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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

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.

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.

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.

Go camping

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Reader mode

>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.

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.

> "...doom-scrolling..."

This may be the load-bearing point of your lament.

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...

That's a super tiny apartment. The niceness comes from caring, not from money.

> 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.

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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.