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
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.
N months ago I was like, "OMG, claude code can work on this code base with me and like, understand it, and do high level things that I tell it, this is magic, how can this possibly even exist?"
Now I'm like, "OMG, I can't believe claude code still needs me to explain XYZ, why is it so incredibly limited..."
I think about this stuff a lot. It's crazy how I, like, water plants with clean water that's literally on tap. Warm showers on-demand are a daily miracle.
Immediate illumination for why people don't quite feel like royalty despite all this would be achieved by replacing the aesthetic of this presentation with mis-matched uncomfortable and ugly furniture picked up off the side of the road, in a cheap split-level or ratty single wide with carpet that should have been replaced a decade ago and fucked-up window blinds et c., a kitchen table piled with a mess of homework and a pile of 20 medical bills and "EOB" letters and crap generated by a single brief visit to a hospital some of which are almost certainly in error and will take hours on the phone to correct, and so on. The presentation is upper-middle-class and comfy as hell. It's an aesthetic that my family is only slowly and haltingly and with much bargain-hunting (even Ikea is kinda spendy, IMO) struggling toward even with top-10% (for the US, let alone globally!) household income, and will never quite achieve because reality doesn't look like that. I know it's not the main point of the site, but the way they've elected to illustrate this notion is interesting in that it suggests a critique of, or elaboration on, the actual main point.
Like, I'm scrolling through this and my thoughts are on how expensive this environment is. I don't have my spices in cute well-sealing matching jars that look nice on a shelf... because that shit's expensive. Mine are mostly stale... because non-stale spices are expensive and take effort and education to track down. Hell some of mine are probably contaminated with heavy metals and I don't know it. Behind all of this is price-anxiety and ambient stress.
The core idea is sound and worth highlighting, but the reality of "so much is available extremely cheap in nearly unlimited quantity and variety! Isn't that fantastically amazing!" is exhausted parents doom-scrolling the Netflix catalog for an hour before going to bed having watched nothing, as they stress about whether their kids' dental appointment tomorrow is going to turn up anything so expensive they have to defer it and scrimp and save to pay for it.
>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.
All true but a reminder that basic health care, natural foods and a safe environment are out of reach for too many. We have definitely improved on the distribution of foods and even safe environments, but there are insitutional blockages that would go a long way.
Sometimes I think that the truly wealthy and powerful are convinced suffering is necessary lest we devolve into universe 25
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.
At least in whatever apartment you can afford you won't trip constantly due to each of the four rooms having slightly different floor heights. And you won't have a wall that extends into another room but somehow not take up the space, like you're in some perpetual "House of Blue Leaves"-esque horror. Your apartment will be real and not made by AI.
This is an interesting premise, and I would like to read the article, but the weird scrolling makes that almost impossible; the pictures overlay the text to such an extent that I can only read a couple of lines at a time. I wish there were some browser feature that would force sites to use normal scrolling.
For the last year I've been on well water for the first time in my life. High iron, manganese and iron bacteria - safe, but tasted eggy and ruined shower heads, dishwashers, clothes, washing machine, kettles...
I just finished installing a whole-house filter & softener system and everyone is delighted. I told my kids that once a month we're going to serve untreated well-water with dinner, so we stay grateful for it.
Is this a variation of the old "don't fucking complain about the status quo, you have a telescreen, not even the kings of old had a telescreen watching them! How dare you question the titans of industry, whose minion's diligent effort has provided you a telescreen at an affordable price!"?
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.
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.
>It is to humanity’s credit that we remain restless in the midst of all of this progress. We continue to look forward, pushing the frontier further with new treatments, new tools, and new institutions that will help future generations in ways we can’t even picture yet.
Abundance truthers ignore that having access to more consumer goods is often orthogonal to happiness ("Hedonic treadmill").
But am I better off for all the trinkets I now have in my home if the alternative could have been better social safety nets, less wealth inequality, less social isolation, lower global emissions, etc.?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. For the last month I’ve been living in a camper van, working and traveling, which I’m really lucky to be able to do by choice. It’s lonely to be sure, but I also feel mentally far more resilient than I have in ages, and I’m trying to figure out why.
Being in nature is good for us, so that’s probably part of it, as is the constant practice of being self-reliant.
Another theory is friction. I can’t just roll out of bed to the couch, and back. I don’t have a fixed place to shower, so I swim in a river most days, and usually it’s freezing. Camping alone was terrifying at first, but objectively not that dangerous and not worth worrying about. All these little moments are a chance to exercise that mental muscle to do uncomfortable things.
Modern life is devoid of this friction. I could try to take a cold shower every day, but a not-cold one is just a turn of the wrist away. I could try to make myself go outside a bit every day, but I don’t need to.
This isn’t a new observation, but I can’t believe how stark the contrast is. I’m getting stuff done that I’ve been procrastinating on for years.
I love the animation on the website. In a world where everyone is complaining about everything, it's nice to see a post like this. Also it reminded me how grateful I should be for the comfortable life I'm living, thank you for that.
Just want to notice that the author is a part of the effective altruist cult.
> I am an associate program officer in the Abundance and Growth Fund at Coefficient Giving, where I lead our grantmaking on Innovation Policy. In this role, I aim to identify and support efforts to safely accelerate scientific progress and innovation. I am motivated by the broader goals of improving scientific research, funding, institutions, and incentive structures through creativity and experimentation, and I am always excited to connect with others who share those goals (feel free to reach out at jordan.dworkin@coefficientgiving.org).
I find it interesting that innumerable people just like the ones quoted in this article were able to lead rich lives and find happiness, despite the absence of these material things.
Take the first quote. If only we had music on demand, "the limit of human felicity" could be attained. Yet -- we now have music on demand and clearly it did not cause everyone permanent happiness.
What I take from this is that material things actually matter very little to the attainment of meaning. Meaning comes from elsewhere.
I have running water, it's true, but I'm still bothered by the AI slop art in this article. Funny thing, that.
To put a name on what a lot of folks in this thread are describing (I didn't see the term mentioned in the article): Negative Visualization [1].
Basically imagining living life without a given luxury (hot water, infinite music on tap, functioning eyesight, etc), really internalizing that feeling, and then practicing gratitude for the fact that you do indeed have that thing.
The same on a smaller scale happened with modern consumer computing. We like to complain but
* have OLED screens and dark modes which are amazing after sundown,
* virtually everything works on Linux, especially all effectively mandatory/government services (at least here in Poland),
* and with some hardware selection Linux works everywhere,
* batteries last ages and everything can be charged via USB-C,
* smartphone cameras now finally exceed my own vision, have amazing zoom and take great nighttime photos (although not of moving stuff yet),
* the ecosystem allows to magically summon a car,
* can have an e2e encrypted multimodal (video, photos, documents, text) conversation with virtually everyone we know, wherever they are in the world, live or asynchronously,
* not to mention LLMs just doing things for you like a tireless assistant.
All of these were a dream when I first set up a home server in 2004. Some like OLED were a dream I didn't even know I had, the LCD glow just annoyed me.
Wonderful, and even misses a lot of things!
Glass windows that let light in but not cold and rain. Smokeless cooking. Mattresses that don't need to be fluffed up. We're accustomed to so, so many things. Toilets!
Like others I did think of the hedonic treadmill when I read this, but I also get a hint of "you should be happy". This supposes there are only two groups of people:
1. Those who are happy with what they have,
2. Those who are never happy and always want more.
But this is an oversimplification. Many people belong to a third group:
3. Those who understand we have nice things today, but aren't happy with how we got them and whether we'll be able to have them tomorrow.
Sadly I think the "you should be happy" people tend to bunch together groups 2 and 3. You can see this false dichotomy all over the place.
50 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 17.7 ms ] threadA 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
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.
N months ago I was like, "OMG, claude code can work on this code base with me and like, understand it, and do high level things that I tell it, this is magic, how can this possibly even exist?"
Now I'm like, "OMG, I can't believe claude code still needs me to explain XYZ, why is it so incredibly limited..."
You mean Fahreneit, of course.
Immediate illumination for why people don't quite feel like royalty despite all this would be achieved by replacing the aesthetic of this presentation with mis-matched uncomfortable and ugly furniture picked up off the side of the road, in a cheap split-level or ratty single wide with carpet that should have been replaced a decade ago and fucked-up window blinds et c., a kitchen table piled with a mess of homework and a pile of 20 medical bills and "EOB" letters and crap generated by a single brief visit to a hospital some of which are almost certainly in error and will take hours on the phone to correct, and so on. The presentation is upper-middle-class and comfy as hell. It's an aesthetic that my family is only slowly and haltingly and with much bargain-hunting (even Ikea is kinda spendy, IMO) struggling toward even with top-10% (for the US, let alone globally!) household income, and will never quite achieve because reality doesn't look like that. I know it's not the main point of the site, but the way they've elected to illustrate this notion is interesting in that it suggests a critique of, or elaboration on, the actual main point.
Like, I'm scrolling through this and my thoughts are on how expensive this environment is. I don't have my spices in cute well-sealing matching jars that look nice on a shelf... because that shit's expensive. Mine are mostly stale... because non-stale spices are expensive and take effort and education to track down. Hell some of mine are probably contaminated with heavy metals and I don't know it. Behind all of this is price-anxiety and ambient stress.
The core idea is sound and worth highlighting, but the reality of "so much is available extremely cheap in nearly unlimited quantity and variety! Isn't that fantastically amazing!" is exhausted parents doom-scrolling the Netflix catalog for an hour before going to bed having watched nothing, as they stress about whether their kids' dental appointment tomorrow is going to turn up anything so expensive they have to defer it and scrimp and save to pay for it.
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.
Sometimes I think that the truly wealthy and powerful are convinced suffering is necessary lest we devolve into universe 25
I just finished installing a whole-house filter & softener system and everyone is delighted. I told my kids that once a month we're going to serve untreated well-water with dinner, so we stay grateful for it.
Abundance truthers ignore that having access to more consumer goods is often orthogonal to happiness ("Hedonic treadmill").
But am I better off for all the trinkets I now have in my home if the alternative could have been better social safety nets, less wealth inequality, less social isolation, lower global emissions, etc.?
Being in nature is good for us, so that’s probably part of it, as is the constant practice of being self-reliant.
Another theory is friction. I can’t just roll out of bed to the couch, and back. I don’t have a fixed place to shower, so I swim in a river most days, and usually it’s freezing. Camping alone was terrifying at first, but objectively not that dangerous and not worth worrying about. All these little moments are a chance to exercise that mental muscle to do uncomfortable things.
Modern life is devoid of this friction. I could try to take a cold shower every day, but a not-cold one is just a turn of the wrist away. I could try to make myself go outside a bit every day, but I don’t need to.
This isn’t a new observation, but I can’t believe how stark the contrast is. I’m getting stuff done that I’ve been procrastinating on for years.
not having a vaccine for a deadly disease, or having a vaccine AND a monstrous media machine that will convince millions to not take it?
> I am an associate program officer in the Abundance and Growth Fund at Coefficient Giving, where I lead our grantmaking on Innovation Policy. In this role, I aim to identify and support efforts to safely accelerate scientific progress and innovation. I am motivated by the broader goals of improving scientific research, funding, institutions, and incentive structures through creativity and experimentation, and I am always excited to connect with others who share those goals (feel free to reach out at jordan.dworkin@coefficientgiving.org).
https://jordandworkin.com/about/
Take the first quote. If only we had music on demand, "the limit of human felicity" could be attained. Yet -- we now have music on demand and clearly it did not cause everyone permanent happiness.
What I take from this is that material things actually matter very little to the attainment of meaning. Meaning comes from elsewhere.
I have running water, it's true, but I'm still bothered by the AI slop art in this article. Funny thing, that.
Rent, food, transport and healthcare are still very significant costs for the average person, and those are just the basics.
There is power in controlling people through upheaval and degrowth. I delight when those self-serving revolutionaries FAIL.
Basically imagining living life without a given luxury (hot water, infinite music on tap, functioning eyesight, etc), really internalizing that feeling, and then practicing gratitude for the fact that you do indeed have that thing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_visualization
* have OLED screens and dark modes which are amazing after sundown,
* virtually everything works on Linux, especially all effectively mandatory/government services (at least here in Poland),
* and with some hardware selection Linux works everywhere,
* batteries last ages and everything can be charged via USB-C,
* smartphone cameras now finally exceed my own vision, have amazing zoom and take great nighttime photos (although not of moving stuff yet),
* the ecosystem allows to magically summon a car,
* can have an e2e encrypted multimodal (video, photos, documents, text) conversation with virtually everyone we know, wherever they are in the world, live or asynchronously,
* not to mention LLMs just doing things for you like a tireless assistant.
All of these were a dream when I first set up a home server in 2004. Some like OLED were a dream I didn't even know I had, the LCD glow just annoyed me.
1. Those who are happy with what they have,
2. Those who are never happy and always want more.
But this is an oversimplification. Many people belong to a third group:
3. Those who understand we have nice things today, but aren't happy with how we got them and whether we'll be able to have them tomorrow.
Sadly I think the "you should be happy" people tend to bunch together groups 2 and 3. You can see this false dichotomy all over the place.