I like this article; the message really resonates with me. For instance, I write music. But a good three minute song could take me days to write (and most music

I like this article; the message really resonates with me. For instance, I write music. But a good three minute song could take me days to write (and most musical artists usually take way longer than that). I like to animate, but a minute of animation could take even longer than a minute of song. Similarly, writing a trivial game or a simple app just takes way longer than it should. But I don't think that this sort of complete inability to gauge how long something should take to do has anything to do with the Karate Kid. Instead, I think the ubiquity of complex works makes the effort required non obvious, and even difficult, to see. Right now, I'm hearing music on the radio, typing on Hacker News, running Google Chrome on Ubuntu, with a book next to me. Incredible amounts of work went into each of these things. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for me to fathom the amount of hours put into Ubuntu, for instance. It feels sort of like our inability to comprehend huge numbers, or the Universe - and I kind of feel like there might even be a tie in to that old Wired article about the 'Monkeysphere' somewhere. The omnipresence of complex creative works makes for two related effects: we only use those works for relatively short periods of time, and we come to take them for granted. Surely before we were totally immersed in a world full of the products of work, we took more time to appreciate the details around us. But now we are essentially incapable of doing that. I wouldn't say that that is a bad thing; it's just a change. But it does lead to problems like the article mentioned where we can't properly understand how much work some things take. The other issue I mentioned is that we only use these things for short periods of time. No matter how familiar we become with a game or web app, we can not fathom the amount of detail put in to that app by the creator. I'll use the example of a game: every time we play through, we will only see one path through the game. But the game creator had to account for every path (just like the creators of Ubuntu had to account for someone doing any possible action within the OS). So there are several orders of magnitude more depth in the game (or OS) then I could ever truly appreciate just by playing it. I think that this sort of analysis can be extrapolated to all sorts of other creative mediums as well. We read a book in an hour, where the author probably labored an hour just choosing the right words for a sentence. There would be no way to appreciate that kind of work unless we spent ridiculous amounts of time reading, but we don't - like I said, we only use things for (relatively) short periods of time. You probably read this comment in a minute or two, or maybe didn't even read it at all and just went down to the end to find the tl;dr. But it took me maybe 30 minutes to write. So there isn't one. Go read it.