take things for granted, focused mainly on the things they don't have and can't do. It's the human condition.
I feel like in discussions about nostalgia, there can be this default presentish reaction which talks about all of the things that are better
But in the hedonic adaptation sense like - and comparisons are complicated - people aren’t by and large happier now (because of the hedonism this is sidestepping the argument of how well distributed it is, and I’m talking the past 50-100 years not compared to subsistence farming and the like early Industrial Revolution etc et al)
I do think a lot of the senses that things are better now are based on this adaptation, not thinking about would you be less happy if you didn’t know about some of the small things you were missing.
Happiness doesn't matter. It's not a useful metric for anything important.
> people aren’t by and large happier now (because of the hedonism this is sidestepping the argument of how well distributed it is, and I’m talking the past 50-100 years not compared to subsistence farming and the like early Industrial Revolution etc et al
Funnily, this range contains WWII, great depression, run up to them and falldown from them. It all involved a lot of royally unhappy desperate people. It is also shortly after WWI and ex soldiers were in fact unhappy, traumatized and causing further traumatization to others around.
Also, at least in rural areas I know more history about, it involved society with high alcoholism rates, high domestic violence rates, prostitution by young teenagers (14-17) as a genuine social problem. A lot of us are happier then them. Trully. Not a wife of violent gambler and alcoholic today, but we have less wife's of violent gamblers and alcoholics today.
Maybe happiness is a different kind of thing from the pleasure/pain axis. Maybe it’s a different thing that’s tragically easy to mistake for the same thing.
I notice a lot of resistance and discomfort whenever someone says anything like this (“are you suggesting my pain doesn’t matter? How about the starving kids in xyz?”), and I get that. But it feels like there might be something to it.
Everyone should read this about "happiness": https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
> "It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast."
What I hate is the folks who get in the middle of all of that and monetize things some new way.
Not trying to shame you but...50 degrees? Do you live in Phoenix and keep your home at 60 degrees?
It seems the Air Conditioner outlet temperature should be 15-20 degrees F cooler than the indoor temperature.
So to keep your home at 70, you need exit temperature to be 50-55F.
seems like it might be lower or higher, depending on humidity.
That is interesting and I didn't know that, though the commenter said air coming out of their vents almost 50 degrees below the outdoor air temp, so I'm tempted to think they weren't referring to the outlet temperature.
I think the vent temperature is the outlet temperature.
So on a 102 degree day, for 72 degrees indoors, you might need 52 degree vent temperature.
In phoenix - just go to work and come home after dark.
Go camping
Why did people kill the commenter who replied to me? What he wrote was my thoughts exactly.
HN can be pretty weird with +1 kind of comments.
What?? It's somehow now possible to utterly eradicate a comment ?
If a comment gets flagged enough, it gets marked as "dead". There's a show dead option you can enable in your HN profile settings to still be able to see such comments though.
I've found that camping and hiking have the amazing benefit of restarting many of the daily pleasures like a good bed, a hot shower, a nice hot elaborated meal, a set of fresh clean clothes, etc.
So, +1 to the recommendation
Everyone reaches the hedonistic plateau, and fast at that. Except for people who sound like they just read a book from some neoliberal think smithy. They will have a euphoric fainting spell over the wonders of the convenience store.
Think about all those elated anecdotes about how someone used an inferior tool for a decade, was fine with it, then tried a better one and now “can’t imagine how I lived without it...” well it’s a bittersweet memory distortion innit.
The same on a smaller scale happened with modern consumer computing. We like to complain but
* have OLED screens and dark modes which are amazing after sundown,
* virtually everything works on Linux, especially all effectively mandatory/government services (at least here in Poland),
* and with some hardware selection Linux works everywhere,
* batteries last ages and everything can be charged via USB-C,
* smartphone cameras now finally exceed my own vision, have amazing zoom and take great nighttime photos (although not of moving stuff yet),
* the ecosystem allows to magically summon a car,
* can have an e2e encrypted multimodal (video, photos, documents, text) conversation with virtually everyone we know, wherever they are in the world, live or asynchronously,
* not to mention LLMs just doing things for you like a tireless assistant.
All of these were a dream when I first set up a home server in 2004. Some like OLED were a dream I didn't even know I had, the LCD glow just annoyed me.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. For the last month I’ve been living in a camper van, working and traveling, which I’m really lucky to be able to do by choice. It’s lonely to be sure, but I also feel mentally far more resilient than I have in ages, and I’m trying to figure out why.
Being in nature is good for us, so that’s probably part of it, as is the constant practice of being self-reliant.
Another theory is friction. I can’t just roll out of bed to the couch, and back. I don’t have a fixed place to shower, so I swim in a river most days, and usually it’s freezing. Camping alone was terrifying at first, but objectively not that dangerous and not worth worrying about. All these little moments are a chance to exercise that mental muscle to do uncomfortable things.
Modern life is devoid of this friction. I could try to take a cold shower every day, but a not-cold one is just a turn of the wrist away. I could try to make myself go outside a bit every day, but I don’t need to.
This isn’t a new observation, but I can’t believe how stark the contrast is. I’m getting stuff done that I’ve been procrastinating on for years.
Environmental design!
Make it so the path of least resistance takes you exactly where you want to go.
https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits-summary
just don't go full-on chris mccandless
EDIT:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_McCandless
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Wild_(film)
Ha, Chris McCandless is to vanlife what Alex Honnold is to rock climbing: technically the same activity but with a very different level of consequence for failure.
I didn't know who that was, and read the article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Honnold
andthen down at the bottom it said this:
is this some weird unexpected connection??but you might projecting deep purpose and meaning to your travails that you are subjecting yourself out of pure choice.
your heart knows that you can go back to comfortable modern life whenever you please so you wont really experience the pain that comes from hopelessness which i belive is really needed ingriedient to humble you.
My 87 year old grandma drives her Suzuki Alto from 2000 to her cottage on a hill in the forest. It's a log cabin, 200+ years old. No running water, no electricity except a gas driven generator that powers a pump, and sometimes power tools. There is a lake down the hill for washing oneself and candlelight. Since a few years there is a gas powered tiny fridge, before we only had a cool concrete food storage basement. Now the sandwiches taste normal, storing butter in summer would give a light sourness to them. My grandmothers ex boyfriend installed a solar panel, just enough to charge phones.
Being there for a longer time and coming back to normal life makes you really see what is necessary and not. Also how much work life was in the olden times.
To put a name on what a lot of folks in this thread are describing (I didn't see the term mentioned in the article): Negative Visualization [1].
Basically imagining living life without a given luxury (hot water, infinite music on tap, functioning eyesight, etc), really internalizing that feeling, and then practicing gratitude for the fact that you do indeed have that thing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_visualization
This is an interesting premise, and I would like to read the article, but the weird scrolling makes that almost impossible; the pictures overlay the text to such an extent that I can only read a couple of lines at a time. I wish there were some browser feature that would force sites to use normal scrolling.
This is so ironically on point.
I recall reading a shampoo bottle in the bathroom maybe 25 years ago because there was nothing else to read.
Meanwhile now you are correctly complaining about how weird the scrolling feels like.
Ah, I regularly used to read cleaning product labels on the toilet, hello fellow human!
This is the issue with the naive narrative of progress isn't it? Today you can sit on your toilet and read a virtually unlimited amount of text, except some text has weird scrolling, some text is interrupted by self playing video ads, some text is AI marketing slop. It's jarring that despite the undoubtedly real technological progress, we still inflict these inconveniences on ourselves, not even out of necessity.
At least I never needed JavaScript to read text on a shampoo bottle.
Dr. Bronner's has lots to read.
For me, the images and text are out of sync; by the time the focus in the image has moved to the next item, the text is already hidden under the image.
I found the problem: the site can't handle a portrait-ratio browser window like I always use. After stretching the window out wide, the layout works.
Reader mode
Does not work in Firefox's reader mode, unfortunately
For the last year I've been on well water for the first time in my life. High iron, manganese and iron bacteria - safe, but tasted eggy and ruined shower heads, dishwashers, clothes, washing machine, kettles...
I just finished installing a whole-house filter & softener system and everyone is delighted. I told my kids that once a month we're going to serve untreated well-water with dinner, so we stay grateful for it.
I like this form of parenting. Make your life better for your kids, but reintroduce some challenge so that they learn to appreciate the comforts of life.
As a fellow filtered well-water maintainer... just give it time. Even the best filtration systems break down. There are lots of moving parts to keep that water clean. Odds are you'll see or smell that brown water soon enough!
In a typical ion exchange setup, there isn't all that much. A big tank filled with resin to attract the minerals, and a big tank of salt to wash the resin clean.
Eventually, the resin will break down and need replacement, or the valve on the tank will fail. But neither of those are insurmountable to fix, and will tend to last many years.
Now, if you go with RO, that's different. Then you really need a pump and multiple filters which need regular changing. Those can be a bit more maintenance. (Not to mention all the wasted water)
Wonderful, and even misses a lot of things! Glass windows that let light in but not cold and rain. Smokeless cooking. Mattresses that don't need to be fluffed up. We're accustomed to so, so many things. Toilets!
Air conditioning!
Many people in low income countries still lack every item on this list except for smallpox eradication and the sewing machine (indirectly, through imported second hand clothing).
One thing that I have found very interesting is reading what recipients of direct cash transfers do with the money: https://live.givedirectly.org
These are some of the worlds poorest people who get a transfer of several hundred to a thousand dollars via a charity called Give Directly. Although most of the money gets invested into business ventures, one interesting thing that comes up frequently is people buying straw mattresses for $20-30. The people who do this were frequently sleeping on hard dirt before getting the money.
I love the animation on the website. In a world where everyone is complaining about everything, it's nice to see a post like this. Also it reminded me how grateful I should be for the comfortable life I'm living, thank you for that.
I think about this stuff a lot. It's crazy how I, like, water plants with clean water that's literally on tap. Warm showers on-demand are a daily miracle.
Immediate illumination for why people don't quite feel like royalty despite all this would be achieved by replacing the aesthetic of this presentation with mis-matched uncomfortable and ugly furniture picked up off the side of the road, in a cheap split-level or ratty single wide with carpet that should have been replaced a decade ago and fucked-up window blinds et c., a kitchen table piled with a mess of homework and a pile of 20 medical bills and "EOB" letters and crap generated by a single brief visit to a hospital some of which are almost certainly in error and will take hours on the phone to correct, and so on. The presentation is upper-middle-class and comfy as hell. It's an aesthetic that my family is only slowly and haltingly and with much bargain-hunting (even Ikea is kinda spendy, IMO) struggling toward even with top-10% (for the US, let alone globally!) household income, and will never quite achieve because reality doesn't look like that. I know it's not the main point of the site, but the way they've elected to illustrate this notion is interesting in that it suggests a critique of, or elaboration on, the actual main point.
Like, I'm scrolling through this and my thoughts are on how expensive this environment is. I don't have my spices in cute well-sealing matching jars that look nice on a shelf... because that shit's expensive. Mine are mostly stale... because non-stale spices are expensive and take effort and education to track down. Hell some of mine are probably contaminated with heavy metals and I don't know it. Behind all of this is price-anxiety and ambient stress.
The core idea is sound and worth highlighting, but the reality of "so much is available extremely cheap in nearly unlimited quantity and variety! Isn't that fantastically amazing!" is exhausted parents doom-scrolling the Netflix catalog for an hour before going to bed having watched nothing, as they stress about whether their kids' dental appointment tomorrow is going to turn up anything so expensive they have to defer it and scrimp and save to pay for it.
>Mine are mostly stale... because non-stale spices are expensive and take effort and education to track down.
Not really though. The spices at the grocery store are not stale when you buy them, and will not go stale for 1-2 years once opened. If your spices are stale it's because you don't cook very often and you aren't using them up.
Also let's keep in mind that people had even less furniture in the past, and much of it you had to build yourself out of trees you cut down yourself. Healthcare was leeches and dental care was nonexistent. These "basic human rights" were incredible luxuries only a century or two ago.
> "...doom-scrolling..."
This may be the load-bearing point of your lament.
Are you somehow blaming the parents in the commenters hypothetical?
Not blaming, exactly.
But if the question is "why people don't quite feel like royalty despite all this" it's pretty obvious that "doom scrolling" might be a large part of the answer.
If we could somehow start getting the upper-middle class and the upper class, and the upper-upper class to appreciate the ordinary abundance, it might cure them of the greed that drives wealth extraction at the detriment of those in lower classes. Like if everyone in the healthcare industry, from clinician to supplier to R&D to administrators, were satisfied with an ordinarily abundant life, then those medical bills wouldn't be so high in the first place. We're technologically capable of giving every human this ordinary comfort, security against crisis, and 30 hour work weeks.
I can’t imagine ever affording such a nice apartment.
At least in whatever apartment you can afford you won't trip constantly due to each of the four rooms having slightly different floor heights. And you won't have a wall that extends into another room but somehow not take up the space, like you're in some perpetual "House of Blue Leaves"-esque horror. Your apartment will be real and not made by AI.
In the US, it's pretty easy. My wife used to live in the Tenderloin for $2400/mo and her place was nicer than this because she was good at putting things together. I don't happen to have a photo of the whole studio handy, but here's the view from the window: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/b/b7/Photo_-_San_Fran...
Pray tell how much she was making at the time to be able to afford 2400/month in rent?
Keep in mind that both wages and rents are higher in SF and not really comparable to the rest of the country.
I know, I'm still curious because a lot of people I knew who also lived there were making like 45k to 80k (8 years ago?) So it's relevant to say their job and how much they were making becauase they might be a rarified class among evev SF...which very much defeats the point of the original comment.
$2400 a month is $29k per year, pretty affordable at the U.S. median household income of $83k. It's not uncommon for people living in big cities to spend a larger portion of their income on rent. And don't forget that many people have roommates.
The tenderloin, famously a place where people can afford homes.
That's a super tiny apartment. The niceness comes from caring, not from money.
Many people are struggling to afford the living room, even if they can afford the furnishings.
Rent, food, transport and healthcare are still very significant costs for the average person, and those are just the basics.
the future is a nice place to be, if our bikes still had pedals we couldn't hang them at the wall after commuting
> the future is a nice place to be, if our bikes still had pedals we couldn't hang them at the wall after commuting
It's not hanging, it's levitating. And modern phase-shift technology lets its handlebars sit comfortably inside the wall while still being outside of it.
Ordinary abundance.
----
I used to love pictures like that when I was a kid, someone put effort and care into every inch, so you could explore and find little treasures. Now when I see one, the thing's flimsy and falls apart on inspection.
Also grateful for the lush houseplants that don't need any light and get by jsut fine on amber lighting from some lamps
evolutionaly, we are living in the "impossible valley", we are programed to be oportunistic, but the oportunitys never stop, and the threats we are designed to cope with never materialise, but humans bieng the omni beast can often do well, but for many it leads to disfunction, but evolution has yet to respond to such a fleeting trifling event, that we call "civilisation". And is it's own hint as to the real validity of all that we do, and what we must consider doing if we wish to take some measure of agency in our species fate.
"Everything around me was someone's lifework" - Gordon Brander
This was beautiful and simply executed, thank you!
I find it interesting that innumerable people just like the ones quoted in this article were able to lead rich lives and find happiness, despite the absence of these material things.
Take the first quote. If only we had music on demand, "the limit of human felicity" could be attained. Yet -- we now have music on demand and clearly it did not cause everyone permanent happiness.
What I take from this is that material things actually matter very little to the attainment of meaning. Meaning comes from elsewhere.
I have running water, it's true, but I'm still bothered by the AI slop art in this article. Funny thing, that.
I can eat better than a king, every day.
I remind myself of this often, despite living a lower-middle class existence.
There’s always room for hedonic escalation and lifestyle creep, but if all of my needs are covered I’m largely satisfied.
As the saying goes: “He who is not satisfied with that which he has will not be satisfied with that which he hopes to have.”
Especially if you eat mindfully rather than stuffing your face to get it over with like many people seem to. I can eat like an Indian even though I'm in the UK: fresh vegetables every day and all the spices you can imagine. Meanwhile many people are still eating barely better than Shackleton's men stuck on the ice for months on end.
All true but a reminder that basic health care, natural foods and a safe environment are out of reach for too many. We have definitely improved on the distribution of foods and even safe environments, but there are insitutional blockages that would go a long way.
Sometimes I think that the truly wealthy and powerful are convinced suffering is necessary lest we devolve into universe 25
Health care is unbounded. Even the poorest people rarely die from common old diseases like TB and pneumonia, while even the richest people still die from cancer and heart attacks. We have machines that can keep you alive indefinitely without your heart or lungs working, but they're so expensive, we normally just let people die instead. I live in a country with public healthcare and the news is regularly filled with stories of people begging for money to buy treatments that the government decided it can't afford to fund. Some of these don't even do much - eg. a cancer drug that actually shortens your life compared to chemo but has less severe side effects.
Another good article on this topic for those who enjoyed: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/we-live-like-roy...
.. and I want more for myself and everyone else. And I don't feel bad about it. In fact, degrowthers can pound sand and cry about it.
There is power in controlling people through upheaval and degrowth. I delight when those self-serving revolutionaries FAIL.
Just want to notice that the author is a part of the effective altruist cult.
> I am an associate program officer in the Abundance and Growth Fund at Coefficient Giving, where I lead our grantmaking on Innovation Policy. In this role, I aim to identify and support efforts to safely accelerate scientific progress and innovation. I am motivated by the broader goals of improving scientific research, funding, institutions, and incentive structures through creativity and experimentation, and I am always excited to connect with others who share those goals (feel free to reach out at jordan.dworkin@coefficientgiving.org).
https://jordandworkin.com/about/
This seems like a very un-culty varietal of effective altruism. Nothing to do with AI doom on his website
charitable giving is good, and aiming for efficacy from our charitable dollars is good.
And so… what?
Make a point or leave it be, rather than making vague innuendo about how we should disapprove of them.
Effective altruists are a transhumanist cult filled with people that think an ML degree qualifies them to speak on subjects outside of their domain and make decisions on behalf of humanity.
A disclosure should be required next to anything they're working on.
Is that this person though? If you actually look at his website there doesn't seem to be anything about transhumanism. Seems like he's just a metascience/science policy guy
I really loved this, thanks for sharing
Like others I did think of the hedonic treadmill when I read this, but I also get a hint of "you should be happy". This supposes there are only two groups of people:
1. Those who are happy with what they have,
2. Those who are never happy and always want more.
But this is an oversimplification. Many people belong to a third group:
3. Those who understand we have nice things today, but aren't happy with how we got them and whether we'll be able to have them tomorrow.
Sadly I think the "you should be happy" people tend to bunch together groups 2 and 3. You can see this false dichotomy all over the place.
nice little piece of web-literature.
Reminds me of a funny scene in Netflix's mini-series Dracula between him and Kathleen:
> D: You’re clearly very wealthy.
> K: Wealthy?
> D: Yes. Well, look at all this stuff. All this food. The moving picture box. And that thing outside, Bob calls it um, a car. And this treasure trove is your house!
> K: It’s a dump.
> D: Kathleen, I’ve been a nobleman for 400 years. I’ve lived in castes and palaces among the richest people of any age. Never….never! Have I stood in greater luxury than surrounds me now. This is a chamber of marvels. There isn’t a king, or queen or emperor that I have ever known or eaten who would step into this room and ever agree to leave it again.
> I knew the future would bring wonders. I did not know it would make them ordinary.
on a side note: while our brains seem to be wired to forget about such abundance in our lives that prior generations gave us, almost every item there not just has no appreciation in our contemporary culture, but is even showered with moralizing vilification and resentment: whether it is using them (e.g. affordable flights, A/Cs), buying them (e.g. overseas produce), producing them (e.g. telegraphs: data-centers), or the shapes or contents they are supposed to come (e.g. the art).
> moralizing vilification and resentment
Or genuine concern over their environmental impacts...
appreciate the downvote for proving my point
Which is what exactly?
Is this a variation of the old "don't fucking complain about the status quo, you have a telescreen, not even the kings of old had a telescreen watching them! How dare you question the titans of industry, whose minion's diligent effort has provided you a telescreen at an affordable price!"?
I think there's a middle ground where we can appreciate the great things we have while also striving to continue to get better and not lock ourselves into either constant animosity for "the system" or constant self loathing for not appreciating what we have.
That seems like an extrapolation to a pretty extreme conclusion. I don't see anything in the article that says anything like that. It's an appreciation of how much objective standards of living have improved over the past few centuries.
Sure yeah. propaganda has to be subtle sometimes.
Propaganda for what, exactly?
> Propaganda for what, exactly?
The status quo. Framing things in this way is something I first encountered in libertarian/capitalist propaganda (when I didn't know better and was basically a dogmatic libertarian). The message is basically: people should focus on the goods the status quo provides, instead of the political power, economic security, etc. that it doesn't.
I don't see why pointing out improvements in quality of life is "propaganda for the status quo" or precludes talking about political power and economic security. We can and do talk about both all the time.
> I first encountered in libertarian/capitalist propaganda
you should definitely look up the communist/socialist propaganda on East Germany and Soviet Union. In capitalism there is no such thing as what is provided by status quo, that's the whole point of capitalism, you can have whatever you want as long as you are willing do whatever it takes, unlike socialism/communism where you're allowed to have whatever the government mandates as the max (land, money, etc.) you can have
If you know anything about libertarian cranks, this doesn't make any sense and smacks of projection. They're not "satisfied with the status quo" qua political structure or economy.
There's a value in gratitude and recognizing widespread improvements in QoL, in large part fuelled by growth in the past century, and taking advantage of state capacity. That's not tantamount to saying there are no issues today, let alone that you shouldn't care. You can at least criticize accurately and take things at face value.
> If you know anything about libertarian cranks, this doesn't make any sense and smacks of projection. They're not "satisfied with the status quo" qua political structure or economy.
I didn't say anything about "libertarian cranks." I've only first (and mainly) seen this line of thought in "libertarian/capitalist propaganda."
And I think you can broadly break that propaganda down into (at least) two broad efforts, with somewhat different goals:
1. Preventing movement from the status quo in a non-libertarian direction. That's where this kind of thing comes in, because it can be used to distract from dissatisfaction.
2. Advocating that the status quo to change in a more libertarian direction.
Tautologically, libertarian "propaganda" would be pushed by libertarian ideologues. You've revealed that you're conflating libertarian and "capitalist", so I take it that through your interpretation, any remotely pro-market sentiment is "libertarian propaganda" (like plain ol' Liberalism, or, suggesting that zoning reform i.e. the govt getting out of it's own way can improve housing affordability). After all, no one comes out and says "this is propaganda", and you're telegraphing your yardstick.
> Preventing movement from the status quo in a non-libertarian direction.
The fact that you think the status quo is somehow in line with libertarian ideology, as I helpfully hinted at, tells me you have no clue what you're talking about. Developed countries broadly exercise a Liberal democracy with mixed-market economy and substantial government spending and intervention, which has mostly gone up over time. That's something libertarians whine about, not boast about.
Yes. There's (anecdotally) been an increase in "don't look at this mess objectively" type of content being put out lately. Presumably because a chair is about to be removed (or it's just garden variety psychological pressure to force a range of outcomes).
It would seem obvious to anybody who lived in the past that the goal of civilizational progress is to...progress. But in our current era, you're gaslit into feeling guilty for desiring basic things (or any form of enjoyment); all the way down to basic living needs.
It's a shame but there's no argument that you can present to others that won't devolve into either politics, straw man arguments, or just transparent abuse. Best to just ride the tiger and ignore it all as best as you can.
It's probably better to name and shame and make those responsible aware that everyone else knows they are responsible.
Here are a few from just the last six months. Read into it what you will.
[1] High gas prices and inflation are stressing people out — but the economy will be fine as long as they keep spending. - [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/high-gas-prices-and-inflat...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/high-gas-prices-and-inflat...)
[2] The 'Vibecession' Is Over. The 'Permacession' Is Here. - [https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/americans-depresse...](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/americans-depresse...)
[3] The Economy Is Booming. Why Does It Feel Like a Bust? - [https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-economy-is-boom...](https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-economy-is-boom...)
[4] Why Americans hate the 'good' economy. - [https://www.axios.com/2026/06/25/economy-inflation-democrats...](https://www.axios.com/2026/06/25/economy-inflation-democrats...)
[5] Most Of Us Are Richer Than Ever Before. Why Doesn't It Feel That Way? - [https://www.investopedia.com/most-of-us-are-richer-than-ever...](https://www.investopedia.com/most-of-us-are-richer-than-ever...)
[6] Buying power is up 73%. Why do Americans feel broke? - [https://www.thestreet.com/economy/purchasing-power-in-americ...](https://www.thestreet.com/economy/purchasing-power-in-americ...)
Having read the article, I can confirm that it is.
I don't know what's worse, people dying of a disease because there is no cure, or people dying of a disease because they can't afford a cure?
not having a vaccine for a deadly disease, or having a vaccine AND a monstrous media machine that will convince millions to not take it?
>It is to humanity’s credit that we remain restless in the midst of all of this progress. We continue to look forward, pushing the frontier further with new treatments, new tools, and new institutions that will help future generations in ways we can’t even picture yet.
Abundance truthers ignore that having access to more consumer goods is often orthogonal to happiness ("Hedonic treadmill").
But am I better off for all the trinkets I now have in my home if the alternative could have been better social safety nets, less wealth inequality, less social isolation, lower global emissions, etc.?
I often imagine WWIII, as I witness the bombs coming down to destroy everything we've built, wondering, "what conveniences would I give up for this not to be happening?"
And I also realize that this is more than a thought experiment for many people living right now.