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Comment by ralphstodomingo | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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> 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...

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.

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