Comfort and convenience

For the last thirty years, the easiest shortcut has been convenience.

If a marketer or a politician or an institution wants to gain acceptance, make it convenient. Tim Wu has pointed out that we’ll trade almost anything to save a few moments of hassle or thought.

But that doesn’t mean we’ve been spending our time and money on comfort.

They’re not the same.

Convenience in the short run often comes at the expense of comfort. The comfort of resilience, of kindness, of long-term satisfaction. The comfort of offering someone dignity, a hand up or knowing that we put our effort into something useful.

Perhaps the next cycle of our cultural development will be to find the courage to walk away from convenience and find comfort instead.

May 2, 2024

What does reality look like?

Not what we see when we’re present, but what do we see when we imagine we’re present?

In the early days of photography, the world was black and white, and sort of flat. It’s worth noting that no one who saw these pictures complained about the fact that they didn’t exactly match what the world was like… it was normal.

Color changed our perception of what normal looked like.

Movies and then Technicolor made the world seem more vivid when it was normal.

But then we took a big step backward. YouTube, compressed MP3 files and grunge typography made the world a bit compressed and janky. When we’re surrounded by this all day, our tiny screens start to get under our skin and shift our perception of the world, the same way a pair of eyeglasses with a slightly incorrect prescription give us an ongoing headache.

Then AI comes along. First, it polishes our writing. Not just your writing, but the writing all around us. It gets more even and consistent. You may have noticed that there are far fewer spelling mistakes to annoy us than there used to be.

And next up, video:

The last century’s worth of video and film is about to snap into clarity and focus, challenging our memories of what it was like, and establishing a new reality.

After a few months, we won’t even notice.

May 1, 2024