5 ms·

Right. Many things get easier, but "everything" is not easy, especially not in comparison to every-other-thing. And +1 for pointing out that drudgery-for-the-s

Right. Many things get easier, but "everything" is not easy, especially not in comparison to every-other-thing. And +1 for pointing out that drudgery-for-the-sake-of-drudgery is hardly the solution.

justinator 9y ago
But the convenience itself becomes the drudgery. Does everyone love to drive a convenient car, even though it leads to traffic/congestion, bad posture, poorer help (Which , now you have to go to the gym), and environmental collapse? Have you ever noticed the public space we give up to the convenience of the automobile? How much of your town/city has been paved over?
- deeg 9y ago
  That's romanticizing the past. Before cars horses (and the infrastructure to support them) caused massive environmental problems, people had all sorts of physical ailments from riding, and their corpses occasionally littered the streets.
  - justinator 9y ago
    I would say horse vs. car is a strange comparison ('cause you can walk you know), but OK. Did travel-by-horse, any time in human history contribute to GLOBAL climate change, rising sea levels, unpredictable weather patterns, etc, etc, that the rise of greenhouse gases like CO2 from the combustion fossil fuels seems to be doing? I'm guessing not. Conveniences have created a population explosion, and we're slowly snuffing out our existence because of it. Convenience is just another pattern of the Luxury Trap that authors like Yuval Noah Harari talk about. We have more of things at lower qualities, which allow us to spread more suffering around.
  - philipkglass 9y ago
    That specific bikes-vs-cars example is actually pretty good, IMO. When I was in graduate school I spent all day in a classroom or in front of a computer, but I was still in good physical shape because I biked to and from the campus each day. I would have had to go into debt to buy a car. My officemate and fellow grad student had car payments and paid for a gym membership to offset his similarly sedentary day. I used to laugh at that. I laugh a little less now, knowing how much risk cyclists are exposed to from cars, but that problem itself is a symptom of American cities that are built in an excessively car-dependent, car-first way.
  - skookumchuck 9y ago
    When cars first appeared, there were calls to "clean up our cities" by using cars instead of horses. Horses also regularly killed people.
    - testvox 9y ago
      Not to mention the shit > “In vacant lots, horse manure was piled as high as sixty feet. It lined city streets like banks of snow. In the summer time, it stank to the heavens; when the rains came, a soupy stream of horse manure flooded the crosswalks and seeped into people’s basements. Today, when you admire old New York brownstones and their elegant stoops, rising from street level to the second-storey parlour, keep in mind that this was a design necessity, allowing a homeowner to rise above the sea of horse manure." http://gothamist.com/2013/07/19/why_we_have_stoops.php http://gothamist.com/2013/07/19/why_we_have_stoops.php
      - goatlover 9y ago
        That's unappealing, but car fumes, noise and using up 1/4th of the city isn't all that appealing either, not to mention accidents are worse. You just get used to it if you live in a big city, probably like how people got used to horses and manure.
    - b0rsuk 9y ago
      Oh please, like cars aren't the most common cause of violent death! There are many good arguments against horses, but it isn't one of them.
      - skookumchuck 9y ago
        As I recall, horses killed people at much higher rates than cars.
  - philwelch 9y ago
    The first mistake was committing to civilization in the first place. Hunter-gatherers were probably happier and healthier than any of us before we started moving into marginal habitats and resorting to agriculture to survive. I don't think the Mongols or Comanche had "massive environmental problems". Steppe nomads don't need any more infrastructure than the steppe. They also manage to kick the asses of any "civilization" that hasn't managed to invent machine guns yet.
    - essayist 9y ago
      Don't know why this got downvoted. The archeological record demonstrates that the first agriculturists are worse off than the Hunter-Gatherers who preceded them.
  - trgn 9y ago
    Those are no longer our problems, and to the extent that they were, it's barely related. Corpses on the street were a consequence of communal poverty, not a consequence of not having cars to haul them off. Tearing down the city and rebuilding it for the car, which happened in the majority of American cities 40s-70s was an ideological program, and part of what drove it was a collective obsession for utility, or convenience. This was the era of unbridled optimism when there were technological solutions to all societal challenges. This article refers to that same postwar mindset with regards to food preparation and other household chores. It is also not romanticizing the past because we can tell the difference today. You can, right now, live in a walkable city or town, and compare it to a life where you have to drive everywhere. For many, the inconvenience of having to walk everywhere is minor given everything else you get in return. In fact, so much so that invariably these places are more expensive to live in.

Right. Many things get easier, but "everything" is not easy, especially not in comparison to every-other-thing. And +1 for pointing out that drudgery-for-the-sake-of-drudgery is hardly the solution.

justinator 9y ago

But the convenience itself becomes the drudgery. Does everyone love to drive a convenient car, even though it leads to traffic/congestion, bad posture, poorer help (Which , now you have to go to the gym), and environmental collapse? Have you ever noticed the public space we give up to the convenience of the automobile? How much of your town/city has been paved over?

deeg 9y ago
That's romanticizing the past. Before cars horses (and the infrastructure to support them) caused massive environmental problems, people had all sorts of physical ailments from riding, and their corpses occasionally littered the streets.
- justinator 9y ago
  I would say horse vs. car is a strange comparison ('cause you can walk you know), but OK. Did travel-by-horse, any time in human history contribute to GLOBAL climate change, rising sea levels, unpredictable weather patterns, etc, etc, that the rise of greenhouse gases like CO2 from the combustion fossil fuels seems to be doing? I'm guessing not. Conveniences have created a population explosion, and we're slowly snuffing out our existence because of it. Convenience is just another pattern of the Luxury Trap that authors like Yuval Noah Harari talk about. We have more of things at lower qualities, which allow us to spread more suffering around.
- philipkglass 9y ago
  That specific bikes-vs-cars example is actually pretty good, IMO. When I was in graduate school I spent all day in a classroom or in front of a computer, but I was still in good physical shape because I biked to and from the campus each day. I would have had to go into debt to buy a car. My officemate and fellow grad student had car payments and paid for a gym membership to offset his similarly sedentary day. I used to laugh at that. I laugh a little less now, knowing how much risk cyclists are exposed to from cars, but that problem itself is a symptom of American cities that are built in an excessively car-dependent, car-first way.
- skookumchuck 9y ago
  When cars first appeared, there were calls to "clean up our cities" by using cars instead of horses. Horses also regularly killed people.
  - testvox 9y ago
    Not to mention the shit > “In vacant lots, horse manure was piled as high as sixty feet. It lined city streets like banks of snow. In the summer time, it stank to the heavens; when the rains came, a soupy stream of horse manure flooded the crosswalks and seeped into people’s basements. Today, when you admire old New York brownstones and their elegant stoops, rising from street level to the second-storey parlour, keep in mind that this was a design necessity, allowing a homeowner to rise above the sea of horse manure." http://gothamist.com/2013/07/19/why_we_have_stoops.php http://gothamist.com/2013/07/19/why_we_have_stoops.php
    - goatlover 9y ago
      That's unappealing, but car fumes, noise and using up 1/4th of the city isn't all that appealing either, not to mention accidents are worse. You just get used to it if you live in a big city, probably like how people got used to horses and manure.
  - b0rsuk 9y ago
    Oh please, like cars aren't the most common cause of violent death! There are many good arguments against horses, but it isn't one of them.
    - skookumchuck 9y ago
      As I recall, horses killed people at much higher rates than cars.
- philwelch 9y ago
  The first mistake was committing to civilization in the first place. Hunter-gatherers were probably happier and healthier than any of us before we started moving into marginal habitats and resorting to agriculture to survive. I don't think the Mongols or Comanche had "massive environmental problems". Steppe nomads don't need any more infrastructure than the steppe. They also manage to kick the asses of any "civilization" that hasn't managed to invent machine guns yet.
  - essayist 9y ago
    Don't know why this got downvoted. The archeological record demonstrates that the first agriculturists are worse off than the Hunter-Gatherers who preceded them.
- trgn 9y ago
  Those are no longer our problems, and to the extent that they were, it's barely related. Corpses on the street were a consequence of communal poverty, not a consequence of not having cars to haul them off. Tearing down the city and rebuilding it for the car, which happened in the majority of American cities 40s-70s was an ideological program, and part of what drove it was a collective obsession for utility, or convenience. This was the era of unbridled optimism when there were technological solutions to all societal challenges. This article refers to that same postwar mindset with regards to food preparation and other household chores. It is also not romanticizing the past because we can tell the difference today. You can, right now, live in a walkable city or town, and compare it to a life where you have to drive everywhere. For many, the inconvenience of having to walk everywhere is minor given everything else you get in return. In fact, so much so that invariably these places are more expensive to live in.