Pod Insights The Vergecast The life-changing magic of touching stuff About this episode We have all become desensitized. Every place is like every other place, every experience is happening at a remove and on a screen. And Ian Bogost, a Washington University professor and a writer at The Atlantic, argues that this "dematerialization" is making our life worse. Ian joins David to explain how to once again commune with the world. He tells us of the magic of paper tickets, why he's kind of obsessed with the rubber on his water bottle, and why you don't need to throw phone into the ocean — but you should probably watch more ASMR videos.
The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life
The Cult of Delayed Gratification Is a Lie
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Transcript 0:02 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of friction-maxing. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're talking about the small stuff. I'm talking to Ian Bogost, who is a writer at The Atlantic and a professor at Washington University, about a book he just wrote called The Small Stuff. And this book, which you don't have to have read to enjoy this conversation, I promise. The book essentially argues that we, as people, have lost sensory contact with the world, and that one important way to go about being happier, and to use Ian's word, which you'll hear a bunch in this conversation, gratified, is to get back in touch with the world around us. Let me just read you a short section of it, which I think explains what he's talking about fairly well. This is from early in the book. He says, "We once had to, we once got to, take direct control over all sorts of objects.
0:48 Speaker 00 We had to engage physically with the apparatuses of ordinary life to get things done. Those devices were varied in nature, offering diverse encounters. And of course, people also had greater and more sundry contact with the natural world and the built environment." Half the book is basically about how we lost that and how everything from the way that we open doors to the way that we use faucets to what we do on our phones has changed the way that we engage with the world. And then a big part of the book is how we can go about getting some of that stuff back. I wanted to have Ian to talk about what we've lost and particularly how technology has played a role in taking some of that stuff away from us and whether technology has a role in giving some of it back. He makes some surprising arguments about the fact that we can get that kind of sensory contact from digital devices. This is not fundamentally a book about throwing
1:33 Speaker 00 your phone into the ocean and going and living in the woods. There's a little bit of that, but there's not a lot of that. And so Ian and I are going to talk through how to bring back your materialization in the world without having to get rid of your phone, which frankly, seems like the best of both worlds. That's coming up in just a sec. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, July 7, 2026. Microsoft announced yesterday that it's laying off 4,800 employees, and more than 30% of those are in the Xbox division. Microsoft is also spinning off four of its game studios, and there are apparently even more cuts still to come. At the same time as making all of these huge cuts, Xbox's CEO Asha Sharma is also trying to argue that the Xbox's brightest days are still coming.
2:17 Speaker 00 She wrote that "I want Xbox to be one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day and gives everyone the opportunity to create and connect." That is vague. And it's the sort of vague that led Xbox into a lot of this trouble. Now this suddenly much smaller team has some big vague work ahead of it. Meanwhile, Nothing released a new set of earbuds called the Nothing Ear 3A, which are interesting, frankly, for a few reasons. One, Nothing's headphones have historically been pretty good, especially for $99. Two, these come in pink, and they look awesome. And three, they have a feature called Audio Snapshot that lets you record what you're listening to on the buds themselves, then sync it back to your phone. I think of it as kind of like taking a screenshot but of audio. And I think this is the kind of AI feature
3:02 Speaker 00 you're going to start to see on headphones everywhere. And finally, the FCC is going to vote later this month to make it easier for broadband providers to hide the fees that they charge you. And going forward, the ISPs might not even have to show you the so-called nutrition labels for pricing. They can just link to them. Because, you know, who really wants to know what you're actually paying on your internet bill? You can read more about all of this at theverge.com. That is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, July 7.
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4:29 Speaker 00 Ian Bogus, welcome to the Vergecast.
4:30 Speaker 03 Thanks so much for having me.
4:32 Speaker 00 I was looking for sort of what is the perfect example that I think kind of lays out all of the complicated things you try to get into. And I think for me, it's tickets. I think the cleanest what have we lost by losing physical objects is tickets. And in a fun way, I think what have we gained by losing physical objects is also tickets. So just sort of real quick, give me the story of tickets a little bit and why it fits into the way that you're thinking about the world.
4:59 Speaker 03 So imagine you're going to a show, you're going to the theater, you're going to a concert, something where you have to go, you spent like maybe a couple hundred bucks on Ticketmaster and you paid all the fees and you got these physical tickets. Or at least you used to get the physical tickets. You'd go to like Will Call and you'd pick them up and then you'd have the tickets. And you'd be like, oh my gosh, I can't lose these tickets. I spent a bunch of money on it. I'm really looking forward to the show. And you have these physical tickets and maybe you like taped them to the back of the kitchen cabinet so you wouldn't lose them. Or you know, you put them in an envelope and then you forgot where it was and you had to look for the envelope and rummage through the drawer. And then on the day of the show, you remember where the tickets are, they're on the back of the cabinet and they have like a sort of give to them. They're like made of cardboard, but they're still weaker than it feels like they should
5:43 Speaker 03 be to be so valuable and you kind of hold them and you feel them moving between one another. You know, there's like a kind of friction between them and you put them in your jacket pocket or you put them in your purse. And then you go out to the car and then you're like, wait, do I have the tickets? And you check your pocket or your purse, yes, I've got the tickets. And then you do that like 50 times before you actually get to the theater or the venue. And then you hand over the tickets and they get punched or they They get scanned or whatever it is that happens to them and they give them back to you and it says where you were supposed to sit. And now there's something different. There's something you don't mind if you lose, but you kind of don't want to because they're a token of having gone to the show and maybe you keep them and pin them up on your wall or you put them in a scrapbook or you just store them in your wallet and you remember them later.
6:26 Speaker 03 So all of that kind of like sensory texture that you experience with the tickets. You don't really need that anymore. Now what you get is a QR code on your smartphone and it's, as you said, now you don't have to worry about losing your tickets, but you don't get all the rest of that. And you go to the show and you kind of hold up your phone and it's always kind of weird to hold up your phone when you feel like you should be doing something different. They shouldn't be looking at your phone and they scan it and it's on the wrong screen or something like that. And then you don't remember what the seat was and you have to pull it up and you don't have all that, you know, kind of like memento of the show anymore to take with you. So, so that's, that's like one example of this phenomenon that I call dematerialization where like the physical world that we used to inhabit without thinking about it at all just kind of went away.
7:10 Speaker 03 And on the, on the whole, it's like definitely more convenient, but then there was a loss associated with that convenience.
7:16 Speaker 00 And I think to me, one of the most interesting parts of reading the book was kind of watching you try to articulate what that loss is. Because I think it is really hard to explain, right? That not only is it about the fact that yes, having things that exist outside of my phone is helpful because I can like know where they are and I don't have to open my phone to go to them. And we, we talk a lot about sort of the advantages of like using a digital camera instead of using your phone. But your argument is, is kind of finer than that, right? That it's like, there's actually something about the feeling of holding the tickets in your hand and, and moving them
7:51 Speaker 03 Right.
7:52 Speaker 00 in your fingers that, that is important. And I think it's, it's very hard to articulate why it's important.
7:56 Speaker 03 Right.
7:57 Speaker 00 But that it is important.
7:58 Speaker 03 The thing that people might think of first with the tickets is that idea of a memory that they can hold and store and, and that's valuable and you don't have that anymore.
8:07 Speaker 00 Totally.
8:08 Speaker 03 But I am talking about that plus other things. And for me, that sense of like you have two tickets because you're going with your spouse or your kid or whatever it is. And just feeling them move between one another, holding two pieces of cardstock and kind of feeling their texture against one another as you kind of rub them together in your hand. First of all, it just kind of gives you something to do with your hand while you're waiting in line. But it's delightful to do that. But I just started to realize as I thought more and more about this phenomenon of dematerialization and that sense of delight, which I call gratification. I felt like, wow, what if that is actually much more important than we've given it credit for? And the fact that it feels so small is both the reason that we haven't given it credit for feeling good,
8:53 Speaker 03 but also the power of it, these like, this collection of little tiny sensory experiences that you've accrued, or you used to accrue more, over your day, that were contributing to your overall sense of contentment. And then as they fell away, you didn't feel like you were missing anything. Like, who cares about not having a paper ticket? But then that happened everywhere, like everywhere to everything. And then it was like, oh, wow, I don't feel like I'm a real human being in the world anymore.
9:18 Speaker 00 Yeah, I feel like you use the word commune a few times, particularly at the beginning of the book. And I feel like that was the word that really stuck in my head throughout the whole thing. And it's a thing I've been thinking a lot about ever since, really, this idea that what we're doing is, right now, it's so sort of disconnected. We're disconnected from each other, we're disconnected from our surroundings, we're disconnected from literally the place that we are, which I also want to talk about. But your point is, it seems like overwhelmingly just that like, the best thing you can do is just like, get back in touch with your senses and the things around you. And like, this idea that you are constantly communing with the world around you, and that we don't do that anymore, strikes me as like, I don't know, I've just been, I've been thinking about that word a lot.
10:00 Speaker 03 I'm glad you picked up on that because I, there's a moment in the book toward the end when I, I encourage the reader to think of their sensory life, the objects of their senses as friends, as like, as characters. And I, I really mean it, that it's like having a relationship.
10:21 Speaker 03 With everything that you encounter in the world. And we're used to thinking like, oh, you can't have a relationship with like an inanimate object. You can't have a relationship with it. And if it's, if you have a relationship with like a natural object, maybe that's sort of reasonable because it's alive, or at least potentially alive, like an oak tree. But who has a relationship with the garbage truck or the tickets in their pocket? Like a, like a human style of relationship. But I think that's a really useful way of thinking about both the loss and the continued opportunity, because this happens all the time, even though we've lost the tickets, there's other things that take its place. And that sense of just having like respect and interest and curiosity and, and most of all, acceptance of, of just accepting that you are in the world with other things,
11:06 Speaker 03 other people too, other entities, and that that's an enormous miracle. That is something that's available to us, no matter how much we've lost, because we're still surrounded by so many sensory encounters all the time.
11:18 Speaker 00 Yeah. You don't quite go all the way to the end of the, how did we become disconnected from this world? And again, to use your word, dematerialized. You don't get all the way to the end of the road and say it's the iPhone's fault, which I think is what a lot of people say.
11:32 Speaker 03 It is what a lot of people think.
11:33 Speaker 00 Um, do you, do you think that's the truth? Like, is, if, is the iPhone kind of problem number one? Or smartphones in general, obviously, kind of problem number one here?
11:43 Speaker 03 I think we've mistaken smartphones for a bigger problem than maybe they are. And it's certainly a problem. Like, the reason that you can get the QR code ticket is because of the smartphone and the app ecosystem.
11:56 Speaker 00 Sure.
11:57 Speaker 03 But think about what you're doing in line with your phone instead of with your tickets. You're still touching it. It's got a smooth glass front. Mine has one of those like textured cases that I like to rub and touch. Even if the phone is off, it's still a delightful sensory object that's gratifying to engage with.
12:13 Speaker 00 I have a pop socket on mine that I just spin around in my hand.
12:15 Speaker 03 Oh, you got the spinner.
12:16 Speaker 00 Like hours and hours and hours a day.
12:17 Speaker 03 Exactly. Yeah. The heft of it in my pocket is both bothersome and comforting. The idea that you can pull it out isn't just about being like lured into the info system or whatever. It's also about... Rummaging for it, or trying to find it again? Or is it still there in the same way that you're asking if the ticket's still there? And if you look at the forces of dematerialization, I give a lot of examples of them that are not just the iPhone or just computers. This has been going on for a long time, long before the smartphone. One of the other common examples that people relate to really well is the public restroom with all the sensors. Instead of turning on the faucet, you wave your hands under it and hope it works.
13:02 Speaker 03 And then you do that with the soap and the toilet and the towel dispenser and maybe the door too. And that's, I mean, those are like, systems that have digital components in them, but they're not computers or smartphones. Another example I talk about is just economic. It's about the incentives to own things and the fact that if you're able to own a home or even an automobile, that you have incentives and inspiration and rationales to connect with it physically. And that's not really about the phone either. So I tried really hard, in the book, to be honest about where I think the problems lie. And they are partly computational and they're partly related to the whole internet thing.
13:43 Speaker 03 But yeah, I think we've overestimated the degree to which smartphones have ruined our lives.
13:49 Speaker 00 Interesting. Okay. I find that sort of hopeful in a weird way.
13:52 Speaker 03 Yeah. Well, you know, as I've been living this whole life of trying to make sense of this thing that I call gratification, and I truly and earnestly believe in this, I started realizing that that sense of addiction or compulsion or whatever you want to call it, I mean, I'm just as guilty of it as anyone. I'm drawn to the phone and the apps. But that it was kind of just like my attention system, or the things in my life I was accepting as interesting were narrower than they could be. And once I was like, you know, like my water bottle though, right? With its like rubber base that sits down against the counter? That's kind of, that's super interesting.
14:31 Speaker 03 You know, the feel of my desk in front of me, the gravel on the street, on the neighboring street, when I walk down it crunches underfoot. It's kind of as interesting as my iPhone in a certain way. And they're much more plentiful. So I started missing my phone a lot less. I didn't have to like lock it up.
14:50 Speaker 00 I ask this question in the nicest possible way. Do you feel sort of insane explaining this thing that you've gone through? Just being like, I don't need my phone that much because of the rubber on the bottom of my water bottle. It's like beautiful and sort of insane.
15:04 Speaker 03 And I try to address this in the book too, that that that feeling of oddity, of like embarrassment, of strangeness, that's both something to overcome, to learn to overcome.
15:16 Speaker 00 Sure.
15:17 Speaker 03 But it's also a tell. It's like, when you start feeling, is it kind of weird to like be so delighted in this rubber bumper on my, on my water bottle? You're like, ah, I'm living in gratification land here. Like, that's a sign that you're on the right track. One of the things that I've discovered about it is that when you talk about these experiences with other people, they're usually like right there with you very quickly. And it's sort of like you go first kind of a thing that we've been in. There is an example I talk about where my wife and I are peeling off a plastic protective film from the the name label on a new knife block we bought. And if you bring that example up of the plastic protective film with like anyone on earth who's ever encountered it, they'll be like,
15:59 Speaker 03 oh, I feel like so delightful to do that. I can't, I sometimes I just leave it on for a year so I have something to do later. They're right there with you, but they wouldn't maybe bring it up on their own, you know? And so you're right, there is a folly. It feels unimportant. Like I called the book The Small Stuff because the small stuff feels unimportant and it isn't. It's super important. So part of the exercise, and I think it's an easy exercise, is just, just learning that it is. And, and you know, when it feels good, admitting that it feels good and not worrying so much that like someone's going to like look at you funny when you, when you do it.
16:33 Speaker 00 Yeah. So talk me through that exercise, actually, a little bit, because it feels like there were, there were parts of the book where it felt like your argument was going to turn into essentially, uh, like, do you know this concept of friction maxing?
16:45 Speaker 03 I do.
16:46 Speaker 00 Uh, it, it felt a little like you were pushing towards that, right? The, the like resist convenience at all costs, resist taking the easy and quick and low touch way out of everything. Like go, go do things the hard way because it is worth doing the hard way. I don't, I don't actually think that's what you're advocating for.
17:04 Speaker 03 I'm really glad that you said that because it's not what I'm saying.
17:07 Speaker 00 Parse those two things apart for me a little bit.
17:09 Speaker 03 So I think what happened is when you're like very smartphone, kind of internet focused, everything is so, I mean, everything has been made so easy for us. Our lives are incredible and there's a lot of kind of frictionless, smooth, efficient experiences that we now have. Instead of going to the store, like this weekend I was working on a project. I really needed a part from like, like a home improvement store. And I didn't have to get in my car and go to the store. I could just use one of the delivery apps to get, like, how easy is that? But now I'm not going to the store and not in my car and I'm not like rummaging through the shelves. I'm missing out. Our lives are a lot easier. And so because of that like sense of like smoothness or efficiency that we encounter all the time, it's, it's easy to mistake the solution for difficulty.
17:54 Speaker 03 Like I need to make my life more difficult now. I need to introduce friction. But that's not actually what you want. Like, that's actually kind of a bananas thing to think like, what if I made my life harder? Ah, like I'll stick it to technology by making my life harder again. Like, I, I think in some ways it's useful as like a provocation. If you're like, well, what would it be like to do this the hard way? So I can remind myself of the gap between easy and hard. But you're probably not going to do that long-term. It's not really going to help you live differently. And I don't think you have to live differently anyway. Like, I'm not saying change your life. I'm actually saying like, you can live the life you're already living. So yeah, I mean, it's, it's ironic in a way that my book's coming out, right?
18:37 Speaker 03 It kind of like peak friction waxing discourse because I think it does feel like it's the same. But to me, they're just like, like, like polar opposites from one another. Instead of like, make your life harder, I'm saying, do what you're already doing, but more so.
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20:53 Speaker 00 The timing of your book is really interesting because I think the kind of diagnosis of your book, right, this theory of dematerialization, that we are disconnected in these ways, I think more and more people feel that all the time.
21:06 Speaker 03 People feel that.
21:07 Speaker 00 Your remedy is very different, I think, than what a lot of people are coming out and saying, right? Like, you're not arguing that I should throw my phone into the ocean.
21:15 Speaker 03 Right.
21:16 Speaker 00 You're not arguing that I should go and shake a human's hand instead of going to self-checkout every time. You're arguing that, like, I should enjoy self-checkout more, which is such a different way of thinking about it, that it is like, it has kind of blown my mind. And the thing that you argue that I was the most surprised by going through the whole book is that you can have some of these experiences in digital spaces on digital devices.
21:38 Speaker 03 Yeah.
21:39 Speaker 00 Like, you write a bunch about ASMR, which, can you just actually quickly explain how that fits into this construct?
21:44 Speaker 03 Yeah, so ASMR, these YouTubers typically who make these videos have been around for like 10 or 15 years, and they'll whisper, and there's a sort of like tingly sensation that some people get when they hear someone like, kind of, you know, like, scratch the windscreen of their microphone or tap against, tap against a bottle. And what's interesting, and a lot of people use it like a sleep aids or relaxation, but what's interesting to me about ASMR creators is the way that they encourage and model focused, earnest attention to the ordinary world. So there's an ASMR creator that I talked to for the book who has these videos about bath towels.
22:26 Speaker 03 And she's like, spends 20 minutes like folding and smoothing the towels. And it's an extreme version of how you might actually pay attention to towels. And the point is not that you're gonna go spend 20 minutes with your towels, but that you have towels. And when you take them out of the dryer and they're warm, that warmth, and you may put it against your face or feel it or smell it, and it's plush and it has texture. And then as you're folding it, that's not just a chore for you, that's an opportunity for you to commune with your towels, to use that word. And I think the way that ASMR creators model that kind of openness is really admirable and something that we can learn from.
23:07 Speaker 00 Okay, I like that. And I think that to me was the part where kind of your argument about digital spaces started to really click, because it does seem like all the stuff that you're arguing, right, which is that we need this different kind of sensory contact with the world around us, runs right in the face of another thing that you describe, which is that everything in every app that we look at is being like ruthlessly monetized and selected for us by these unknowable algorithms. And I think, like, even even on social media, people are starting to feel like, I don't know why I'm here. I don't know why I'm seeing this thing. I don't know who these people are. Like, we're being dematerialized, even in these digital spaces in this way.
23:48 Speaker 03 That's right.
23:48 Speaker 00 Yeah. And and part of me wonders, like, if if these two things are just increasingly, like, impossibly at odds, that if actually, everybody from, I mean, you talk about Amazon in the book, you talk about social platforms in the book, like, if all of these things actually have every possible incentive to dematerialize us as much as possible, to just turn us into like a warm bag of credit cards.
24:10 Speaker 03 Right.
24:11 Speaker 00 And in fact, everything we're doing here is just a losing battle against the endless forces of dematerialization. And yet again, you seem more optimistic about it at the end than I expected.
24:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think that what we what we have to realize is that as much as these forces are dematerializing, they are also delivering gratification in its own way, or at least in some way. So just touching your phone is always gratifying, as we already discussed. But if you're scrolling Instagram or TikTok, like, often you're seeing, it's like, I call it kind of vicarious gratification. You're like, watching other people do things. And the things that they're doing are increasingly implausible, and they're clearly just done for the algorithm, you know, like those, like, someone like, spreading food all over their marble island in their kitchen or whatever. They're not going to eat any of that. They're not encouraging you to do the recipe. They're just trying to maximize their
25:04 Speaker 03 algorithmic feed, right? And so if you treat it, though, as like this, oh, well, like, there's tomatoes, though, I'm reminded that, like, tomato sauce exists. And if that does at least a little bit of work of sort of Orienting you marginally more toward the experience of pouring the jar of tomato sauce out because you still have to eat and you're going to be cooking, even you're going to be ordering food and then you're scooping it out with the spoon that they deliver with it that maybe cracks and breaks. You're never going to be able to escape the fact that you are a physical being living in the physical world. And so all of that pull that the internet has, it was never really pulling us out of our bodies fully. But also, as you're saying, David, it's like, it's not
25:48 Speaker 03 working anymore. Like, it's less satisfying than it once was.
25:52 Speaker 00 Yes. Where do you think AI fits into that? I think it strikes me as, if you want to point at something that is dematerializing everything and everyone at rapid pace, you can make a pretty strong argument for AI.
26:04 Speaker 03 Definitely. And I think that one of the reasons that, especially people who create stuff as part of their lives, either for a living or as a serious part of their avocation, why they're so worried about or even opposed to AI, is that they know, people know, that the experience of doing something is as important, if not more important, than the outcome or the product that's created at the other end. And sometimes that experience is frustrating. Like, I'm a writer, and I, like all writers, hate writing, right? Like, there's no, not news to anyone. But the moment-to-moment experience of pressing keys on my keyboard is delightful. The experience of kind of like feeling ideas move through my fingertips is where I feel,
26:46 Speaker 03 that's where I feel like the ideas live, not in my brain, but in my fingertips. Like, that's, that's energizing. And the notion that I would use AI to write for me, it would take away not just the writing, not the outcome, not the output, but the experience of being who I am in a certain way. And that's true for people who are like ceramicists, or fine artists, or whatever they do, right? You know, maybe you didn't ever like writing emails or receiving emails, but at least you got to write them. At least you got to tap them out, and you got to hear a little ding when it came in. You got to press the delete button on your keyboard. And now it does kind of feel like, oh, even that, even the work I don't want to do is now going to be taken away from me.
27:25 Speaker 00 Yeah, and I think that there's a fascinating thing coming for all of us where we're going to be asked whether not having to do the stuff we don't want to do is worth not being able to do the stuff we do want to do.
27:37 Speaker 03 Right.
27:38 Speaker 00 And everyone is just going to have to stare down the barrel of that question.
27:41 Speaker 03 You know, one thing we know about automation of all kinds, you know, going back as long as we've had automation, is we never get that time back.
27:47 Speaker 00 Yeah.
27:48 Speaker 03 We never get the leisure time that we're promised.
27:50 Speaker 00 Right.
27:50 Speaker 03 Instead, we just get more work. And that work that we get that's more is also usually worse. It's usually a worse effort.
27:57 Speaker 00 Yeah.
27:58 Speaker 03 And, you know, I'm not saying that we should go wash your clothes by hand, right? This isn't the friction maxing argument. The fact that I have a washing machine, thank goodness, I am happy with the washing machine. But you still engage with it, right? And you got to load it up and then it whirs and you can hear it sort of in the house and it's reminding you that washing is happening and then you go out and you fold and you get the towels out like we were talking about. And those processes, like all of that stuff, we think is just like noise. It's like, oh, that's just a chore that I want to get through. So we didn't really mean for our lives to be changed in this way, optimized, you know, on every register for every variable. And it happened slowly. And now that it happened, I think all of us are looking around going, wait, I didn't ask for that.
28:41 Speaker 03 And when there's an example of something that's like very clearly doing it aggressively, like AI is, it's easy to point to it or smartphones and go, oh, that's the enemy. Let's fight that enemy. But it's really weirder and it's happened over a much longer period of time and it's kind of everywhere. Like the faucets in the restroom have nothing to do with computers and AI, but they're part of the problem. The difficulty you have opening doors in office buildings, which I also talk about, like that doesn't have anything to do with AI, but it's part of the problem. And I think it's a relief, it's been a relief for me not to try to hang, well, not to try to hang the problem on myself, but also not to hang it on like one phenomenon in particular, to understand that it's much more systemic.
29:24 Speaker 00 It does seem to me, and I think this is probably particularly true in technology, but maybe true of everything you just described, that it feels a lot like the forces are everybody versus my humanity, right?
29:37 Speaker 03 Yeah.
29:37 Speaker 00 We as people are desperately trying to hold on to our ability to experience the world, while everybody is, for reasons of, you know, regulation and capitalism, but mostly capitalism, trying to pull it away from me.
29:50 Speaker 03 I think that's right. And then what I would add atop it is that at the same time that that whole thing was happening, which of, you know, of course, since the industrial revolution at least, right? We've also been persuaded that the only kind of contentment that's worthwhile is what we call happiness, this sort of like big stuff accomplishments, not necessarily just that you would optimize for, but that you would value as the thing that you're actually after, the thing that gives your life purpose.
30:16 Speaker 00 And that in fact, all of the sacrifices between here and there are worth it. Happiness is some far future thing that I am meant to be working towards at all times.
30:24 Speaker 03 And I guess that's true at a certain level, but then you miss out on that specific experience, which is giving you a sense of pleasure by being directly connected with the world. And we've also kind of, without meaning to, persuaded ourselves that that connection isn't important, that we don't really need it. We can get by in our heads and we can get by with like one or three or five important accomplishments over the course of a decade or maybe our whole adult lives. And what a shame that is. You know, for all the talk of like abundance, the surplus that I'm after is the surplus of sensory encounter that's available all the time.
31:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
31:03 Speaker 03 And so while it seems weird to like become friends with your water bottle, by doing that, I get like another little drip drip of pleasure into the cup, which is very different than like filling it up full blast with some big life accomplishment.
31:16 Speaker 00 Okay, one last thing and then we'll let you go. And this is both because it's related and because this is the Vergecast and we like gadget nerd stuff. I need you to explain your doorbell, just to the people. It is the deepest gadget nerdy stuff in the whole book, and I just need you to briefly explain what you did with your doorbell.
31:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, it is, it is super nerdy. So I live in a house that was built in 1909 in St. Louis and You know, that's a long time, 120 plus years of of changes to the house. And there's a there's a wired doorbell, but it was cut at some point. And a lot of people put in like a like a ring doorbell or something like that that runs on batteries and wifi. But I was I kind of like wanted like a a doorbell, like a traditional doorbell that matched the house architecturally and that had a button that you push and it feels like a doorbell button. And so and then I wanted it to make the sound that my house, I have this ridiculous house that like wants a big booming doorbell sound, you know?
32:15 Speaker 03 So I mean, the long and short of it is that I wired up like five different computers. And there's this whole, I have this whole like server room running my doorbell and the rest of my house too. But where the doorbell has a button behind it that talks to a Bluetooth device that then sends a message to my Apple Home that it has a listener on it that then plays a sound on this speaker that is like nice and resonant. And then it connects to the the camera that I do have somewhere else hidden in a bush that shows me who's who's at the door. And it's very nerdy. And I think it's like just like an interesting example of how the old world and the new world can live together. Like it's a very high tech solution. I do store all of my video feeds like on a raid in my basement instead of up in the cloud with a service. And so that was one like moral position that I took.
32:59 Speaker 03 But also now you come to my door and you press the doorbell and you hear the bong bong that resonates through the house. And it makes me feel like I'm living in the house as it wants to be lived in and not in some weird Frankenstein version of it where I taped a contemporary smart doorbell to the door and kind of ruined the whole experience.
33:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, I loved it. It that was that to me was like both just true, great Vergecast lore and also just like you you've done an enormous amount of very modern work to make your house feel like it's supposed to.
33:33 Speaker 03 Yeah.
33:33 Speaker 00 It's like it's a just a good way to think about it.
33:35 Speaker 03 Yeah, for sure.
33:37 Speaker 00 All right, Ian, thank you so much for being here. This is great. I really appreciate it.
33:40 Speaker 03 Oh, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
33:42 Speaker 00 All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Ian for being here. Go buy his book. It's called The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life. It's out today, Tuesday, as you're listening to this. It's very good. It's pretty short. I highly recommend it. And of course, thank you as always for watching and listening. If you have thoughts, feedback, if you have other examples of this dematerialization and these sorts of sensory things, if there is something that you've experienced that feels the kind of way Ian is describing, I want to hear all about it. The Vergecast at theverge.com is the email. 866-VERGE11 is the hotline. Hit us up about anything and everything. As always, also, the best thing you can do to support everything The Verge is up to, for Ian, it's, you know, buy his book. For us, it's subscribe to The Verge. Theverge.com/subscribe. It gets you all of our podcasts ad-free. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters.
34:26 Speaker 00 It gets you all of our coverage of other things you can do than throw your phone in the ocean. Keep it locked. Theverge.com/subscribe. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This episode was produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Aaron LaCassio. We'll see you tomorrow. Rock and roll.
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