Ordinary Abundance

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

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. For the last month I’ve been living in a camper van, working and traveling, which I’m really lucky to be able to do by choice. It’s lonely to be sure, but I also feel mentally far more resilient than I have in ages, and I’m trying to figure out why. Being in nature is good for us, so that’s probably part of it, as is the constant practice of being self-reliant. Another theory is friction. I can’t just roll out of bed to the couch, and back. I don’t have a fixed place to shower, so I swim in a river most days, and usually it’s freezing. Camping alone was terrifying at first, but objectively not that dangerous and not worth worrying about. All these little moments are a chance to exercise that mental muscle to do uncomfortable things. Modern life is devoid of this friction. I could try to take a cold shower every day, but a not-cold one is just a turn of the wrist away. I could try to make myself go outside a bit every day, but I don’t need to. This isn’t a new observation, but I can’t believe how stark the contrast is. I’m getting stuff done that I’ve been procrastinating on for years.

The same on a smaller scale happened with modern consumer computing. We like to complain but * have OLED screens and dark modes which are amazing after sundown, * virtually everything works on Linux, especially all effectively mandatory/government services (at least here in Poland), * and with some hardware selection Linux works everywhere, * batteries last ages and everything can be charged via USB-C, * smartphone cameras now finally exceed my own vision, have amazing zoom and take great nighttime photos (although not of moving stuff yet), * the ecosystem allows to magically summon a car, * can have an e2e encrypted multimodal (video, photos, documents, text) conversation with virtually everyone we know, wherever they are in the world, live or asynchronously, * not to mention LLMs just doing things for you like a tireless assistant. All of these were a dream when I first set up a home server in 2004. Some like OLED were a dream I didn't even know I had, the LCD glow just annoyed me.

To put a name on what a lot of folks in this thread are describing (I didn't see the term mentioned in the article): Negative Visualization [1]. Basically imagining living life without a given luxury (hot water, infinite music on tap, functioning eyesight, etc), really internalizing that feeling, and then practicing gratitude for the fact that you do indeed have that thing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_visualization

This is an interesting premise, and I would like to read the article, but the weird scrolling makes that almost impossible; the pictures overlay the text to such an extent that I can only read a couple of lines at a time. I wish there were some browser feature that would force sites to use normal scrolling.