As others have mentioned, the decline started long before social media and the Internet. When I was a child, in the 70s, my parents often had other families and couples over for dinner, and we often attended small dinner parties, too.
As an introvert, I absolutely loathed these gatherings and was frustrated by how powerless I was in avoiding them.
Recently, I have been reading over my mother's old letters she wrote to her parents at that time, in which she described the effort and social anxiety that went with this tradition. It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold. Someone invites you over, then that goes into an unspoken balance sheet, and you are required to reciprocate. She often spoke of "owing" dinner to people. I don't think she enjoyed it at all, though there were a few couples I can remember who were good friends of theirs, and those meetups were always a pleasure to listen in on. The rest were simply a drag.
I should note that their life in the 70s (in a middle-class college town) was not some idyllic paradise without the Internet, either. Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu, and days were spent running dreary errands to shop for boring things that we now can get with a click. The rotary-dial telephone that hung in the kitchen was the heartbeat of the house, since replaced by Facebook and smartphones. My parents were always busy and exhausted.
> It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold. ... I don't think she enjoyed it at all, though there were a few couples I can remember who were good friends of theirs, and those meetups were always a pleasure to listen in on. The rest were simply a drag.
It's worth noting that not everything that's good for you is enjoyable, especially in the moment.
Avoiding everything that's a "drag" means staying alone, passively consuming easy media, not exercising, eating hyper-palatble junk food, getting obese and probably depressed, etc.
> I should note that their life in the 70s (in a middle-class college town) was not some idyllic paradise without the Internet, either. Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu, and days were spent running dreary errands to shop for boring things that we now can get with a click. The rotary-dial telephone that hung in the kitchen was the heartbeat of the house, since replaced by Facebook and smartphones.
While I agree that those cloying clickbait articles/videos idealizing random pre-smartphone teen photos and videos are obnoxious (as someone who grew up in that era). I think the modern emphasis on mindlessly reducing "friction" is going to prove ultimately unwise, though probably uncorrected as generational turnover causes people to forget what was lost, and certain degradation gets redefined as "normal" and accepted.
> My parents were always busy and exhausted.
So are modern parents, and all indications are they are more exhausted.
I've been interested in this for quite a while, and have read a fair bit about it as a phenomenon. I think that pursuing comfort and convenience to the point that it's actually harmful is sort of a big factor in a lot of societal change the last several decades in many developed/Western countries. As a European/American dual national I think it's a particularly strong current in American culture, personally.
An accessible intro is Michael Easter's book The Comfort Crisis, which, while a little pop-sciencey, explores the idea that making our lives more and more comfortable (across various axes) creates a feedback cycle that shrinks our comfort zones, making some of the more rewarding (but potentially challenging/uncomfortable) things in life seem unthinkable.
For me this was a bit of a "once you've seen it you can't unsee it" kind of thing. Letting convenience be your primary metric for success often produces totally unsatisfying results, anywhere from how you build cities to the way you eat a meal.
The arc of the original World of Warcraft (broader social impacts aside) is an interesting microcosm to explore: players continually asked for convenience features that would simplify the most tedious aspects of the game and reduce social friction (organizing groups, traveling etc), but as they made things more convenient over the years, many people found that the game actually began to lose something important. The response culminated in a very successful re-release of the original, inconvenient, game after 15 years.
I think "convenience" is correlated to the actual thing you're gesturing towards, but isn't the actual variable that matters most. "grocery stores being open until midnight" is certainly very convenient, but doesn't seem to remove anything important (except perhaps for late shift grocery store workers). On the other hand, buying your food from a grocery store (versus having to hunt it down and kill it) is certainly more "convenient", but "convenience" isn't the most important dimension where hunting differs from grocery store shopping.
Comfort is also correlated to it, but I don't think it's exactly it either. A/C is very comfortable, and certainly there are psychological and physiological downsides to it. But I don't think there's any major rewarding experiences which A/C makes impossible or unthinkable. Maybe the taste of a cool glass of water after working all day in the hot sun? Some amount of resilience to high heat which makes traveling in hot places slightly more enjoyable? Experiencing the changing seasons more directly and consistently than just seeing a changing set of colors out your window? None of these are exactly trivial, but it doesn't seem like "optimizing for comfort removes all the color from life" is exactly right either.
Maybe it's just that suffering just for suffering's sake doesn't do anything. If you were in the universe where all houses are magically air conditioned 24/7 and offered to build a machine to make them uncomfortably hot for 4 months a year and uncomfortably cold for another 4 months a year, selling on the idea that, you know, variety is the spice of life, a little constant hardship toughens you up, I don't think anybody would buy that on its own.
But clearly people DO seem to go kind of crazy without pressure and challenges, whether you frame it as "convenience" or "comfort" or "eustress deficiency" or whatever. There's an entire category of hobbies and interests that are entirely based around doing uncomfortable or dangerous or stressful things (thrill-seeking). And even things like weightlifting, marathons, saunas, physically stressful things are often pleasurable and seem to obviously build character and resilience outside of just the act of lifting heavy things until it hurts too much to continue. I think weightlifting is a good analogy; hardly anyone would lift weights if there was no extrinsic reward at the end of it (e.g. health, vanity, bragging rights). The important thing isn't the inconvenience and uncomfortableness of lifting weights, it's something else.
Maybe "responsibility"? "self-actualization"? I think that's maybe closer to it.
I certainly don't have all of the answers here, but I do think the somewhat ineffable nature of this concept contributes to how at a business or societal scale we wind up optimizing for the wrong things–it's hard to describe, multi-factorial, hard to measure, so instead we optimize for things that deliver obvious measurable improvements. That line of thinking is how you wind up bulldozing a city center to run a highway through it: travel times fall 80%! The negative side effects are harder to measure.
The AC thing interests me as a topic–purely my opinion, but I do think that living in a very narrow temperature range changes your relationship with the outside world, and there's all sorts of good stuff to be done outside that's much harder to get motivated to do if the delta with what you're used to is too big.
As an anecdote: I mostly disliked hot weather in the past, but years ago when I got hooked on running, I found that I disliked the treadmill more than the heat, so I ran outside through a muggy NYC summer. It was miserable to get started but got a bit easier every year, and over time I've noticed, from the digital thermometer on my desk, that the temperature where I have to stop working and turn the AC on has slowly crept upwards. My running club puts on a 5k summer race series–if you'd asked me 10 years ago whether I'd want to run up a hill in the swampy Brooklyn heat every other Wednesday, I would have laughed out loud at the absurdity of the idea–but today it is genuinely something I love, and has been a highlight of my year for several years now.
All that to say, your point about suffering for suffering's sake stands: I cannot sleep without AC above a certain temperature/humidity, and I don't see any reason to force myself to suffer through restless sweaty nights. On the flip-side, though... I have never had more visceral, euphoric appreciation for the comforts of modern life than after a cold and drizzly backpacking trip where we spent the entire time damp and never really, fully warmed up for multiple days. 20-something years later I have the most vivid memory of getting in a hot shower when we got home.
vertnerd · · focus · HN ↗
As an introvert, I absolutely loathed these gatherings and was frustrated by how powerless I was in avoiding them.
Recently, I have been reading over my mother's old letters she wrote to her parents at that time, in which she described the effort and social anxiety that went with this tradition. It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold. Someone invites you over, then that goes into an unspoken balance sheet, and you are required to reciprocate. She often spoke of "owing" dinner to people. I don't think she enjoyed it at all, though there were a few couples I can remember who were good friends of theirs, and those meetups were always a pleasure to listen in on. The rest were simply a drag.
I should note that their life in the 70s (in a middle-class college town) was not some idyllic paradise without the Internet, either. Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu, and days were spent running dreary errands to shop for boring things that we now can get with a click. The rotary-dial telephone that hung in the kitchen was the heartbeat of the house, since replaced by Facebook and smartphones. My parents were always busy and exhausted.
palmotea · · focus · HN ↗
It's worth noting that not everything that's good for you is enjoyable, especially in the moment.
Avoiding everything that's a "drag" means staying alone, passively consuming easy media, not exercising, eating hyper-palatble junk food, getting obese and probably depressed, etc.
> I should note that their life in the 70s (in a middle-class college town) was not some idyllic paradise without the Internet, either. Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu, and days were spent running dreary errands to shop for boring things that we now can get with a click. The rotary-dial telephone that hung in the kitchen was the heartbeat of the house, since replaced by Facebook and smartphones.
While I agree that those cloying clickbait articles/videos idealizing random pre-smartphone teen photos and videos are obnoxious (as someone who grew up in that era). I think the modern emphasis on mindlessly reducing "friction" is going to prove ultimately unwise, though probably uncorrected as generational turnover causes people to forget what was lost, and certain degradation gets redefined as "normal" and accepted.
> My parents were always busy and exhausted.
So are modern parents, and all indications are they are more exhausted.
macNchz · · focus · HN ↗
An accessible intro is Michael Easter's book The Comfort Crisis, which, while a little pop-sciencey, explores the idea that making our lives more and more comfortable (across various axes) creates a feedback cycle that shrinks our comfort zones, making some of the more rewarding (but potentially challenging/uncomfortable) things in life seem unthinkable.
For me this was a bit of a "once you've seen it you can't unsee it" kind of thing. Letting convenience be your primary metric for success often produces totally unsatisfying results, anywhere from how you build cities to the way you eat a meal.
The arc of the original World of Warcraft (broader social impacts aside) is an interesting microcosm to explore: players continually asked for convenience features that would simplify the most tedious aspects of the game and reduce social friction (organizing groups, traveling etc), but as they made things more convenient over the years, many people found that the game actually began to lose something important. The response culminated in a very successful re-release of the original, inconvenient, game after 15 years.
harpersealtako · · focus · HN ↗
Comfort is also correlated to it, but I don't think it's exactly it either. A/C is very comfortable, and certainly there are psychological and physiological downsides to it. But I don't think there's any major rewarding experiences which A/C makes impossible or unthinkable. Maybe the taste of a cool glass of water after working all day in the hot sun? Some amount of resilience to high heat which makes traveling in hot places slightly more enjoyable? Experiencing the changing seasons more directly and consistently than just seeing a changing set of colors out your window? None of these are exactly trivial, but it doesn't seem like "optimizing for comfort removes all the color from life" is exactly right either.
Maybe it's just that suffering just for suffering's sake doesn't do anything. If you were in the universe where all houses are magically air conditioned 24/7 and offered to build a machine to make them uncomfortably hot for 4 months a year and uncomfortably cold for another 4 months a year, selling on the idea that, you know, variety is the spice of life, a little constant hardship toughens you up, I don't think anybody would buy that on its own.
But clearly people DO seem to go kind of crazy without pressure and challenges, whether you frame it as "convenience" or "comfort" or "eustress deficiency" or whatever. There's an entire category of hobbies and interests that are entirely based around doing uncomfortable or dangerous or stressful things (thrill-seeking). And even things like weightlifting, marathons, saunas, physically stressful things are often pleasurable and seem to obviously build character and resilience outside of just the act of lifting heavy things until it hurts too much to continue. I think weightlifting is a good analogy; hardly anyone would lift weights if there was no extrinsic reward at the end of it (e.g. health, vanity, bragging rights). The important thing isn't the inconvenience and uncomfortableness of lifting weights, it's something else.
Maybe "responsibility"? "self-actualization"? I think that's maybe closer to it.
macNchz · · focus · HN ↗
The AC thing interests me as a topic–purely my opinion, but I do think that living in a very narrow temperature range changes your relationship with the outside world, and there's all sorts of good stuff to be done outside that's much harder to get motivated to do if the delta with what you're used to is too big.
As an anecdote: I mostly disliked hot weather in the past, but years ago when I got hooked on running, I found that I disliked the treadmill more than the heat, so I ran outside through a muggy NYC summer. It was miserable to get started but got a bit easier every year, and over time I've noticed, from the digital thermometer on my desk, that the temperature where I have to stop working and turn the AC on has slowly crept upwards. My running club puts on a 5k summer race series–if you'd asked me 10 years ago whether I'd want to run up a hill in the swampy Brooklyn heat every other Wednesday, I would have laughed out loud at the absurdity of the idea–but today it is genuinely something I love, and has been a highlight of my year for several years now.
All that to say, your point about suffering for suffering's sake stands: I cannot sleep without AC above a certain temperature/humidity, and I don't see any reason to force myself to suffer through restless sweaty nights. On the flip-side, though... I have never had more visceral, euphoric appreciation for the comforts of modern life than after a cold and drizzly backpacking trip where we spent the entire time damp and never really, fully warmed up for multiple days. 20-something years later I have the most vivid memory of getting in a hot shower when we got home.
hunter-gatherer · · focus · HN ↗
This just dropped the other day and is pretty relevant to the discussion. You might find it interesting.