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On the other hand, after working for 8 hours a day, is it really reasonable to expect people to be enthusiastic about pursuing their own intrinsic questions about how things work and how they could make or improve something? Just because they don't have to spend a couple of hours on rote labor like doing their laundry by hand and cooking?

I want the answer to be yes, but it's like my favorite quote says, "as soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up."

A better question might be why we're okay with this state of people being largely anesthetized once they get home. But the same thing has been said about television and movies, and pulp fiction before them; maybe the problems are built-in and we just don't have it in us to meaningfully improve.

Sorry for being off topic here, but I just wanted to express my admiration for such a great use of a Terry Pratchett quote. Vimes is my favorite Discworld character and I'm delighted to see his wisdom used so well in a discussion.

Aw, thanks - he's definitely one of my favorite authors.

I think that when you're deeply cynical about people and are never given any reasons to think otherwise, it's easy to start acting like a jerk and generally lose sight of the fact that other people still share the same foibles and flaws and fears and insecurities as yourself.

Terry Pratchett writes the sort of books which remind you that even though you might completely despair of them, there is still something in everyone that is inherently worthy of compassion.

Too bad that human compassion and judgement tend to be the first casualties of all this convenience, huh?

My contrarian impulse leads me to ask whether for a small portion of people, having a short period of time in which they wash clothes by hand, and afterwards go back to the more convenient and efficient way of doing it might have some benefit by resetting something.

But I'm guessing the answer is "probably not, and if so, probably for exceedingly few people. If something like that was a good idea, washing clothes probably wouldn't be the ideal form of it."

A sweet spot might be things which are 'harder' but have other advantages such as cost/health. Commuting by bike, instead of car is one example, though not possible for all.

Clothes washing machines do seem to be one of the unmitigated "goods". Machines use less water, less energy, are gentler on clothes. Reportedly, manual clothes washing is also very hard on the body- physically laborious combined with scalding water and caustic chemicals. There was some article here on HN a little while ago in which the authors were surprised that women of decades past voted the clothes washing machine as the single greatest invention & engine of their emancipation, instead of planes or semiconductors or medicine or-

By all means though, gardening, cooking food, human-powered travel, repairing & making things of all kinds, etc I do believe can have great value.

The sewing machine was also a great emancipator of women.

Yes, now thinking about it I think they had been asked about inventions of the 1900's.

I don't think machine washes are gentler on clothes. Maybe gentler than the traditional whack-against-a-river-rock technique, but certainly hand-washing is generally less physically abusive than a machine wash, in my experience.

Americans still inexplicably prefer the top-loading washing machine, rather than the front-loading type that dominates the market in nearly every other developed country. The agitator in a top-loader makes mincemeat out of delicate items, versus the much more gentle lift-and-drop action of a front-loader.

Should we also all eat spoiled food to reset our appreciation of the refrigerator?

More on point would be owning a cellar, or not eating food that requires refrigeration.

Reduction of traditional food preservation methods that didn't require refrigeration has been a very large health benefit.

Traditionally, during the many "out of season" months a large part of your diet would involve pickled, cured, salted, smoked, etc products, in quantities much larger than nowadays. These preservation methods are quite carcinogenic - over last hundred or so years we've achieved something like 80% reduction in stomach and colon cancer simply by mass use of refrigeration causing people to eat less of those highly processed foods than they did. Those types of cancer used to be very "popular", but the lifestyle change caused by refrigeration has made them quite rare - and intentionally returning to traditional methods of food preservation is likely to be bad for your health (in the long run) and should be done with deliberation.

Given that people are urbanizing, urban densities are increasing, family units are shrinking and people love convenience, I believe the end-game is people living in apartments without kitchens and eating out or eating takeaway food most of the time. This would save a lot of waste as well as carbon waste through supermarket shopping trips. In the future, a kitchen will be seen as a luxury... after all, who has time to shop, cook and clean?

Full disclosure: founder of Infinite Food - http://infinite-food.com/ :)

There were quite a few affluent people who did not do science or anything like that. And quite a few who did science still had time to socialize and relax. Most employed people now, especially those with families, especially Americans, do not have all that time to do hobbies that require effort.

They are tired and stressed when they come home and need something easy to unwind. I am not even sure why fishing or birdwatching would be superior to watching a movie on TV.

They are tired and stressed when they come home and need something easy to unwind. I am not even sure why fishing or birdwatching would be superior to watching a movie on TV.

I've seen quite a few studies that indicate exposure to nature is beneficial in reducing stress. So is physical exercise, even non-strenuous, which you'll get more of by fishing or birdwatching than by sitting on the couch. Maybe these studies are just more non-replicable junk; I don't have time to do a deep dive to check right now. They do line up with my personal experiences and anecdotal observations of others. (Which means I should probably be extra-skeptical, since it's easiest to fool yourself when a result aligns with your prior intuitions.) But that's how I developed my list of examples, with a lot of outdoor activities and activities that will use different parts of your body.

>There is no shortage of hard problems left to solve

Yes, and there never will be. The problem of life is which one to choose. This problem is getting harder in the sense that there's more choice now. (In the old days if peasants didn't labour as their fellows did then they mostly died. Simple choice.) But even though we have choices now this doesn't imply it's possible to live a life of distraction and convenience. The illusion that this is possible leads to nihilism, despair and mental disorder. Which are themselves hard problems.

I only mildly agree; because it is indeed possible to live a life of distraction and convenience. This is easily provable by by observing that there are people doing this already.

In my opinion most of the nihilism and despair stems from the fact that distraction and convenience, for all their superficial attractiveness, are the happiness equivalent of a Big Mac. It's a quick fix, but it does not last...

>it does not last...

Exactly. It ends with addiction, bad health, senility, crippling alimony or something else nasty. Thus hard problems are inevitable. Better to choose something meaningful ASAP.

> we only arrange what will be done, which is a flimsy basis for a life.

Isn't this what managers do? And large company execs? The bigger the team you lead, the less you do and the more you arrange others to do.

So perhaps instead of saying our lives are becoming flimsy, we could say we're all turning into managers.

I'm not going to get upvotes for that, but some of humanity's most profound achievements happened during times of slavery and feudalism. At times even majority of population labored so that the privileged few could pursue philosophy, science, architecture and art. Ancient Greece, Rome, medieval cathedrals, sculptures and paintings. Great wall of China. Oppressive regimes can throw incredible numbers of people at the problem (although recent research suggests the pyramids of Egypt were built by paid workers).

My point is that substantial achievements happen even when the privileged people are largely lazy, spoiled and delegate tasks. It's different kind of achievements than in a more egalitarian society (like a republic), perhaps scientific progress is the biggest casualty.

Majority of history was feudalism. So, I guess of course?

Through, medieval sculptures and paintings are quite odd choice of profound achievement. They are just sculptures and paintings and buildings, really. There is nothing profound or moving about them.

We are generating a lot of art, philosophy and what not right now, more then they ever did. Same for science, it is moving much faster now then it moved under feudalism or slavery.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

When cars first appeared, there were calls to "clean up our cities" by using cars instead of horses.

Horses also regularly killed people.

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

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.

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.

As I recall, horses killed people at much higher rates than cars.

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.

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.

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.

Good comment. I think it's important that we examine our reliance on conveniences but people have been warning us about life becoming too easy since the ancient Greeks.

> there are plenty of rewarding activities that are orthogonal to convenience technologies

The gulf of understanding that many tend to forget or perhaps deliberately dismiss: The vast majority of real people out there would understand nothing or very little of the quoted sentence.

Only because of the word choice; I think you could phrase this, with a bit longer sentences, to something most people can understand.