The Hidden Cost of Optimizing Everything

Modern life is built to make things easier, faster, and more efficient. But what if, in smoothing away life’s everyday frictions, we’ve also lost something essential? This week on “Galaxy Brain,” Charlie Warzel talks with The Atlantic’s Ian Bogost about his new book, “The Small Stuff,” and why the tiny rituals, sensory pleasures, and routine interactions we tend to overlook may be the very things that make us feel connected—to one another, to the world around us, and to ourselves. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:19Speaker 01

  From Rethink, the creative marketing studio at The Atlantic and Walmart, On Solid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Moderesi-Turani, and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during, and after a storm. Listen to On Solid Ground wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  So think about this in like really simple terms. You're cooking dinner. Your goal is to produce a dinner, but the experience of cooking, of hearing the scisseling onions in the pan, or of chopping up the vegetables, or of opening and closing the refrigerator and feeling the gasket as you do so, all of that stuff, which is really gratifying, that's the experience of cooking. And it doesn't make sense to think about it in terms of goals and outcomes that you can optimize.

• 1:16Charlie Warzel?

  I'm Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today, we're going to sweat the small stuff. There's this line from the author Kurt Vonnegut that I love. It's from a 1995 interview in Inc. magazine, where Vonnegut recounts, just as personal computing is really taking off, his love for doing things in a more analog way. There's this one trip to the post office that he talks about, heading to the newsstand, waiting in line, making small talk with the shopkeeper, the satisfaction of sealing the envelope and bringing it to the woman he has a crush on behind the counter. He ends the anecdote with the following: "I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home, and I've had a hell of a good time.

• 1:59Charlie Warzel?

  And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different." That quote has been banging around in my head over the last few years as the world continues To embrace the kind of technological progress that sands down the edges of our lives and keeps our faces in our screens. There's Amazon, DoorDash, parking lot pickup, which can be genuine god sense. But it's a convenience that also comes with a trade off of not having to live in the world among other people in the same way that we used to. In terms of farting around, our devices offer endless engrossing distraction from the physical world. In part, our technologies have created this world where everything can be quantified. This has birthed this optimization culture and a broader obsession with metrics and efficiency.

• 2:43Charlie Warzel?

  My guest today argues that, well, not all of this is bad. It can come at a genuine cost. Many people have, without really deciding on it, become more disconnected from a sense of place, from a sense of self, and from the tiny visceral sensory experiences of being present in the world, just like Vonnegut describes. Ian Bogost is my colleague here at The Atlantic, where he writes about technology. He's an author, professor and administrator at Washington University in St. Louis, and a game designer. But he's also one of the keenest observers I've ever met, not just of how technology changes us, but of all those little quirks that make up our lives. And that, coincidentally, is what his new book, The Small Stuff, is about. In it, Ian makes the case that some of our societal obsessions,

• 3:26Charlie Warzel?

  self optimization, career satisfaction, this constant fixation on whether we are adequately happy or not, those are all aimed at the big stuff. But our lives, they're actually dominated by the small stuff, the Vonnegut-style farting around that gives texture to our days. This, he argues, is good news because the small stuff is abundant and it's actually much easier to notice, to control. And doing so can bring us a sense of genuine gratification, the kind that so many of our technologies just automate away. Now, you may be thinking that this all sounds just a bit nostalgic, a couple of guys lamenting about the good old days. Ian's argument in The Small Stuff isn't some screed against technology. It is, however, in a moment where AI is rapidly automating the world,

• 4:10Charlie Warzel?

  a book about cultivating and strengthening the qualities that make us different than the machines, that bring us joy, that make us human. And so Ian joins me now to talk about it all.

• 4:26Charlie Warzel?

  Ian, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, Charlie.

• 4:30Charlie Warzel?

  So we're here to talk about the small stuff. You have a book that is all about the small stuff. Can you tell me broadly, what is the thesis here of paying attention to the small stuff?

• 4:44Speaker 02

  So the idea is that we have become disconnected from our sensory lives. That's sort of the thesis of the book. And this happened slowly, over years and decades. It happened in part because of technology, but not entirely because of technology. And we kind of didn't notice that that was happening. And maybe we blamed smartphones instead of a whole host of other factors. But the result is that we feel disconnected, you know? Like, decoupled from the world that we live in, from the physical world. And that connection, that connection, that sensory connection where you engage with the world with your senses, which is what I call gratification. We've lost a lot of that. We forgot about it.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  We were too busy optimizing, planning for the future, trying to make our lives more purposeful or happier, that we forgot how to be gratified. And that's what I think we should reclaim.

• 5:41Charlie Warzel?

  You alluded to some surveys, there's a lot of information out about this, that we're in a bit of a happiness crisis.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Happiness crisis is the way that it's always described.

• 5:51Charlie Warzel?

  Right, yes. Which is a funny thing. I imagine like a happiness factory and there's just like red alarms going off and like minion-style workers pulling levers.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Happiness machine that's no longer able to produce happiness widgets.

• 6:04Charlie Warzel?

  Exactly, which is a crisis by all accounts. Happiness, you also say, is this kind of amorphous thing. And you were just alluding to it there with gratification. But you have happiness, satisfaction and gratification as these three types of things. Can you walk me through the differences?

• 6:21Speaker 02

  So at a high level, think of happiness as your overall sense of contentment with your life, how things are going broadly speaking. And it's usually related to big stuff, to your connection to your family, or your spouse, or your kids, your sense of satisfaction at work, and whether you feel purpose at work, whether you're connected to your community, whether your life means something and is worthwhile. It's really big stuff. It's also very hard to define. I'm not sure that anyone really knows what happiness is, despite millennia of attempts to define it. And it's usually kind of like

• 7:01Speaker 02

  retrospective, that you sort of look back at happiness, or you plan forward for it, like, how can I be happier? Oh, I need a different job, I need a different wife, whatever it is. So that's happiness. Satisfaction is a little simpler. It's more like pride in accomplishment. So the satisfaction test is like, you put your hands on your hips, and you look at something you've done, and you think, oh, yeah, that was a good podcast I just recorded. That's satisfaction. And satisfaction is also a big stuff kind of contentment. So you only feel satisfied when a project was big and worth doing, you know, like, you finish a big woodworking project, or you write a book, like I just did, or even you make a nice meal, and you serve it to your family, and then you feel satisfied.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Gratification is weirder. It's much smaller. It's, I describe it as the sensory enchantment of everyday life. It's little, tiny connections to the world. So the sound of my voice in your ears right now, or the feeling of a warm mug as you hold it in the morning, full of coffee, or the texture of the shirt on my body when I touch it, the sound of leaves or twigs crunching under my feet when I walk, the feeling of the sun on my skin in the summer. Those are sensory encounters. And gratification is just the sort of connection,

• 8:25Speaker 02

  the sense of connectivity to the physical world that they deliver, that those encounters deliver. Unlike happiness and unlike satisfaction, it happens right away. You either take it or it's gone forever because it's instantaneous. It's in the moment. And they're usually tiny, like small scale, because your senses are always receiving information from the world. It's also, there's a huge surplus of gratification, unlike happiness or satisfaction. You feel like there's only a limited amount of it. I better make the right choice. What if I move to the wrong city? What if I work on the wrong project? I'll miss out. But this idea of like just being in the world every moment, I think we've massively underestimated the power of that.

• 9:05Charlie Warzel?

  You argue that gratification, and particularly instant gratification, get a very bad rap societally, culturally. Why do you think that is and why do you disagree with that?

• 9:15Speaker 02

  I trace this to a series of behavioral science experiments that began in the late 1960s. A Stanford psychologist named Walter Mishel and some of his colleagues and then successors began running a series of experiments on young children. And they became known as the marshmallow test experiments. And what they would do is they would take little kids from the Stanford preschool and they'd put them in a room and they'd have a researcher go in and offer them a small treat, usually a marshmallow, but sometimes it was a pretzel or something else, and tell them you can have this treat now, or if you wait, then you can have two of them, or you can have a bigger one. They used this experiment as a way to determine whether individuals with more self-control

• 9:58Speaker 02

  or what they perceived to be more self-controlled be more successful in their lives. But even despite what the studies said about any of the individuals who participated, they introduced this idea that gratification is bad and that instant gratification is indulgence, that it's kind of like sin, and that it's associated with addiction-like behaviors. Maybe not addiction writ large, but addiction-like behaviors. So, you know, eating too much, sex, gambling, alcohol, even the marshmallow itself, right? Which is a treat. You shouldn't have too many treats, should you, right? Like, why don't you wait and you can eat something better later? So that whole idea, I think, turned gratification into this bad word.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  And instead of focusing on the moment and what would be pleasurable in the moment, you should always delay, you should always defer, you should always wait till later, something better is likely to come along if you withhold that indulgence in order to invest that effort, that time, what have you, in future outcomes. So I think that's like completely wrong.

• 11:09Charlie Warzel?

  Well, so we can get into why it is, but the immediate, like, as I'm listening to you talk about all of this, the immediate ideological analog here is optimization culture, right?

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:20Charlie Warzel?

  That, as you write, kind of splits the world into this binary of productive and good versus dangerous and indulgent, like you said, almost vice-esque. Where does optimization culture fit into the gratification argument?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  The forces that have disconnected us from everyday life, I have this name, dematerialization, for all of those different forces, technology, bureaucracy, efficiency, even economic factors, they have been leaning toward optimization and efficiency for years and years and years now. And so we've been sort of slowly led to believe, so much that we don't even realize we're believing it, that all that matters are outcomes, especially measurable outcomes. And so anything that isn't focused on a future goal feels like it's not worth doing or that it's less worth doing than something else. And like, one way to think about the gratification problem is in terms of the difference between

• 12:24Speaker 02

  goals or outcomes and experiences. Because the experiences are different from the outcomes that they might produce. So think about this in like really simple terms. You're cooking dinner. Your goal is to produce a dinner, right? And maybe you want to do it at a certain cost, or it has to taste a certain way, or you have to feed a certain number of people, or it has to be ready at a certain time, and there's all sorts of factors that go into it. And you hope it tastes good, you hope people enjoy it and they praise you, all that kind of stuff. But the experience of cooking, of hearing the sizzling onions in the pan, or of chopping up the vegetables, or of opening and closing the refrigerator and filling the gasket as you do so, all of that stuff, which is really gratifying, that's the experience of cooking.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  And it doesn't make sense to think about it in terms of goals and outcomes that you can optimize. What would it mean to optimize the sound of onions sizzling? That you should continuously do it? No, that doesn't make any sense. It's just a part of the experience. And so, like, because we're so focused on goals, and so singularly focused on goals and outcomes, optimization culture, efficiency culture plugs right in to that idea, which is also kind of the premise of happiness thinking. You know, happiness is about future outcomes, it's about doing things that are worth doing, rather than things that feel good in the moment. You're supposed to set aside those things in order that you can produce a greater sense of purpose and ultimately happiness.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  So you might think of optimization as the sort of like workhead version of happiness in a way. It's like happiness but for outcomes. And for that reason, it's related to that idea of like missing out on what's happening in the moment in order to produce supposedly better future results. It just doesn't take much thinking to realize, everybody does this all the time, right? You're like, wait a minute, like, what am I doing though? Why am I doing any of these things? What is the experience of doing them? And I think that disconnect, which all of us have all the time, is where we start feeling guilty, instead of feeling good about the moments that we're having.

• 14:23Charlie Warzel?

  And it's also just this very like puritanical way of being, right? Like, I think so much about all the influencers I see, you know, like, they're not experiencing any of the life, they're, in a way, just speedrunning it to get to the goal, right?

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Right. And then the goal only leads to another goal. One of the things that's been so confusing to me about the whole of like Silicon Valley style success culture and wealth culture, is that it never ends. And everyone I know personally, or know of, who's been immensely successful in business in the technology industry, which I think is driving a lot of that efficiency. Discourse that you're talking about. The moment they achieve massive success, financial success, you know, renown, all of that. It's just, well, what's next? What's your next play? More, there has to be more of it. They don't even like open a winery or a distillery or whatever it is, like something that's wasteful. Right? It's like, I'm gonna start up my new venture, invest in another fund, do more, more, more, more, more.

• 15:20Charlie Warzel?

  Well, this is actually happened. There was a thing that went viral the other day of Mark Zuckerberg talking about his farm that he has in Hawaii, where he's trying to become the absolute best, most efficient farmer. I want the absolute best cows possible. And he's talking about this experience of, of, you know, the macadamia trees and all, and that's what we're going to feed them. But then, oh, how do we process it so it's maximally efficient for these cows to eat? And the way he's describing it is in this efficient way where it's like, this is this guy's hobby. And yet, at the same time, it is just approached with what seems like zero joy. It's just, it's just, I have to get to the maximally efficient outcome.

• 15:58Speaker 00

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• 16:32Speaker 01

  From Rethink, the creative marketing studio at The Atlantic and Walmart, On Solid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Moderesi-Turani, and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during, and after a storm. Listen to On Solid Ground wherever you get your podcasts.

• 17:01Charlie Warzel?

  I want to talk a little bit about that, the dematerialization thing and this disconnecting people from the physical world that they inhabit. What does that look like? Like, where do you feel that most acutely?

• 17:14Speaker 02

  The example I always go to first, the one that everyone understands immediately, is you go into a public restroom at an airport or a convention center or hotel, or wherever you are, your office building, and the toilet flushes for you with a sensor and the faucet turns on, maybe, if you're lucky, with a sensor that you wave your hands under. And the soap is dispensed in a similar way. And when you need to dry your hands, you go and you wave them under another sensor. You're no longer engaging with those ordinary objects. And like, that kind of experience, which seems very unimportant, like, who, you really need to flush a toilet, especially in public? What are you telling me? But if you, if you think of those little experiences that you no longer do,

• 17:57Speaker 02

  you no longer engage in, in the same deep sensory way that you once did. And while they seem tiny and immaterial, maybe, and unimportant, and even silly to mention individually, in the aggregate, it all adds up to this sense of decoupling, of disconnection. Some of them are technologized, you know? During the pandemic, we started scanning QR codes at restaurants so that we didn't have to touch stuff. And now, like, most menus, or a large number of menus, at restaurants are just QR codes. And now you don't get to touch that kind of thing anymore. That's not a part of your life any longer. You know, so those, all of this, like, a giant pile of stuff like that, right?

• 18:37Charlie Warzel?

  Well, what's interesting, too, like, just to use the QR code one as an, as an example, is the daisy chain effect that happens with that, right? Where it's, it's not just, like, yeah, it is, it can be annoying, or, I'm used to having a menu, I like the tactile feel of the menu, there's all that. But the QR code replaces the need for someone to come to the table and say, "Hey, what do you want?", because you're ordering through the app. And then, you know, with that, you've lost that one interaction there. And then that continues to daisy chain throughout the thing.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  And after a while, you're like, "Why, I don't need that. I clearly didn't need that. It's much more efficient to do it that way. So that must have been valueless the whole time."

• 19:15Charlie Warzel?

  Right.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  But it wasn't.

• 19:16Charlie Warzel?

  And you make another argument with, with remote work that's kind of similar, that I'd like to hear more about. Personally, because I wrote a book about remote work a while back. But this idea that- The sameness of knowledge work is part of the reason why people don't feel that pull to go in the office, right? I'm clacking on a keyboard, doing the same thing there that I would be doing in my office with headphones on. Can you elaborate more on that and how that's just that sameness element and how that's infecting how we move about the world?

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you think so, there's a category of workers, of white collar workers that I talk about in the book that are called professionals. We used to call them professionals. I know professionals just kind of means like a white collar worker now, but it used to mean someone who had to get like certification, like an architect or a doctor or a lawyer. And that's an interesting class to look at because those people typically also had work lives that involved being in particular places. Maybe they had an office, but the doctor's also in the clinic or the hospital or moving from exam room to exam room. And the lawyer may have to go to a different office to do a deposition or they have to go to court. And the architect has to be on a job site, for example, you know, wearing their hard

• 20:36Speaker 02

  hat like you would see in a sock image or something like that. And even a journalist, right, like would have to be on site, reporting, talking to people, being in another space that wasn't just them at their computer, making phone calls or sending emails. And there's more and more of those kinds of jobs that used to be like really bound to specific places in addition to the general like white collar worker who's in office, email jobs, as we call them now. Everyone got to the point where they didn't choose not to do that. And it wasn't just because of work from home COVID stuff. It was that all sorts of factors, economic in terms of it was much easier to just be on Zoom instead of going places. That sort of stole away from us, the ability to do all the stuff that comes with those

• 21:20Speaker 02

  kinds of movements through space and time that don't have anything to do with your job. If you were a court reporter or you were an attorney and you ended up in the same courtroom or a series of different courtrooms, you know, like which one had the best coffee at the little coffee vending machine and then you get to press the button. On the vending machine or go down a certain kind of stairway that had a certain feeling when you wore your heels against it. All of that gratifying experience of just moving in and being in the world has nothing to do with your job, actually, nothing to do with your work. But through which you derive contentment, that just evaporates. I think because of all of those factors, some, not all, but some of the sense that we have of our work being meaningless, of not knowing why we're doing it,

• 22:05Speaker 02

  or not knowing why we're doing it in an office versus at home, is that we don't, we don't know that we lost that. We haven't thought about that as a loss. Even in a normal office, you know, you'll hear kind of, you know, line workers saying, "Well, management just wants us here so they can control us," right? Or because it's easier to manage, you know, if we're all in one place. But the truth is that all that like weird stuff that happens when you're getting a Diet Coke, or you're getting coffee, or you're, you know, stumbling to lunch together, or you run into someone in the elevator. Those kinds of experiences don't just produce like more efficient or better work, although they might. They're also like experiences of connectivity with your colleagues, with other people, with other materials in the world.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  And you see, "Oh, Charlie's got this, you know, interesting kind of plum-colored shirt on today. That's nice." So it looks like, it looks like a nice text. "Where did you get that shirt, Charlie, actually? What did you do this weekend?" And you, "Oh, I got this shirt." You have this, you see someone's eyes and you see that, you hear their voice. And you're just engaged with them in a different way. You smell the cologne or perfume that they're wearing. You see the way that they, they walk to and from. You, you kind of feel their physical presence nearby you. All that stuff isn't just about like being more efficient or productive. It's also about being more alive in the world. And so I think one of the reasons why, why our work feels just so stripped of meaning isn't just because the work itself is meaningless, or isn't because like, "Oh, they're making me do it in the office

• 23:32Speaker 02

  and I've got to trundle the work, you know? Got to get in the car. I got to get in the subway." It's also because we stopped expecting those kinds of, we stopped looking for those kinds of experiences, even when, even when we're having them. And nowadays, you can go into an office and it's just, just everybody's just in their headphones, just alone, you know? They're not engaged with it anymore because they kind of forgot that it was a part of their lives in the first place. And I guess, one thing I want to say here is this, this kind of dematerialization effect, it's not your fault. Like, you didn't choose this. Nobody decided, you know what? I want to have a more efficient life and so I no longer want to know what my colleagues are wearing in order that I might see the, the colors of their garments. No one chose any of that. It happened slowly and it happened in ways that we didn't really have a say in.

• 24:17Charlie Warzel?

  Well, and, and the thing, I think some people, you know, might hear you talk about this and, and immediately their mind will go to, well, I don't want to make work my entire life. I don't want to make this my, you know, like, I, I like the fact that it's, it's completely decoupled. But I think what you're actually talking about in the journalism example, you know, is one that I've actually thought about quite a bit. And I think it's the same for a lot of different professions, but in journalism, it actually, it has a different valence. You know, we have this erosion of local news in, in the world, right? And as part of that, there's a lot fewer journalists who are going around in communities, right? In small town communities, there's a lot of national journalists who will parachute into places, you know, like ourselves or whatnot.

• 24:59Charlie Warzel?

  And something I've, I've thought about living in various small towns across, you know, America throughout my life, is that some of those people now have such resentment of the media for reasons good or bad or whatnot, in part because they don't have any relationship to these types of people, right? If I'm just calling, if I'm not in the world doing my job, in the world with other people, having the mundane experiences, right? Like, oh, someone kind of cut in front of me in line, you know, at the, to get into the courtroom. And I'm like, oh, no, no, no worries. Go ahead, you know? And someone goes, wow, that's like, thanks. That's gracious, right? And just clocks something tiny like that. Just these, these, these interactions that mean nothing.

• 25:40Charlie Warzel?

  Those are the things that builds these, not just, they don't just make us happy too, but they build these other like societal bonds, right? They just, they link us in ways large and small, but that lack of gratification broadly speaking, has this, this effect of...

• 25:57Charlie Warzel?

  Kind of making us more distrustful, more suspicious of other people because we have less of those humanizing interactions.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of the ways I think about gratification is as like a foundation. If you think about it as foundational. So it seems unimportant because it's made of these little tiny bits and it's easy to discount and discard it. But what you're saying is something related, which is that just being human, like being a part of the world, a full member of society, also means being in it physically with other things and with other people. And the less that we do that, or the more that we scorn doing it, or the more that we think that it's kind of unimportant because it would be much more efficient if I just got online to do it that way instead, or we just like send in a reporter into your small town to go to the local diner and pretend like they care about the people that they're talking to, right?

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Or whatever the joke is about how national reporters work, that then we can just get the information, you know, like let's just get the story and then get back out again. When what you miss in that experience is the experience, you know, what is it like to be in this place? What does the air feel like? And I don't know about you, but like when I do this work as a journalist, when I go somewhere, it radically changes the story, right? It's a completely different experience because you're engaged with the world in a holistic way. And that's just irreplaceable in a way. You just can't like end around it. You can't pursue efficiency in order to excise it because the experience matters fundamentally.

• 27:35Charlie Warzel?

  You write that technology has allowed personal intimacy and connection to flourish too much in anywhere. That struck me just as a sentence, but also because there is a way in which someone can read that, say, that feels a little counterintuitive to your argument. So to draw that out for me, tell me a little bit more what you mean. Technology has allowed intimacy and connection to flourish too much in anywhere.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Maybe the best way to sort of put a pin on it is you know how like at some point in the last 15 years, everybody you know, you can't make plans with. Anymore, where it's like, well, we'll see. And everyone's kind of like waiting for something better to come along. And you're like, yeah, no, I'll come out tonight. And then, oh, I'm sorry, like, I just can't make it. I'm tired or I'm sick. And really, I don't really, I don't really feel like doing it. Or there's this other thing, or even I just been watching Netflix instead. There's this enormous surplus of information online. We have too many choices and too many options. I've written about this before for for The Atlantic. You know, the the sense that before the smartphone, we were pretty bored, actually. Like, there was, there wasn't as much to do. And you would like read the back of like, you know, whatever magazine was at the dentist's office,

• 28:42Speaker 02

  or look at shampoo bottles, or watch the clock spin. And that felt like soul destroying at the time. But it also engaged you more deeply with everything that was kind of outside of your head. And now we live in this world of symbols all the time that we can generate and we can exchange. And I think that that gave us the sense that we, it's sort of like, we don't need our physical bodies. Like, anything I want is is in info space. I can consume it as an idea. I can create it as an idea. And this is to some extent where like the singular singularitarian dream comes from. I can just upload my brain. And it doesn't matter that I have a body anymore because I can discard it and be the same person that I actually am. Because all that matters is my connection to information, like the most extreme version of it.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  But we kind of believe it on an ordinary day to day level, too. And it's just, it's just wrong. And you know it's wrong anytime you have a real earnest encounter with a person or you're speaking to someone across a counter. And it's just you and them. And maybe you're even having dispute and and you're trying to resolve it. And you're looking into their eyes and they're another human being and not just an account with an anime icon. And that forces you, it forces you to live in a different headspace because you're in a different physical space with it. So like the way that technology has changed us isn't just about like the extent to which we use it. That's what you normally think. I'm just using this too much. But it's also that we use it differently. We live our lives differently because of it.

• 30:09Charlie Warzel?

  I kind of agree with you here, but also there's an element that some people may uncharitably read is like, you know, wanting the the good old days back, right?

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 30:18Charlie Warzel?

  Like, just, just... So if someone's gonna approach you about the small stuff argument and say, yes, as you said, so much of this is frivolous, but it's also just, it's not, it's not coming back. I don't know. How do you, how do you, how do you approach that person?

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, the, um, there, there is a counter response to this force, this force of dematerialization that's been going on for a little while. That's, that's sort of like reads as nostalgia, like the drive to kind of analog culture, or, you know, we're gonna try to reclaim, I'm gonna have a, I'm gonna have a dumb phone now instead of a smartphone, or I'm gonna spin vinyl. That drive comes from the same problem that I'm at, that I call dematerialization. But instead of moving forward, what it does is say, oh, we have to go back again. And we'll, we'll try to reclaim these little bits that are, that are available to us. That's the nostalgia version. The friction maxing version, I think,

• 31:15Speaker 02

  is equally wrong in a different way. What it's saying is like, if the problem is efficiency, if everything got like too smooth and easy, then we should make it hard again. And that's even weirder as a conclusion to come to, because the thing about gratification that's so striking to me is how easy it is. It's not hard at all, when, or it doesn't have to be. So the answer to the question is that we can't go back. You're right. But we don't have to. This has been the hardest thing to get across and to, to try to convince people of, as I've been working on this project, that there's an enormous surplus of sensory life that's constantly available and happening all the time, because we believe that we've

• 32:00Speaker 02

  lost it, and that, or that someone has taken it from us, or that we're siphoning it into our smartphones, or that we used to... Have it, but now my job is too terrible or I can't on a home anymore. And those things are all true, but you're still a body in the world. And you're still engaged with that world at every moment of every day of your life. So that's a very different way of approaching the reclamation of this loss. Then like trying to lament the past or trying to invent new technologized and kind of efficiency driven ways of procuring it in the future.

• 32:32Charlie Warzel?

  I am someone who struggles pretty hard with ambition, being in my own head, constantly focusing on what you're calling the big stuff. Right. I have a, I have a big stuff focused brain.

• 32:44Charlie Warzel?

  Constantly, which also means that I'm constantly trying to do the opposite. Right. I'm, I'm trying to do the work of focusing on gratitude, of being more present in moments to keep the other stuff at bay. Right. And when I start doing it, I have this sensation that I'll be walking down the street and it's a really nice day and I hear the birds all of a sudden. Right. Or I see a great cloud and it brings me this level of what you will call gratification.

• 33:12Charlie Warzel?

  The sensation is small. I'm not overwhelmed by it. Right. And then the big stuff part of my brain just takes over and it goes, that's it? That's the solution? And this then just triggers the big stuff brain to just start worrying away with these promises of like, no, no, there's a stronger satisfaction. If you, if you, if you make this, you know, jump in your career, if you do this thing like, that's going to be like, be the kind of satisfaction that like, you know, makes your knees buckle. How do you square that and, and the small feeling of it with the promise that the big brain offers?

• 33:49Speaker 02

  I'm going to give you the, the galaxy brain answer to this, to this question. Which is that you can have both. I'm not asking you to choose between ambition or purpose or even happiness. And gratification, but to recognize that what are you going to do instead of taking in that smell of the salty surf? Like, what would happen instead? What would you lose if you didn't? All that you'd lose is that gratifying experience of having done so. You can keep on advancing in your career and trying to solve the problems in your marriage and trying to improve the lives of your children and trying to connect with your community through volunteership or whatever it is that you think will make you happy and give you purpose. You can keep doing that and you can also feel the sand between

• 34:34Speaker 02

  your toes, right? And, and you know, like, when I say this, it's like, of course, duh. Like, obviously, you can do that. And yet, we've still kind of forgotten it, haven't we? We feel guilty about it in the way that you're describing, or maybe it's not even guilt, maybe it's a sense of habit, or a sense that even that little shard of mental space that's processing my senses would be better spent planning my app, or whatever it is that you do for a living.

• 35:00Charlie Warzel?

  Right.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where Inpress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Inpress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  From Rethink, the creative marketing studio at The Atlantic and Walmart, On Solid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Moderesi-Turani, and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during, and after a storm. Listen to On Solid Ground wherever you get your podcasts.

• 36:06Charlie Warzel?

  We're talking a lot about the embodied nature of things and paying attention to our bodies. And I wonder if you ever think about this book and the arguments in some ways as a kind of handbook for cultivating the things that make us different than the machines. Because some of the debates that we're having over artificial intelligence and superintelligence and the differences between machines simulating human consciousness and human consciousness is that we're the ones that have the bodies. We're in meat space. We know what it feels like to get a sunburn. We know what it feels like to be caught in the rain. Do you think about that as it relates to a future where we're going to be interacting a lot

• 36:49Charlie Warzel?

  with things that simulate human intelligence or consciousness, but they're not embodied?

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Right. They simulate a certain kind of human intelligence that's decoupled from embodiment. Here's the weirdest thing, though, to me. The way that AI is pushing people, and maybe I'll just speak for myself. The way it's pushing me back into the physical world as much as it is continuing to undermine that connection to it. A lot of the work that I do with AI is me asking questions that then force me to do things with my hands, you know?

• 37:24Charlie Warzel?

  Really?

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, I'll give you an example. I have a new kitchen counter getting installed this week. Okay. And the stone guys, they had to move the range and they knocked off the knob for the oven control. And because of the way my range is built, that means like a whole replacement of this whole thermostat assembly, because it was like just a piece of zinc that broke off. And, you know, in the past, I would have been like angry at the workers or I would have been calling up, you know, my contractor or the replants repair people. And now I'm like, you know, I mean, I wonder what part this is. I bet the chat can tell me. And it can tell me, you know, like, how would I repair this if I wanted? You could say you could go to YouTube and do that for years, but it's something different.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Like, I'll take a picture and I'll show you. Oh, I see which one you have. And, you know, it's trying to use what it can do as an information system in order to sort of push me by invitation to reengage with part of the physical world. That was available to me the whole time, but that I had determined wasn't something that I knew how to engage with anymore. And I've had like just dozens, maybe hundreds of those kinds of experiences over the past couple of years that aren't about like automating my work or stealing stealing the experience of doing whatever it is I might be doing, communicating with other people, write all the stuff people are worried about, but are more about reminding me that that's that that world is out there.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  It's available to me. And so in that way, I'm encouraged that this like this almost like this dialectic of of the info space and the physical space might still be traversable, that we might be able to move between them more readily and with greater fluency. There's some future of the AI thing that looks like that and not where it steals it steals all of our work and all of our connectivity with ourselves and with the world. I don't know if we'll be able to achieve that, but I certainly think there are signs that we could steer it in that direction.

• 39:27Charlie Warzel?

  When I think about that, I think that there's there's a good point there, which is when you're asking these types of machines, computer that is truly interactive, like I can ask a follow up question to computer and computer can can figure this thing out. That to me, when it's pointed towards the physical world, how do I fix this? How do I do this? You know, that seems to me to be very true. The concern is that so much of it also is like a accelerator for all of these other systems.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  There's no question.

• 40:06Charlie Warzel?

  That push us into the disembodied zone. Right? It makes all of the things that make the knowledge work and the and the computerized bureaucracy bad. It's just like it's it's a particle accelerator situation for that. But I I want to. Kind of land the plane here and just talk about practical solutions. We have stop and feel the sand between your toes. We have, we have those, those types of things, which I'm not, I'm not discounting at all. Give me some things that, that people can, can, can do to help the small stuff feel more present in their lives.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  One of the easiest things is just to talk about it, to give it voice. I think this sense of ridiculousness or embarrassment or smallness that the small stuff embodies, it makes it feel weird. And I have a section of the book where I talk about peeling protective film off of products that come with it. And this is the kind of thing where I'm like, if I told you, anyone in the world, hey, you know how like really gratifying it is to peel that protective film off products, they'd be like, oh my gosh, you're totally right. Right? But it doesn't, you're not willing to take the first step, to take the leap into, into believing that. And just talking about it, just saying, you know, this was, here's a gratifying experience that I'm having right now and you're having with me and let's just, let's just vocalize it. That does a lot. It normalizes it. It's really simple too. It doesn't require that much work and you can do it every day.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Another one is, you know, I talk extensively about the internet and the internet isn't bad. It's not like put your phone down, get off of the internet. There's a lot of kind of vicarious gratification that the internet has to offer. We've talked a little bit about it with those like repair videos, the, the like Tik Tok drain clearing videos I'm obsessed with, the way that like ASMR YouTubers pay attention to towels and garments and bottles and those sorts of things. That's not an end in itself, but it is again, a way of being introduced to this idea of, of, of being reminded that the sensory world is interesting and meaningful.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Another technique I think is really useful is do something that's physically different, that involves a different kind of sensory life than your norm. And that might mean that like, if you work at a computer all day, then do something different with your hands, make something, go garden, but have it like treated as a true hobby. And the hobby isn't, it doesn't need to be related to the outcome, like having a good gardener, knitting sweaters that you can sell or give away or what have you. It's really just about a different sensory activity than the one that you experience in your ordinary life. That's another thing you can do. Just introduce like a diversity of sensory experiences as much as you, as much as you can.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  And I think one more thing that I'll throw out there is just take it. Just stop worrying so much about whether this stuff is good or it's going to prevent you from accessing some future version of yourself that's even better. The more that you know that these gifts are just here, these sensory gifts are available if you accept them, the more you kind of exercise that mentality and carry it out, then the more familiar and comfortable you will be with it. I know this sounds ridiculous, maybe, and it also sounds harder than it really is. But the sense of like, oh, we say this all the time, oh, it's a nice breeze that I'm feeling today, or it's quite warm today, it's really chilly. Oh, that tastes a little different than I expected.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  There's a little more dill in that than I anticipated when I put it in my mouth. All of that, that's it. That's all the stuff you're already doing, but then just surfacing it and not worrying so much about whether it's weird or whether you're cheating yourself out of some future version of yourself in order to encounter it. And really what you're losing, if you don't, is the experience of living in the moment.

• 43:55Charlie Warzel?

  I think that's an excellent, excellent place to leave everything. This is all, I think, really beautiful, and thank you for sharing it. I really appreciate it.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  It's so fun to talk positively about the world, you know, as a technology critic, to be like, you know what? It's actually OK. So thank you so much for talking to me about it.

• 44:22Charlie Warzel?

  That's it for us here. Thank you again to my guest, Ian Bogost. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe on the Atlantic's YouTube channel or on Apple or Spotify or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my fellow journalists, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener. That's theatlantic.com/listener. Thanks so much, and I'll see you on the internet.

• 44:57Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Think social media. That's where Inpress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Inpress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.