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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

> "What do we gain by connecting a smart watch to an internet-enabled coffee maker so I can avoid getting up to press a switch in the morning? Stay in bed and scroll Twitter?"

Or read a book. Or play with your kids. Or your pets. Or talk to your spouse/significant other/friends. Or write code. Or post on your blog. Or...

The value of "time-saving" is that it lets you choose what you will spend the saved time on, instead of being forced to spend it on routine tasks that might not give you any real satisfaction even though they need to be done. But you do have to choose. Being able to do that is of value to many people. But perhaps it isn't of value to everyone; and to someone for whom that opportunity to choose is not of value, perhaps they would indeed be better off making their coffee and doing other necessary life chores by hand.

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> Or read a book. Or play with your kids. Or your pets. Or talk to your spouse/significant other/friends. Or write code. Or post on your blog. > you do have to choose.

Yes, convenience frees you up to pursue something else, but I've felt that it takes so much willpower to pick an activity you know to be of value to you (like exercise, or reading a book) over something immediately gratifying. Another thing I've been thinking about, related to this is that our value systems and/or attention span have been weakened severely by the torrent of information and immediate connectivity these days have.

I remember this quote attributed to G. Michael Hopf: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." What if this pursuit of convenience is making us weaker, and in the long run, blind to what should be pursued with the time we free up?

You may be interested in this if you haven’t already come across it previously: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_th...

Really interesting bit, wouldn't have found it unless you sent me this. Interested, too, to hear what people think about it.

> it takes so much willpower to pick an activity you know to be of value to you (like exercise, or reading a book) over something immediately gratifying

Yes, it does. Anything worthwhile requires effort. But most such things can also benefit greatly from practice--the more you are able to choose to do them, the easier it gets to choose to do them.

> Yes, convenience frees you up to pursue something else, but I've felt that it takes so much willpower to pick an activity you know to be of value to you (like exercise, or reading a book) over something immediately gratifying.

Whereas before you didn't have to choose and never got an opportunity to use your willpower to pick an activity of value. What's to say that people weren't made weak and compliant by a lack of opportunity to make their own choices?

> What if this pursuit of convenience is making us weaker, and in the long run, blind to what should be pursued with the time we free up?

What if it isn't? What if this is little more than another moral panic, such as a decade ago how sexting was going to ruin everyone forever and was a threat to all children?

It seems to me that there are few answers here, but an awful lot of moralizing about shockingly little. Re-frame much of it as the quest for self-mastery, and now generations of philosophers approve.

> Whereas before you didn't have to choose and never got an opportunity to use your willpower to pick an activity of value. What's to say that people weren't made weak and compliant by a lack of opportunity to make their own choices?

Is the lack of choices and opportunity absolutely less preferable than wasting collective human time and energy in the deceptive pursuit of convenience? Also, aren't we converging to a future where we are in less control of important things, like privacy, human rights and environmental health, because we have traded them away to entities who were willing to take these from us in the pretext of convenience?

What if it isn't? What if this is little more than another moral panic? Aren't we better off treating matters like these with care rather than abandon regardless? I think it's weak to dismiss this as a moral panic simply because an unrelated concept came and proved to be one.

Back then, you knew the bad people simply wanted to take your freedom and use it to empower their choices. Now, they feed off our compliance and mindless consumption with a smile on their face and we seek them out actively. I or you may benefit individually, but atrophy is a real thing, tedium and hardship serves its own purpose. Would you make the case that we do not weaken mankind as a whole, or in the long run?

I'm saying the premises as presented don't hold water, and therefore the arguments rooted in them do not function as intended.

For instance, we are in a context where we are less in control of important things, like privacy, human rights, and environmental health than we would like. We are not in a context where we previously had full individual control of these things. We in aggregate, human socities, have always traded these away for one reason or another. What clear rubric makes one reason better or worse?

Whether this is a moral panic is an interesting question. It gets to the core of the issue. Specifically, is there any good evidence to believe that convenience is making humanity weaker? Perhaps it is true. Perhaps it is the opposite of true. Perhaps the truth is a mixed bag. Perhaps it's unmeasurable, making the whole subject one purely of personal opinion. Do we even have a clear definition of "strong" or "weak"?

I'm making the case that you have a wonderful opportunity to convincingly make yours ahead of you yet.

> Specifically, is there any good evidence to believe that convenience is making humanity weaker? [...] Do we even have a clear definition of "strong" or "weak"?

This, exactly. Unless we're talking about how much weight a person can lift, there's no objective definition of "strong" or "weak" person. "Strength" in this context isn't a property of a person at all, in my opinion, but of how other people perceive that person behavior - and that perception is so dependent on observers' life experiences, culture, religion, education and many other factors that it's practically meaningless. As such, the very notion of "strong person" is exploited in all kind of propaganda - with a concept this fuzzy it's easy to bend it to mean whatever you want it to mean.

"Convenience is making us weak" or "hardships make people strong" are examples of such propaganda in action. There's no meaning to them other than what the person talking wants them to mean (and, possibly, what the audience wants to hear). You could reformulate the statements to be easier to prove or falsify, but then the entirety of modern psychology and cognitive science would be against you, which is why nobody attempts to do this.

Well, that's how thought-terminating cliches generally are, so no surprise here. What's amazing to me, though, is that we're this deep into the thread and we still talk about them...

I use a (manual) coffee grinder as part of a morning ritual. When I wake up I put on water to boil, start grinding coffee, stare out of the window, make coffee and then return to bed and read my news/blogs for as long as the coffee lasts. Then I go for a shower.

The thing for me is: it feels good to start the day by doing something yourself and the time you spend in morning rituals can be valuable for the whole day.

Although I automate a lot on computers, I belive in the value of manually making things happen, instead of having a environment that caters to you.

Every now and then I break my ritual and don’t drink coffee, which is something I don’t want to have to schedule with my smart watch.

Do you cut the wood to boil your coffee, light the fire, or is that line about boiling coffee just a convenient knob you turned. When you put the water on to boil do you go to the well [that you dug yourself] and let a bucket down on a rope [that you made yourself]; or do you open the tap? Is your coffee grinder a rock, or a more convenient gadget?

None of those things sounds particularly bad -- and many people do all of the above...

Environmentally wise, they are much saner. And from a sedentary standpoint too.

Perhaps, but your morning coffee now isn't ready until lunch time...

It doesn't take more than 10 minutes to cut some wood for the fireplace/stove (assuming you haven't already cut them at a more convenient time or bought them pre-cut). Water from the well is also like 2-5 minutes to get assuming the well is in your property and not a few miles away (and assuming you don't have it already connected to pipes).

All in all, one can get some firewood, start the stove/fireplace, grind coffee, and have a cup within 30 minutes or so.

Still more than waiting 2-3 minutes for the machine to poor it, but not really impossible. On the plus side, the whole procedure assumes that you live in the countryside, and don't have some office job to feel stressed to go early to.

I have a similar morning routine. Waiting for coffee to steep and drinking it creates a space to slow down and do something other than getting ready, in a way that using an alarm or some hard rule like "three news stories" wouldn't replicate.

A friend of mine starts work very early, so he has a different routine. He takes his dog out, gets dressed, then drinks his coffee on the commute. His coffee maker isn't especially smart, but it automatically heats water at the same time every morning. For him, taking the dog out is his manual "slow time", and automating coffee gained him a little bit more of it.

I don't think it's coincidental that artisanal products and "Pintrest-style" homemade crafts are in vogue at the moment. Doing something manually is fulfilling, and often produces much better results than automation. But not everyone gets that fulfillment from the same tasks, so automation helps free time for the ones we value. It's probably telling that neither my friend nor I has a drip coffee maker; we each went to a pole of manual or automated production.

> you do have to choose

But that is precisely the point! Suppose, (as Barry Schwartz says) constraints are what drive choices we consider meaningful. Then, the greater the convenience, the harder it becomes to make meaningful choices!

Would spending time with family feel as meaningful as it does now if you were living inside the loop of "Groundhog day" and recreating the same evening over and over again? That is essentially immortality, as experienced in an unchanging world.

> Or read a book. Or play with your kids...

I don't know about the people you meet, but most people I meet seem to lament that it feels like they're getting less and less time for these things :-)

> Would spending time with family feel as meaningful as it does now if you were living inside the loop of "Groundhog day" and recreating the same evening over and over again?

Who said that was the choice being offered?

> That is essentially immortality, as experienced in an unchanging world.

But we don't live in an unchanging world, so I don't see how any of this is relevant.

> most people I meet seem to lament that it feels like they're getting less and less time for these things

Is that because they're refusing to use automatic coffee makers and doing all their chores by hand? Or is it because they're using all the time freed up by automation on Facebook and Twitter instead of using it reading or playing with their kids?

That line of thinking sounds a lot like trying to artificially induce meaningful experiences. I don't know if it generalizes to everyone, but once I'm aware I'm tricking myself into something, I don't find it meaningful at all.

Also, "spending time with family" isn't meaningful per se. The meaning is in the details the phrase doesn't convey - the things you do together, the things you talk about, the emotions you feel.

> most people I meet seem to lament that it feels like they're getting less and less time for these things :-)

That's because we live in a competitive environment; the work really does expand to encompass all the time labour-saving inventions liberate - simply because some people choose to go "the extra mile" and everyone else suddenly has to follow suit, or risk being left behind.

>Or read a book. Or play with your kids. Or your pets. Or talk to your spouse/significant other/friends. Or write code. Or post on your blog. Or...

Or nothing of the short -- just go and produce more useless innovations (IoT crap, and so on), and then spend 3+ hours on social media, and so on.

The important real time saving low hanging fruits inventions (washing machine, fridge, etc) are already done (some are pending still, but they aren't those peddled by modern companies).

All those modern "innovations" are meant for you to be a good consumer -- and to be such, you need to constantly buy the next, and work in the rat race to afford them.

You could read the book and play with your kids without an "internet-enabled coffee maker"...

In fact even agrarian medieval societies had more holidays (almost half the year) and far more leisure time than we do -- and that's with all the farm and household chores...

Both your statement and the GP's ring true to me.

Here's how I'd parse it - Automation does indeed free up time for by choice activities, but it also removes motivation to do things that are both hard to do and good to do. Obvious example: cars have made tons of things possible that weren't possible before, but if I didn't have a car or live in a society built around them I'd probably get a lot more exercise.

The more automation we have the fewer things we're forced to do and there are drawbacks that come with that. Others have brought up that the experience of having done any hard thing may have intrinsic benefits, but fewer of us have had that experience. Not an argument against automation, just acknowledging the cons.

If making coffee is as simple and quick as pressing a button, then I doubt the convince would save enough time for any of the activities you mentioned.

We also should also not forget the extreme sacrifice in quality that comes “quick and easy” coffee.

exactly. read 2 pages of a book. play with your pet for so little time that it gets pissed off at you. ditto the kid. code long enough that you manage to remember what you were doing yesterday and then immediately forget...

A stupid-simple $20 coffee machine with no interface but an on/off switch will produce something most daily coffee drinkers find acceptable, given grounds a notch or two above the absolute cheapest around, and it takes at most 1 minute of hands-on time if your stuff's arranged with any sense at all. My pour-overs from whole beans take like 3 min hands-on, maybe, and that's about as fiddly as it gets. Maybe add one minute with a manual grinder just for maximum fiddliness. WTF are people doing that not having to make coffee frees up any useful amount of time?

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