8 ms·

Barry Schwartz, in his provocative essay "Self determination: The tyranny of freedom" [1] argues that it is constrains that give meaning to our actions by shapi

Barry Schwartz, in his provocative essay "Self determination: The tyranny of freedom" [1] argues that it is constrains that give meaning to our actions by shaping our choices. Without constraints, on what basis would one choose? This puts convenience directly at odds with meaningfulness. Ironically, this pursuit of convenience is what gives meaning to a lot of people, especially in Silicon Valley. :-) As an elderly Uber driver once commented to me... "What do we gain by connecting a smart watch to an internet-enabled coffee maker so I can avoid getting up to press a switch in the morning? Stay in bed and scroll Twitter?"

pdonis 7y ago
> "What do we gain by connecting a smart watch to an internet-enabled coffee maker so I can avoid getting up to press a switch in the morning? Stay in bed and scroll Twitter?" 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. Or... The value of "time-saving" is that it lets you choose what you will spend the saved time on, instead of being forced to spend it on routine tasks that might not give you any real satisfaction even though they need to be done. But you do have to choose. Being able to do that is of value to many people. But perhaps it isn't of value to everyone; and to someone for whom that opportunity to choose is not of value, perhaps they would indeed be better off making their coffee and doing other necessary life chores by hand.
- ssivark 7y ago
  > you do have to choose But that is precisely the point! Suppose, (as Barry Schwartz says) constraints are what drive choices we consider meaningful. Then, the greater the convenience, the harder it becomes to make meaningful choices! Would spending time with family feel as meaningful as it does now if you were living inside the loop of "Groundhog day" and recreating the same evening over and over again? That is essentially immortality, as experienced in an unchanging world. > Or read a book. Or play with your kids... I don't know about the people you meet, but most people I meet seem to lament that it feels like they're getting less and less time for these things :-)
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > Would spending time with family feel as meaningful as it does now if you were living inside the loop of "Groundhog day" and recreating the same evening over and over again? Who said that was the choice being offered? > That is essentially immortality, as experienced in an unchanging world. But we don't live in an unchanging world, so I don't see how any of this is relevant. > most people I meet seem to lament that it feels like they're getting less and less time for these things Is that because they're refusing to use automatic coffee makers and doing all their chores by hand? Or is it because they're using all the time freed up by automation on Facebook and Twitter instead of using it reading or playing with their kids?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    That line of thinking sounds a lot like trying to artificially induce meaningful experiences. I don't know if it generalizes to everyone, but once I'm aware I'm tricking myself into something, I don't find it meaningful at all. Also, "spending time with family" isn't meaningful per se. The meaning is in the details the phrase doesn't convey - the things you do together, the things you talk about, the emotions you feel. > most people I meet seem to lament that it feels like they're getting less and less time for these things :-) That's because we live in a competitive environment; the work really does expand to encompass all the time labour-saving inventions liberate - simply because some people choose to go "the extra mile" and everyone else suddenly has to follow suit, or risk being left behind.
- ralphstodomingo 7y ago
  > 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?
  - nopassrecover 7y ago
    You may be interested in this if you haven’t already come across it previously: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_th...
    - ralphstodomingo 7y ago
      Really interesting bit, wouldn't have found it unless you sent me this. Interested, too, to hear what people think about it.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > 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.
  - Kalium 7y ago
    > 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.
- vlan0 7y ago
  If making coffee is as simple and quick as pressing a button, then I doubt the convince would save enough time for any of the activities you mentioned. We also should also not forget the extreme sacrifice in quality that comes “quick and easy” coffee.
  - wDcBKgt66V8WDs 7y ago
    exactly. read 2 pages of a book. play with your pet for so little time that it gets pissed off at you. ditto the kid. code long enough that you manage to remember what you were doing yesterday and then immediately forget...
  - asark 7y ago
    A stupid-simple $20 coffee machine with no interface but an on/off switch will produce something most daily coffee drinkers find acceptable, given grounds a notch or two above the absolute cheapest around, and it takes at most 1 minute of hands-on time if your stuff's arranged with any sense at all. My pour-overs from whole beans take like 3 min hands-on, maybe, and that's about as fiddly as it gets. Maybe add one minute with a manual grinder just for maximum fiddliness. WTF are people doing that not having to make coffee frees up any useful amount of time?
- atoav 7y ago
  I use a (manual) coffee grinder as part of a morning ritual. When I wake up I put on water to boil, start grinding coffee, stare out of the window, make coffee and then return to bed and read my news/blogs for as long as the coffee lasts. Then I go for a shower. The thing for me is: it feels good to start the day by doing something yourself and the time you spend in morning rituals can be valuable for the whole day. Although I automate a lot on computers, I belive in the value of manually making things happen, instead of having a environment that caters to you. Every now and then I break my ritual and don’t drink coffee, which is something I don’t want to have to schedule with my smart watch.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Do you cut the wood to boil your coffee, light the fire, or is that line about boiling coffee just a convenient knob you turned. When you put the water on to boil do you go to the well [that you dug yourself] and let a bucket down on a rope [that you made yourself]; or do you open the tap? Is your coffee grinder a rock, or a more convenient gadget?
    - coldtea 7y ago
      None of those things sounds particularly bad -- and many people do all of the above... Environmentally wise, they are much saner. And from a sedentary standpoint too.
      - bluGill 7y ago
        Perhaps, but your morning coffee now isn't ready until lunch time...
        coldtea 7y ago
        It doesn't take more than 10 minutes to cut some wood for the fireplace/stove (assuming you haven't already cut them at a more convenient time or bought them pre-cut). Water from the well is also like 2-5 minutes to get assuming the well is in your property and not a few miles away (and assuming you don't have it already connected to pipes). All in all, one can get some firewood, start the stove/fireplace, grind coffee, and have a cup within 30 minutes or so. Still more than waiting 2-3 minutes for the machine to poor it, but not really impossible. On the plus side, the whole procedure assumes that you live in the countryside, and don't have some office job to feel stressed to go early to.
- lostphilosopher 7y ago
  Both your statement and the GP's ring true to me. Here's how I'd parse it - Automation does indeed free up time for by choice activities, but it also removes motivation to do things that are both hard to do and good to do. Obvious example: cars have made tons of things possible that weren't possible before, but if I didn't have a car or live in a society built around them I'd probably get a lot more exercise. The more automation we have the fewer things we're forced to do and there are drawbacks that come with that. Others have brought up that the experience of having done any hard thing may have intrinsic benefits, but fewer of us have had that experience. Not an argument against automation, just acknowledging the cons.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >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. Or... Or nothing of the short -- just go and produce more useless innovations (IoT crap, and so on), and then spend 3+ hours on social media, and so on. The important real time saving low hanging fruits inventions (washing machine, fridge, etc) are already done (some are pending still, but they aren't those peddled by modern companies). All those modern "innovations" are meant for you to be a good consumer -- and to be such, you need to constantly buy the next, and work in the rat race to afford them. You could read the book and play with your kids without an "internet-enabled coffee maker"... In fact even agrarian medieval societies had more holidays (almost half the year) and far more leisure time than we do -- and that's with all the farm and household chores...
scarejunba 7y ago
We have the universal constraint: we will all die. I have fifty years left. Every day I lose a day. Who are these people without constraints? Without constraints there are at least two friends with different startups that I’d work at. Without constraints, I’d spend twice as much time in the gym. I’d cook meals with prep times thrice as long. The point is to have useful constraints. Being constrained by having to do laundry is a low quality life. Being constrained by having to drive an hour a day to work is low quality. Being constrained by having to grow my own food or starve is low quality. Convenience powers climbing Maslow’s pyramid. Being a slave to tedium, never again. Life is too short.
- badpun 7y ago
  There are people who are consciously choosing the "tedium" of growing their own food (look up homesteading on youtube), instead of pursuing startup ideas. Both options have tedious grind (coding something that you're already an expert in can be no more challenging than pulling weeds), and both have tons of challenges and opportunities for personal growth.
  - vraivroo 7y ago
    Yes, because one of the flaws in the human brain is finding "meaning" in "having to do a lot of work". I don't really care for that. They're going to die same as me, and they're as unlikely (maybe less likely) to contribute anything lasting.
    - sebastianconcpt 7y ago
      If that feature got naturally selected after countless generatios, what allows you to say that's a flaw?
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    Convenience is what allows them that. Look at what you just said: “on YouTube”. Part of the ability for them to talk about their lifestyle choices comes from the convenience of having YouTube to share it. That’s the true beauty of convenience. Would they be as fulfilled if they were unable to share? Probably not. They reached greater heights of self-actualization because of this. And what made that possible? Digital video recording, not flipbooks. An internet connection. Not carrier pigeons.
lordnacho 7y ago
> As an elderly Uber driver once commented to me... "What do we gain by connecting a smart watch to an internet-enabled coffee maker so I can avoid getting up to press a switch in the morning? Stay in bed and scroll Twitter?" Well I'm not normally one to invoke religion, but I think the Buddha discovered this line of thinking a long time ago. He didn't have technology like we do, but as a prince he certainly had every convenience imaginable. IIRC he ended up becoming an ascetic, part of a timeless tradition across the globe of finding meaning through simple living. I'm not sure it works, but it's certainly a rich tradition.
LUmBULtERA 7y ago
>As an elderly Uber driver once commented to me... "What do we gain by connecting a smart watch to an internet-enabled coffee maker so I can avoid getting up to press a switch in the morning? Stay in bed and scroll Twitter?" Huh. I use an internet-enabled coffee maker to make me coffee at the same time every morning, thereby giving me extra sleep. Extra sleep every morning is glorious and definitely worthwhile to me.
- lgas 7y ago
  I don't drink coffee but my father has used a non-internet-enabled coffee maker to make himself coffee at the same time every morning, thereby giving him extra sleep, for many years. I'm not sure how the internet would improve on that.
- dkersten 7y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the value. It takes me about 3 minutes to make coffee and I usually do it while I eat breakfast or otherwise prepare for my day.
- DenisM 7y ago
  > I use an internet-enabled coffee maker to make me coffee at the same time every morning, thereby giving me extra sleep. Where's the internet part? It just needs a timer.
sebastianconcpt 7y ago
"What do we gain by connecting a smart watch to an internet-enabled coffee maker so I can avoid getting up to press a switch in the morning? Stay in bed and scroll Twitter?" Thanks for sharing that!
sebastianconcpt 7y ago
This always caught my attention too. Now I realize this can be "the big picture" of why it happens (while it is certainly involved, is not as easy as just energy conservation): Natural Selection > Women selecting who reproduces and who doesn't > Hypergamy driving women's desires > Men performing to be selected > Obsession for performance > Natural Selection Filtering next generation > and so on.
vageli 7y ago
> As an elderly Uber driver once commented to me... "What do we gain by connecting a smart watch to an internet-enabled coffee maker so I can avoid getting up to press a switch in the morning? Stay in bed and scroll Twitter?" What do we gain by using a machine to quickly and easily create coffee? Why don't we start from the individual beans, grind them, fetch water from a manual well outside, and use our wooden stoves to heat water to a boil for our cup of joe? Convenience.
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  The process you describe sounds like a sure recipe for the subjectively best tasting coffee in the world for me. To give an example - I can take a cable car to almost every second mountain in the alps to reach the top. Or I can hike/climb/skitour it. Although the result is the same (me on the top), the feelings of accomplishment, self-worth etc. are incomparable. Route is really often more important than destination. Back to coffee example, each of us needs to strike a balance that fits us, there is no one-fits-all. I know damn well what fits me for happy life.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  The process you are describing may be very rewarding if you have the time for it.
bwestergard 7y ago
Thanks for the recommendation, I look forward to reading it in full. This recalls Hegel's theme of "second nature": [ The synthesis of ethical life means that individuals not only act in conformity with the ethical good but that they recognize the authority of ethical laws. This authority is not something alien to individuals since they are linked to the ethical order through a strong identification which Hegel says "is more like an identity than even the relation of faith or trust" (¶ 147). The knowledge of how the laws and institutions of society are binding on the will of individuals entails a "doctrine of duties." In duty the individual finds liberation both from dependence on mere natural impulse, which may or may not motivate ethical actions, and from indeterminate subjectivity which cannot produce a clear view of proper action. "In duty the individual acquires his substantive freedom" (¶ 149). In the performance of duty the individual exhibits virtue when the ethical order is reflected in his or her character, and when this is done by simple conformity with one's duties it is rectitude. ] https://www.iep.utm.edu/hegelsoc/ https://www.iep.utm.edu/hegelsoc/

pdonis 7y ago

> "What do we gain by connecting a smart watch to an internet-enabled coffee maker so I can avoid getting up to press a switch in the morning? Stay in bed and scroll Twitter?" 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. Or... The value of "time-saving" is that it lets you choose what you will spend the saved time on, instead of being forced to spend it on routine tasks that might not give you any real satisfaction even though they need to be done. But you do have to choose. Being able to do that is of value to many people. But perhaps it isn't of value to everyone; and to someone for whom that opportunity to choose is not of value, perhaps they would indeed be better off making their coffee and doing other necessary life chores by hand.

ssivark 7y ago
> you do have to choose But that is precisely the point! Suppose, (as Barry Schwartz says) constraints are what drive choices we consider meaningful. Then, the greater the convenience, the harder it becomes to make meaningful choices! Would spending time with family feel as meaningful as it does now if you were living inside the loop of "Groundhog day" and recreating the same evening over and over again? That is essentially immortality, as experienced in an unchanging world. > Or read a book. Or play with your kids... I don't know about the people you meet, but most people I meet seem to lament that it feels like they're getting less and less time for these things :-)
- pdonis 7y ago
  > Would spending time with family feel as meaningful as it does now if you were living inside the loop of "Groundhog day" and recreating the same evening over and over again? Who said that was the choice being offered? > That is essentially immortality, as experienced in an unchanging world. But we don't live in an unchanging world, so I don't see how any of this is relevant. > most people I meet seem to lament that it feels like they're getting less and less time for these things Is that because they're refusing to use automatic coffee makers and doing all their chores by hand? Or is it because they're using all the time freed up by automation on Facebook and Twitter instead of using it reading or playing with their kids?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  That line of thinking sounds a lot like trying to artificially induce meaningful experiences. I don't know if it generalizes to everyone, but once I'm aware I'm tricking myself into something, I don't find it meaningful at all. Also, "spending time with family" isn't meaningful per se. The meaning is in the details the phrase doesn't convey - the things you do together, the things you talk about, the emotions you feel. > most people I meet seem to lament that it feels like they're getting less and less time for these things :-) That's because we live in a competitive environment; the work really does expand to encompass all the time labour-saving inventions liberate - simply because some people choose to go "the extra mile" and everyone else suddenly has to follow suit, or risk being left behind.
ralphstodomingo 7y ago
> 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?
- nopassrecover 7y ago
  You may be interested in this if you haven’t already come across it previously: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_th...
  - ralphstodomingo 7y ago
    Really interesting bit, wouldn't have found it unless you sent me this. Interested, too, to hear what people think about it.
- pdonis 7y ago
  > 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.
- Kalium 7y ago
  > 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.
vlan0 7y ago
If making coffee is as simple and quick as pressing a button, then I doubt the convince would save enough time for any of the activities you mentioned. We also should also not forget the extreme sacrifice in quality that comes “quick and easy” coffee.
- wDcBKgt66V8WDs 7y ago
  exactly. read 2 pages of a book. play with your pet for so little time that it gets pissed off at you. ditto the kid. code long enough that you manage to remember what you were doing yesterday and then immediately forget...
- asark 7y ago
  A stupid-simple $20 coffee machine with no interface but an on/off switch will produce something most daily coffee drinkers find acceptable, given grounds a notch or two above the absolute cheapest around, and it takes at most 1 minute of hands-on time if your stuff's arranged with any sense at all. My pour-overs from whole beans take like 3 min hands-on, maybe, and that's about as fiddly as it gets. Maybe add one minute with a manual grinder just for maximum fiddliness. WTF are people doing that not having to make coffee frees up any useful amount of time?
atoav 7y ago
I use a (manual) coffee grinder as part of a morning ritual. When I wake up I put on water to boil, start grinding coffee, stare out of the window, make coffee and then return to bed and read my news/blogs for as long as the coffee lasts. Then I go for a shower. The thing for me is: it feels good to start the day by doing something yourself and the time you spend in morning rituals can be valuable for the whole day. Although I automate a lot on computers, I belive in the value of manually making things happen, instead of having a environment that caters to you. Every now and then I break my ritual and don’t drink coffee, which is something I don’t want to have to schedule with my smart watch.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Do you cut the wood to boil your coffee, light the fire, or is that line about boiling coffee just a convenient knob you turned. When you put the water on to boil do you go to the well [that you dug yourself] and let a bucket down on a rope [that you made yourself]; or do you open the tap? Is your coffee grinder a rock, or a more convenient gadget?
  - coldtea 7y ago
    None of those things sounds particularly bad -- and many people do all of the above... Environmentally wise, they are much saner. And from a sedentary standpoint too.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      Perhaps, but your morning coffee now isn't ready until lunch time...
      - coldtea 7y ago
        It doesn't take more than 10 minutes to cut some wood for the fireplace/stove (assuming you haven't already cut them at a more convenient time or bought them pre-cut). Water from the well is also like 2-5 minutes to get assuming the well is in your property and not a few miles away (and assuming you don't have it already connected to pipes). All in all, one can get some firewood, start the stove/fireplace, grind coffee, and have a cup within 30 minutes or so. Still more than waiting 2-3 minutes for the machine to poor it, but not really impossible. On the plus side, the whole procedure assumes that you live in the countryside, and don't have some office job to feel stressed to go early to.
lostphilosopher 7y ago
Both your statement and the GP's ring true to me. Here's how I'd parse it - Automation does indeed free up time for by choice activities, but it also removes motivation to do things that are both hard to do and good to do. Obvious example: cars have made tons of things possible that weren't possible before, but if I didn't have a car or live in a society built around them I'd probably get a lot more exercise. The more automation we have the fewer things we're forced to do and there are drawbacks that come with that. Others have brought up that the experience of having done any hard thing may have intrinsic benefits, but fewer of us have had that experience. Not an argument against automation, just acknowledging the cons.
coldtea 7y ago
>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. Or... Or nothing of the short -- just go and produce more useless innovations (IoT crap, and so on), and then spend 3+ hours on social media, and so on. The important real time saving low hanging fruits inventions (washing machine, fridge, etc) are already done (some are pending still, but they aren't those peddled by modern companies). All those modern "innovations" are meant for you to be a good consumer -- and to be such, you need to constantly buy the next, and work in the rat race to afford them. You could read the book and play with your kids without an "internet-enabled coffee maker"... In fact even agrarian medieval societies had more holidays (almost half the year) and far more leisure time than we do -- and that's with all the farm and household chores...

scarejunba 7y ago

We have the universal constraint: we will all die. I have fifty years left. Every day I lose a day. Who are these people without constraints? Without constraints there are at least two friends with different startups that I’d work at. Without constraints, I’d spend twice as much time in the gym. I’d cook meals with prep times thrice as long. The point is to have useful constraints. Being constrained by having to do laundry is a low quality life. Being constrained by having to drive an hour a day to work is low quality. Being constrained by having to grow my own food or starve is low quality. Convenience powers climbing Maslow’s pyramid. Being a slave to tedium, never again. Life is too short.

badpun 7y ago
There are people who are consciously choosing the "tedium" of growing their own food (look up homesteading on youtube), instead of pursuing startup ideas. Both options have tedious grind (coding something that you're already an expert in can be no more challenging than pulling weeds), and both have tons of challenges and opportunities for personal growth.
- vraivroo 7y ago
  Yes, because one of the flaws in the human brain is finding "meaning" in "having to do a lot of work". I don't really care for that. They're going to die same as me, and they're as unlikely (maybe less likely) to contribute anything lasting.
  - sebastianconcpt 7y ago
    If that feature got naturally selected after countless generatios, what allows you to say that's a flaw?
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Convenience is what allows them that. Look at what you just said: “on YouTube”. Part of the ability for them to talk about their lifestyle choices comes from the convenience of having YouTube to share it. That’s the true beauty of convenience. Would they be as fulfilled if they were unable to share? Probably not. They reached greater heights of self-actualization because of this. And what made that possible? Digital video recording, not flipbooks. An internet connection. Not carrier pigeons.

lordnacho 7y ago

> As an elderly Uber driver once commented to me... "What do we gain by connecting a smart watch to an internet-enabled coffee maker so I can avoid getting up to press a switch in the morning? Stay in bed and scroll Twitter?" Well I'm not normally one to invoke religion, but I think the Buddha discovered this line of thinking a long time ago. He didn't have technology like we do, but as a prince he certainly had every convenience imaginable. IIRC he ended up becoming an ascetic, part of a timeless tradition across the globe of finding meaning through simple living. I'm not sure it works, but it's certainly a rich tradition.

LUmBULtERA 7y ago

>As an elderly Uber driver once commented to me... "What do we gain by connecting a smart watch to an internet-enabled coffee maker so I can avoid getting up to press a switch in the morning? Stay in bed and scroll Twitter?" Huh. I use an internet-enabled coffee maker to make me coffee at the same time every morning, thereby giving me extra sleep. Extra sleep every morning is glorious and definitely worthwhile to me.

lgas 7y ago
I don't drink coffee but my father has used a non-internet-enabled coffee maker to make himself coffee at the same time every morning, thereby giving him extra sleep, for many years. I'm not sure how the internet would improve on that.
dkersten 7y ago
I'm not sure I understand the value. It takes me about 3 minutes to make coffee and I usually do it while I eat breakfast or otherwise prepare for my day.
DenisM 7y ago
> I use an internet-enabled coffee maker to make me coffee at the same time every morning, thereby giving me extra sleep. Where's the internet part? It just needs a timer.

sebastianconcpt 7y ago

"What do we gain by connecting a smart watch to an internet-enabled coffee maker so I can avoid getting up to press a switch in the morning? Stay in bed and scroll Twitter?" Thanks for sharing that!

sebastianconcpt 7y ago

This always caught my attention too. Now I realize this can be "the big picture" of why it happens (while it is certainly involved, is not as easy as just energy conservation): Natural Selection > Women selecting who reproduces and who doesn't > Hypergamy driving women's desires > Men performing to be selected > Obsession for performance > Natural Selection Filtering next generation > and so on.

vageli 7y ago

> As an elderly Uber driver once commented to me... "What do we gain by connecting a smart watch to an internet-enabled coffee maker so I can avoid getting up to press a switch in the morning? Stay in bed and scroll Twitter?" What do we gain by using a machine to quickly and easily create coffee? Why don't we start from the individual beans, grind them, fetch water from a manual well outside, and use our wooden stoves to heat water to a boil for our cup of joe? Convenience.

saiya-jin 7y ago
The process you describe sounds like a sure recipe for the subjectively best tasting coffee in the world for me. To give an example - I can take a cable car to almost every second mountain in the alps to reach the top. Or I can hike/climb/skitour it. Although the result is the same (me on the top), the feelings of accomplishment, self-worth etc. are incomparable. Route is really often more important than destination. Back to coffee example, each of us needs to strike a balance that fits us, there is no one-fits-all. I know damn well what fits me for happy life.
maxxxxx 7y ago
The process you are describing may be very rewarding if you have the time for it.

bwestergard 7y ago

Thanks for the recommendation, I look forward to reading it in full. This recalls Hegel's theme of "second nature": [ The synthesis of ethical life means that individuals not only act in conformity with the ethical good but that they recognize the authority of ethical laws. This authority is not something alien to individuals since they are linked to the ethical order through a strong identification which Hegel says "is more like an identity than even the relation of faith or trust" (¶ 147). The knowledge of how the laws and institutions of society are binding on the will of individuals entails a "doctrine of duties." In duty the individual finds liberation both from dependence on mere natural impulse, which may or may not motivate ethical actions, and from indeterminate subjectivity which cannot produce a clear view of proper action. "In duty the individual acquires his substantive freedom" (¶ 149). In the performance of duty the individual exhibits virtue when the ethical order is reflected in his or her character, and when this is done by simple conformity with one's duties it is rectitude. ] https://www.iep.utm.edu/hegelsoc/ https://www.iep.utm.edu/hegelsoc/