Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

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I've been interested in this for quite a while, and have read a fair bit about it as a phenomenon. I think that pursuing comfort and convenience to the point that it's actually harmful is sort of a big factor in a lot of societal change the last several decades in many developed/Western countries. As a European/American dual national I think it's a particularly strong current in American culture, personally.

An accessible intro is Michael Easter's book The Comfort Crisis, which, while a little pop-sciencey, explores the idea that making our lives more and more comfortable (across various axes) creates a feedback cycle that shrinks our comfort zones, making some of the more rewarding (but potentially challenging/uncomfortable) things in life seem unthinkable.

For me this was a bit of a "once you've seen it you can't unsee it" kind of thing. Letting convenience be your primary metric for success often produces totally unsatisfying results, anywhere from how you build cities to the way you eat a meal.

The arc of the original World of Warcraft (broader social impacts aside) is an interesting microcosm to explore: players continually asked for convenience features that would simplify the most tedious aspects of the game and reduce social friction (organizing groups, traveling etc), but as they made things more convenient over the years, many people found that the game actually began to lose something important. The response culminated in a very successful re-release of the original, inconvenient, game after 15 years.

There's this (to me) weird idea that's common in the US and increasingly Europe about dating/activities/convenience that you have to always go somewhere and spend money to "do things", as if you need a new and different activity every day and as if only things you spend money doing are time worth spent.

I think that 200 years ago this idea would seem very strange to people, but today is the entire life of many.

The other direction is probably "quality time", but even that often involves taking someone somewhere to some paid "activity".

Also: people don't have hobbies anymore, and I think this is why.

Curious what other books or studies in this vein you might recommend

Not OP but I've also read and recommended The Comfort Crisis.

Stepping further down the "better personal health" path, there's Outlive by Peter Attia. Stepping further down the "addiction to convenience" path, there's Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke.

Both excellent books and perspectives worth reading. (Both audiobooks are great too.)

I think "convenience" is correlated to the actual thing you're gesturing towards, but isn't the actual variable that matters most. "grocery stores being open until midnight" is certainly very convenient, but doesn't seem to remove anything important (except perhaps for late shift grocery store workers). On the other hand, buying your food from a grocery store (versus having to hunt it down and kill it) is certainly more "convenient", but "convenience" isn't the most important dimension where hunting differs from grocery store shopping.

Comfort is also correlated to it, but I don't think it's exactly it either. A/C is very comfortable, and certainly there are psychological and physiological downsides to it. But I don't think there's any major rewarding experiences which A/C makes impossible or unthinkable. Maybe the taste of a cool glass of water after working all day in the hot sun? Some amount of resilience to high heat which makes traveling in hot places slightly more enjoyable? Experiencing the changing seasons more directly and consistently than just seeing a changing set of colors out your window? None of these are exactly trivial, but it doesn't seem like "optimizing for comfort removes all the color from life" is exactly right either.

Maybe it's just that suffering just for suffering's sake doesn't do anything. If you were in the universe where all houses are magically air conditioned 24/7 and offered to build a machine to make them uncomfortably hot for 4 months a year and uncomfortably cold for another 4 months a year, selling on the idea that, you know, variety is the spice of life, a little constant hardship toughens you up, I don't think anybody would buy that on its own.

But clearly people DO seem to go kind of crazy without pressure and challenges, whether you frame it as "convenience" or "comfort" or "eustress deficiency" or whatever. There's an entire category of hobbies and interests that are entirely based around doing uncomfortable or dangerous or stressful things (thrill-seeking). And even things like weightlifting, marathons, saunas, physically stressful things are often pleasurable and seem to obviously build character and resilience outside of just the act of lifting heavy things until it hurts too much to continue. I think weightlifting is a good analogy; hardly anyone would lift weights if there was no extrinsic reward at the end of it (e.g. health, vanity, bragging rights). The important thing isn't the inconvenience and uncomfortableness of lifting weights, it's something else.

Maybe "responsibility"? "self-actualization"? I think that's maybe closer to it.

I certainly don't have all of the answers here, but I do think the somewhat ineffable nature of this concept contributes to how at a business or societal scale we wind up optimizing for the wrong things–it's hard to describe, multi-factorial, hard to measure, so instead we optimize for things that deliver obvious measurable improvements. That line of thinking is how you wind up bulldozing a city center to run a highway through it: travel times fall 80%! The negative side effects are harder to measure.

The AC thing interests me as a topic–purely my opinion, but I do think that living in a very narrow temperature range changes your relationship with the outside world, and there's all sorts of good stuff to be done outside that's much harder to get motivated to do if the delta with what you're used to is too big.

As an anecdote: I mostly disliked hot weather in the past, but years ago when I got hooked on running, I found that I disliked the treadmill more than the heat, so I ran outside through a muggy NYC summer. It was miserable to get started but got a bit easier every year, and over time I've noticed, from the digital thermometer on my desk, that the temperature where I have to stop working and turn the AC on has slowly crept upwards. My running club puts on a 5k summer race series–if you'd asked me 10 years ago whether I'd want to run up a hill in the swampy Brooklyn heat every other Wednesday, I would have laughed out loud at the absurdity of the idea–but today it is genuinely something I love, and has been a highlight of my year for several years now.

All that to say, your point about suffering for suffering's sake stands: I cannot sleep without AC above a certain temperature/humidity, and I don't see any reason to force myself to suffer through restless sweaty nights. On the flip-side, though... I have never had more visceral, euphoric appreciation for the comforts of modern life than after a cold and drizzly backpacking trip where we spent the entire time damp and never really, fully warmed up for multiple days. 20-something years later I have the most vivid memory of getting in a hot shower when we got home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSU9gNm5pAI

This just dropped the other day and is pretty relevant to the discussion. You might find it interesting.

Idle hands are the devil's workshop but at a societal level.

Perhaps "friction"? Agreed that it's hard to pin down, and comfort / convenience doesn't quite capture it.

We are all living overly precious, fragile lives which rathole us into depression and mal-behavior.

Look up universe 25 and mouse utopia experiments. Exactly predicted this.

> Exactly predicted this.

In the same way that economists have successfully predicted ten of the last three recessions.

No. Not at all. Do you even comprehend the words you type? Or read?

That's not what an Economist does. They can tell you that a specific policy is likely to have an impact along one or two dimensions (e.g. interest rate), but they don't know what policymakers at home or abroad are going to do, e.g. Trump's trade wars, or impacts of innovations across industries, e.g. AI leading to RAM shortage and data centres.

It's childish to pretend like Economists are supposed to anticipate everyone's every move in order for their work to be given credence. If you think tariffs are bad for consumers, an Economists worked that out for you.

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