5 ms·
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
by carlgreene 2mo ago
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
- xnx 2mo agoWe need a Netflix Chaos Monkey tool for modern life. Each week one modern convenience stops working for a day: indoor plumbing, air conditioning, electricity, wifi, automobile, air travel etc. after one day without, you will again appreciate those things for the next few years
- abroadwin 2mo agoCan confirm. As someone living on well water in an area with semi-frequent power outages in winter I have periodically been given renewed appreciation for the value of power, central heat and running water. Now I have a great standby generator, though, so I'm sure I'll start taking it all for granted again soon.
- PaulHoule 2mo agoI live in an 1850s farm house with a spring up the hill and a backup well with a pump for those Augusts where the trees pull all the water out of the ground (not quite this one!) Our main heating system is two wood stoves with a small propane heater as a backup. The power goes out a lot in the winter but at least we are cozy, particularly with today's LED/Lithium lights. Back when I had ADSL from the central office my internet would stay up when I lost power so I had enough power to run a cordless phone and one (of two) DSL modems off a small UPS -- so I could keep 21st century comms. Once I got fiber-to-the-node most outages would affect the node so I gave up on the UPS. They're supposed to get FTTH to my house soon but I have no idea how that is going to be affected by outages.
- The_Fox 2mo agoI also used to be affected by node outages on a cable network, but now I have Starlink and as long as I can generate some power, I can be online. I wouldn't go back; you might consider it.
- dspillett 2mo ago> They're supposed to get FTTH to my house soon but I have no idea how that is going to be affected by outages. That would depend on the source of the outage and if your power has single points of failure in common with the comms infrastructure. One would hope the exchange has generator backups to cover short complete outages, but I'm not so sure about equipment between there and your residence (does the local cabinet have a power source, perhaps a battery or its power feed being provided by the exchange and its backups, that would survive at least a short area-wide outage?). I've certainly had full internet access when power has dropped for my (very urban) home and the rest of the local area, so at least in cases like me the exchange and infrastructure between kept running (and my laptop battery & the small UPS protecting the ONT, router, switch, and AP, kept my infrastructure going even though the desktop PC dropped as it isn't on the UPS).
- toast0 2mo ago> As someone living on well water in an area with semi-frequent power outages in winter After a few of these outages and typically two to three nines of utility power availability, I got a portable generator for my well (we have an automatic generator for the house, but the well is on a separate meter); but we've also had a well pump fail. That was "fun", I think the well company came out the next day to troubleshoot, and then the 3rd day to replace the pump, which took pretty much all day because of the depth of the well. At least it happened during good weather.
- abroadwin 2mo agoI was in the same boat. When I bought this house it had a standby generator, but not on the same meter as the well and not enough power to run my central heating. I recently upgraded the generator to be able to power everything and switched the well onto the house panel. Such a huge improvement.
- toast0 2mo agoMy well is pretty far from the house. Would have to trench a lot of large electrical cabling to get it connected to the generator. Too much hassle and expense for now. I've been seeing aliexpress battery + hybrid charger deals that could probably support my pump, at least for a little while, will probably do one of those eventually, especially if we build a pumphouse.
- ChrisArchitect 2mo ago(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering#Chaos_Monkey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering#Chaos_Monkey)
- greytape 2mo agoThis is called: "going camping".
- xg15 2mo agoOr "living in an apartment with affordable rent"...
- smallmancontrov 2mo ago> affordable That's the crux, isn't it? You aren't just dependent, you are dependent on a system that relentlessly stalks you with increased demands. You are tasked with keeping ahead of a pack of hunters who want to take you down -- and not only will your companions leave you for dead the moment that happens, the group will punish any suggestion that we might want to do something about this on a systemic level because they strive to join the hunters themselves. It's grim and people are correct to behave like it's grim.
- xg15 2mo agoI think you need better companions.
- smallmancontrov 2mo agoThe electorate is what it is, but yes, I hope we can change the currently prevailing attitude.
- palmotea 2mo agoOr his companions need to get better. I interpreted... >> You are tasked with keeping ahead of a pack of hunters who want to take you down -- and not only will your companions leave you for dead the moment that happens, the group will punish any suggestion that we might want to do something about this on a systemic level because they strive to join the hunters themselves. ...as referring to software engineers as a whole, because it fits. We're laborers, but a significant fraction of us has misinterpreted having a comfortable salary now as being capitalists themselves, so bought into libertarian propaganda and behave like they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires (for instance, by strongly resisting things like unionization). Unfortunately, too many of us who are actually interested in "[doing] something about this on a systemic level," are too pampered to have the focus to actually be effective, and get distracted and put all kinds of divisive stuff front-and-center (basically playing into the divide-and-conquer game of the bosses).
- MarkusQ 2mo agoIf our education system, hiring processes, onboarding/skill transfer support, career development pipelines and similar systems continue to degrade, we should have something like what you're asking for before too much longer.
- karmakurtisaani 2mo agoWe'll have vibe-designed houses, sewer systems, electronics and the like. Cheap, and almost work 85% of the time!
- xnx 2mo agoPlants crave Brawndo.
- IAmBroom 2mo agoI just attended a 9,000-person medieval camping event, where most camps are lit with individual solar power. The only power grid usage by most of us was that site water was pumped by electricity. Due to high mineral content, few of us drink straight from the tap, and every camp has stored water, soft drinks, and so on. The entire county lost power for about 8 hours. From the social media posts, you would have thought people were undergoing severe hardship, because they had to wait 1/3 of a day for their propane-heated showers. Also, some were angry that the county hadn't done more to plan for these situations... which happen maybe once every decade or so.
- techblueberry 2mo agoI don’t know if I’m just weird, but my reaction is usually the opposite. When the power goes out, and you’re forced to sit and talk to people or just enjoy the quiet of the night. I think about how much we’ve lost in the modern rat race. One of the things that sits with me is that for all we’ve been given, most of us have lost the ability to just sit out in a field and enjoy the stars (light pollution, starlink, etc)
- idiotsecant 2mo agoYeah, OK but this is clearly romanticizing away the fact that you are deeply dependent on these services. See how long you can just sit and enjoy the stars when your indoor plumbing and refrigeration goes away, and more importantly when your neighbors go away, not to mention the billions of little moving parts that must operate flawlessly for something like the global supply chain that brings you those shorts you wear and that tea you drink sitting in the grass and staring at the sky. I'm not trying to single you out but I am intensely annoyed by the light and airy disregard of an intensely complex graph of interconnected services that make life possible at the density and quality that we enjoy. We've lost a great deal less than we've gained, and anyone who doesn't think so has not had the joy of involuntarily going without them for a significant length of time.
- techblueberry 2mo agoFair enough, but I do think there are diminishing returns beyond the basics, and there’s a hierarchy. We are very fortunate to have clean water and sewage. There are terrible stories in Victorian England of like workers popping in water systems and killing hundreds of people. Electricity powers a ton of basics and maybe you think you could do without heating and air conditioning until a heat wave passes over Europe and kills hundreds of people. I do think beyond that you start to deal in a lot of tradeoffs. I hate they seemed to have systematically replaced wood burning fireplaces with gas. I moved out of a house with a wood burning fireplace and what a mistake, Except automated bill pay. I swear I could go back and live in the 70’s if it wasn’t for automated bill pay.
- 2mo ago
- gumby 2mo agoGood idea. We did have one a few years ago: the Covid pandemic. Societies around the world did not handle it well, or worse, many of those that did spawned smaller chaos monkeys.
- xnx 2mo agoIndeed that was a major disruption. If anything good came out of the shakeup, one of the thing has to be that supply chains are even more rapidly adaptable (even if they still aren't natively resilient).
- jancsika 2mo agoIf you don't mind vectorizing these then they already exist and are called power outages.
- PantaloonFlames 2mo agoMove to Italy!
- skinfaxi 2mo agoGo camping every so often if you can.
- andai 2mo agoYou are describing life in central Europe! At least when I was growing up. I'm also reminded of a while back when the power went out in Spain, and people said it was like a time capsule to the 1970s. People, outside, talking! Imagine...
- saturn8601 2mo agoI don't know about others...but thats just home ownership or life in general ha ha Life is a series of maintenance tasks + a few moments of rest and happiness followed by death. I think millenials like minimalism for many reasons but some may be the trauma of having clutter in their boomer parents home as well as the idea that each item is a liability. Each item needs a place to rest, possibly time spent maintaining and repairing it, and possibly energy in the form of electricity/fuel etc. Less items = less potential chaos. I guess the very wealthy don't feel any of these issues since while they are still there money can handle dealing with the entropy. How I envy them sometimes.
- nradov 2mo agoThe living experience you're describing might be annoying but it's not actual trauma. I think some younger people are too quick to use that word and it trivializes real trauma.
- saturn8601 2mo agoMaybe 'negative lived experience' is a better word? Im trying to describe an uncomfortable situation during their upbringing that has imprinted an aversion to that style in their minds.
- imjonse 2mo agoA trip to the third world or even easier to a ghetto/favela/poor rural area in your own country is realistically achievable and may lead to an even more profound appreciation. A real life Chaos Monkey is easy to interpret as gamified or temporarily slowed down modern life, so may even be fun sometimes.
- tonyedgecombe 2mo agoI think it’s quite healthy to do that yourself now and then. Probably the most eye opening for me was fasting for a day. Even small things are enlightening, when my slippers disintegrated I didn’t replace them for a month. It gave me a whole new appreciation for something I otherwise considered insignificant.
- SideburnsOfDoom 2mo agoYou're describing the last power cut that we had due to poorly maintained infrastructure. I would not romanticise it too much. It also fits severe water restrictions due to drought. I would not romanticise that much either.
- rocketpastsix 2mo agoWe've dealt with a broken water heater, a city wide wifi outage, incredibly hot temps (thats the current thing), and loss of power for 30+ hours in the winter storm that hit the US Southeast earlier this year. It has really made me come to appreciate each of these things more than I did.
- pizzathyme 2mo agoIt's true. The negative takeaway is that is no matter what miracles come in the far future (free energy, perfect health care, infinite resources, infinite intelligence), people will eternally be wanting, take things for granted, focused mainly on the things they don't have and can't do. It's the human condition.
- techblueberry 2mo agoI feel like in discussions about nostalgia, there can be this default presentish reaction which talks about all of the things that are better But in the hedonic adaptation sense like - and comparisons are complicated - people aren’t by and large happier now (because of the hedonism this is sidestepping the argument of how well distributed it is, and I’m talking the past 50-100 years not compared to subsistence farming and the like early Industrial Revolution etc et al) I do think a lot of the senses that things are better now are based on this adaptation, not thinking about would you be less happy if you didn’t know about some of the small things you were missing.
- throwaway_7274 2mo agoMaybe happiness is a different kind of thing from the pleasure/pain axis. Maybe it’s a different thing that’s tragically easy to mistake for the same thing. I notice a lot of resistance and discomfort whenever someone says anything like this (“are you suggesting my pain doesn’t matter? How about the starving kids in xyz?”), and I get that. But it feels like there might be something to it.
- EMIRELADERO 2mo agoEveryone should read this about "happiness": https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/can-socialists-be-happy/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... > "It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast."
- nradov 2mo agoHappiness doesn't matter. It's not a useful metric for anything important.
- circlefavshape 2mo agoWhat? 100% disagree! Do you actually mean this? What do you think is important?
- 2mo ago
- carlosjobim 2mo agoGo camping
- lezojeda 2mo agoI've found that camping and hiking have the amazing benefit of restarting many of the daily pleasures like a good bed, a hot shower, a nice hot elaborated meal, a set of fresh clean clothes, etc. So, +1 to the recommendation
- carlosjobim 2mo agoWhy did people kill the commenter who replied to me? What he wrote was my thoughts exactly.
- euroderf 2mo agoWhat?? It's somehow now possible to utterly eradicate a comment ?
- shadow28 2mo agoIf a comment gets flagged enough, it gets marked as "dead". There's a show dead option you can enable in your HN profile settings to still be able to see such comments though.
- shadow28 2mo agoHN can be pretty weird with +1 kind of comments.
- keybored 2mo agoEveryone reaches the hedonistic plateau, and fast at that. Except for people who sound like they just read a book from some neoliberal think smithy. They will have a euphoric fainting spell over the wonders of the convenience store. Think about all those elated anecdotes about how someone used an inferior tool for a decade, was fine with it, then tried a better one and now “can’t imagine how I lived without it...” well it’s a bittersweet memory distortion innit.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- dachris 2mo agoI often say that everyone should be on a misery week once a year, where you live like our "ancestors". I.e. like my grandparents, who grew up in the 1920s on a farm, only 1 heated room, privy outside, no running water, limited food options, hard work each day. As my granny used to say to anyone with nostalgia: no, things were definitely not better back then. Misery week would greatly increase happiness for the rest of the year, add humility, and empathy with the less privileged.
- JeremyNT 2mo agoEven just going backpacking for a few days highlights it. Despite access to some modern amenities (maybe a lighter, or a camp stove, and some food you bought and took with you) it's humbling. Looking for water in the wilderness - even with access to maps - can be quite a challenge in and of itself!
- dominotw 2mo agoits a fun adventure because your already know that your comforts and old life are just a flight away. but regardless it not going to bring any meaningful humbleness because you will forget all about it. i grew up in povery for first 20 yrs of my life in a desert but i have never think of that life and experience humbless in any different way than ppl who have never experienced it.
- m463 2mo agolol a friend would go "camping" with his family and a few other families. They would all reserve the same group campsite every year. When it would get near to the "camping" time my friend would be preparing giant battery banks, hotspots, and other tech with the right usb/hdmi cables and more...
- carlosjobim 2mo agoThe hard work (and drink) makes those kind of weeks all but miserable.
- dominotw 2mo agothats not useful because then you immedetlily forget all about it.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- tshaddox 2mo agoHedonic 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.
- jjice 2mo agoI've never thought about hedonic adaptation as a positive, but that's a good point that it has some real value in the case of societal adaptations and driving further innovation. We usually view it through the lens of an individual over-adapting to niceties that end up being a drain on their lives long term somehow.
- fcarraldo 2mo agoWe are solving problems, but we're also creating more problems with those solutions. Greenhouse gases, global warming, oil spills, wars over resources, straining power grids, species extinction, worsening mental health, worsening social cohesion, widening inequality. All are the result of technological progress within our systems of government. Hedonic adaptation prevents us from asking "is this worth the downsides, or should we go back to how it was?"
- tshaddox 2mo agoIt's possible to mistakenly think you've solved a problem when you've actually made the situation worse, of course, and that's just plainly a bad thing. It's important to be able to identify specific things which we thought were solutions but were actually new worse problems, and roll them back if possible. [0] But that's not really what the hedonic treadmill refers to! The hedonic treadmill is referring to the fact that, when a problem is solved, the level of pleasure or happiness individuals experience reportedly quickly returns to the pre-solution baseline. [0] Crucially, this must not be conflated with advocating a general slowdown or pause on attempts at progress. That's the civilizational death sentence.
- ericyd 2mo agoNot trying to shame you but...50 degrees? Do you live in Phoenix and keep your home at 60 degrees?
- m463 2mo agoIt seems the Air Conditioner outlet temperature should be 15-20 degrees F cooler than the indoor temperature. So to keep your home at 70, you need exit temperature to be 50-55F. seems like it might be lower or higher, depending on humidity.
- ericyd 2mo agoThat is interesting and I didn't know that, though the commenter said air coming out of their vents almost 50 degrees below the outdoor air temp, so I'm tempted to think they weren't referring to the outlet temperature.
- m463 2mo agoI think the vent temperature is the outlet temperature. So on a 102 degree day, for 72 degrees indoors, you might need 52 degree vent temperature. In phoenix - just go to work and come home after dark.
- m463 2mo agoWhat I hate is the folks who get in the middle of all of that and monetize things some new way.
- AgentOrange1234 2mo agoIt's so hard to stay in awe and wonder. 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..."
- simonebrunozzi 2mo ago> air almost 50 degrees cooler You mean Fahreneit, of course.