| ▲ | carlgreene 2 hours ago |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | xnx an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | abroadwin an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | PaulHoule 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | greytape an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is called: "going camping". | | | |
| ▲ | techblueberry 17 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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) | | |
| ▲ | idiotsecant 4 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | MarkusQ an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | karmakurtisaani an hour ago | parent [-] | | We'll have vibe-designed houses, sewer systems, electronics and the like. Cheap, and almost work 85% of the time! |
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| ▲ | IAmBroom 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | ChrisArchitect an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering#Chaos_Monkey) |
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| ▲ | techblueberry 19 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | pizzathyme 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | carlosjobim 9 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Go camping |
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| ▲ | keybored 3 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
