You can enjoy eating, meal preparation, and the like and _also_ recognize how very, very, very money, time, and resource consuming it all is. If you could replace a typical home-cooked meal which cost $3->5 in materials and at _least_ half an hour in personal labor with a pill that costs $0.03->0.05 and can be produced in the thousands per hour, that's a significant win. And if you can build those pills from the bypr…
> [...] very money, time, and resource consuming it all is. So where do you want to spend that money, time, and resources instead?
On this topic, I find this article fascinating: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23758087 But life in New Jersey was not working out for Yarima. It wasn't the weather, food or modern technology but the absence of close human relations. The Yanomami day begins and ends in the shapono, open to relatives, friends, neighbours and enemies. But Yarima's day in the US began and ended in a closed box, cut off from society.
There's a related documentary of the immense damage brought by paleontologists to those tribes on netflix. I thought about her too reading the comment.
How do people who study dinosaur fossils damage tribes?
Historically, this could be the underlying reason for the existence of various professions: adjutant, batman, valet, secretary, personal assitant - perhaps the main function they provided was just providing a presence?
Perhaps a function but I don’t think I would go so far as to say primary. They also lugged their stuff around and handled all of the boring parts of life, like opening doors, writing letters and so on, that they didn’t want to deal with.
I.e. all the things technology is outsourcing back to us.
There was a thread on Reddit recently asking what leisure time was like for people before radio, TV, and the Internet. Someone mentioned a memoir they'd read from the early 1900s and the part that stuck with them was how social everyone was. After work, people would go to friends houses, putter around town and catch up with neighbors, visit shops where they knew everyone, etc. I can't but think that so many of the ma…
One thing I like about my apartment complex is we have a hot tub outside. The weather is almost always nice here, so it’s a nice place to be, so I go out most nights, and often hang out with regulars. Even though it’s super nice (basically resort-quality), there’s probably only a half dozen regulars, while there’s hundreds (200?) apartment units here.
This is the good thing about shared facilities like this: the cost per-unit is really low because there's so many units to share the cost of just a few things like this (or an exercise room, a game room, etc.), and so much space is saved by sharing these things among hundreds of units. But most residents don't use them most of the time, so for the occasional users, they have it available for the 2x a year they want it, and the regular users don't usually feel crowded.
There's a related documentary of the immense damage brought by paleontologists to those tribes on netflix. I thought about her too reading the comment.
How do people who study dinosaur fossils damage tribes?
You're right, it was late, I meant anthropologists.
I mean look at the success of Stardew Valley, a game whose entire premise is that you move to a small rural town to start a farm and forge relationships with the locals. Its a well designed game to be sure but I really think some of the popularity stems from scratching that itch of communal living that so many folks feel they lack.
Been thinking about it a bit. Isn't the key thing about those interactions that you're all at work ? You're tending your cows, Robin is running a carpentry business, that couple is running a shop, etc. (I forgot the names of everyone, sorry; been years since I binged on SDV). Closest analogue to this in modern life is... your co-workers in the office. That chat you have with Maru on the way to sell your wheat in the…
Definitely something to that, although I think a huge part of the appeal of Stardew is that there's no actual pressure to do anything. It's relaxing because your engagement with anything like work is entirely voluntary, you can't really fail in any meaningful sense no matter what you do.
As someone with mild social anxiety, doing this results in greater distraction thinking about it than any gain from the actual process.
As someone who also has social anxiety, I suspect that it would be very difficult for us at first but if we pushed through that, it would not just help us be more productive, but also help with our social anxiety.
Help with the social anxiety, you're probably right about that.
The productivity thing may vary based on the individual.
If there's stuff going on around me, I can't focus. I want to be in a quiet place alone (pandemic has been easy street for me, sometimes I don't leave my apartment for weeks on end).
I found that am super productive when travel by air, just sitting and working at the gate or mid flight. Now I wonder if that's the effect of all the people around.
> Now I wonder if that's the effect of all the people around.
I used to study at the student center on campus (Rutgers New Brunswick) for this reason. I tried the library a few times, but it felt off to me for some reason; too quiet, perhaps.
The trick is to have a living room and a regular habit of hosting something like “Monday night in” where people come over and just hang out.
It can’t be scheduled. The crux of the whole thing is people can drop by at anytime and more importantly you have to genuinely like it. Can’t treat people dropping over as some sort of event.
I think a standing day is fine. It just has to be low pressure and loose plans.