When we are no longer restricted by resource limits as a society, everything quickly becomes an addiction. Food, alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine, sex, drugs, gambling, shopping, TV, video games, social media. I'm sure people a lot more qualified than me will be able to talk about it in scientific terms, but I feel like a certain category of species (maybe all of them?) simply never ran into limiting excesses as part of their evolution. There are animals that will literally eat themselves to death if given the chance.
I have some similar thoughts about this. Take Internet media streaming: am I happier being able to watch any of 10,000 things with no effort, rather than having maybe a couple dozen at hand and the ability, with some time and effort, to acquire one or two more if I really want them enough? Or is the ability to select exactly a certain thing to watch with low effort just scratching an itch that only exists because I can do that, and I'd be exactly as happy watching whatever caught my eye on the public library movie shelf earlier that week? I suspect, for most people, it's the latter. Am I happier with Spotify or whatever, than I would be with a smallish but well-used record collection that I add another entry to only a couple times a year? I suspect not.
Am I better off with 2-day shipping and the easy ability to read the opinions of enthusiasts and experts for any product I have a small interest in, then order it immediately? Does the change in what I buy actually pay off given the extra time-cost of that research, the extra brain-clutter of knowing things about products I'd probably never have though much about otherwise, and the extra money I'm sure I'm spending because of those factors? I kinda doubt it, but it's so damn hard to resist finding out what's the best way to do [thing] or the best product for the best way to do [thing] when you can do that, even if the result is that your life-satisfaction meter doesn't budge versus some hypothetical alternate universe in which, for anything you're not an actual enthusiast about, you just buy whatever looks good out of the selection at a local non-specialty store.
[EDIT] and yes I'm aware I'm dangerously close to realizing that almost everything "good" in life is just removing an irritation that only exists in the first place because of how life is and is structured, and how I'm choosing to respond to life and its typical structure, and then abandoning the material world to become a Buddhist monk or something.
Two of my favourite TED Talks are Barry Schwartz and the Paradox of Choice, where he says "in the past, you went to the store and there was one jar of peanut butter or one pair of jeans, and you bought them. If they weren't good, well, you had no choice. You demand choice. Now you go to the store and there's 30 jars of peanut butter or pairs of jeans - chunky, smooth, sweet, plain, large, small, organic, popular brand, niche brand, imported brand, etc. Now whatever you choose, you will have doubts, and if it isn't good, well there were so many choices it must be your fault, so you feel bad".
And Dan Gilbert on Happiness, demonstrating with studies that no, you are not happier with more choice, you are objectively, measurably, unquestionably, happier with no choice. 10,000 films that you can stop watching and change for another as soon as you are unhappy -> unhappiness. 1 film you have to watch all the way through and have no other -> you'll grow to like it. You become happier with things you're stuck with, and that even applies to people who are disabled, missed out on fortunes, got imprisoned for crimes they did commit, and for crimes they didn't commit, as well as for everyday people who bought something they can't return vs something they can return.
Via PJ Eby, you care about what you care for. People have it the other way round - "I'm not maintaining my car, but if I had a Lambo then I would care about my car". Noooo, if you start cleaning and maintaining your car, then you will care about your car because you're investing time and effort into it.
There was a book about this called the Paradox of Choice. Basically, that we want choices but they make us less happy.
There's a related phenomenon, I don't know a name for it, where given a choice between convenience and happiness people will almost always choose convenience, generally without even realizing they've made a choice. Our genes have a deep, deep preference for minimizing energy expenditure.
This happens with video games too. Players hate restrictions, but if they were removed, would get board and stop.
For a recent example, look at Valheim. They explicitly block you from using portals to move metal ore, which forces you to use a cart or a boat to move it. Suddenly I was a highway engineer for a few hours and pay more attention to harbour than before and had a blast.
Yet there are mods which remove this restriction, which removes this experience. Why build a highway if I can just drop a portal down?
I occasionally play Minecraft with my young son. I feel that eventual boredom arrives in creative mode. With no constraints, the charm can disappear.
I think constraints generally in a creative process (design, for example) are almost necessary. Graphic designers get it in print budgets, colour selections, quality of photographs, etc.
I remember once having to pitch to build a web site. The client stated they literally had no budget limitation. I honestly didn't know what to do, having spent my entire career fitting a solution to a budget!
Yeah, the universality and unoriginality of the observation isn't lost on me, but I do think there's some "the medium is the message" stuff going on with the sheer quantity and low-friction to selection of media and other options available to us now, with the Web and ubiquitous always-online computing devices turning into an outright engine for itch-generation and itch-scratching-of-same-itch. And that's before you factor in adversarial actors (marketers and such).
Packages show up on the lawn it is astonishing how they appear.
They are astonishing surprises.
It’s what I ordered the cat food the espresso machine the two new tables.
Ordering things and how they appear basically I am a small-scale sorcerer.
On the road I press the button and the music goes.
Air conditioning gas pedal restaurant take-out etc.
It is my will being perpetually sated.
Pretend we are writing a fable in which a sorcerer always gets what he wants.
Consider what happens to a soul which always gets what it wants.
> "Consider what happens to a soul which always gets what it wants."
In a popular Alan Watts talk he imagines a dreamer:
"let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be."
And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today."
I personally love choice. But maybe for people like you, a service that curates some of the top choices and offers that as limited pool could be a useful.
It starts with the famous experiments where rats would prefer drugs to food and water but goes on to further study that lead to not so bleak conclusions.
My mother worked in a alcohol rehab center. People who drank up to 12L of wine a day (I still wonder how that works) would turn to window cleaning liquid on withdrawal.
She said no-one ever quit the alcohol addiction by choice, all of them were brought here by court, generally after killing people in an accident.
I sure hope people can quit alcohol addiction by choice. But you do need to rebuild all the friendships that only existed around drinking routines. I for one have quit a coworking space that revolved too much around beer. They were good business contacts and that is why it’s hard to walk away.
I'm suspicious of bold claims like that from people observing a selected subset of a population. An alcohol rehab center, particular the type that accepts people sentenced there by a court, is likely to get few to no voluntary patients. Therefore, somebody working there will only see the people who have a serious enough alcohol problem to get in enough alcohol-related legal trouble to get sentenced to go to rehab.
I've known some people who would probably qualify as functional alcoholics, and none of them have ever got into legal trouble for it. IME, you generally have to be a wildly out of control drunk to get into legal trouble from it regularly.
I've also known plenty of people who stopped or cut back alcohol consumption voluntarily, with no help from any organized programs. It's quite doable for many people, once you decide that you genuinely want to stop, though I acknowledge that some people genuinely can't. You may infact have to change friendships and routines if some of the old ones are too conductive to binge drinking, but do what you gotta do.
