A Simpler Life
While visiting people over the past few weeks, I noticed that they have a lot more stuff around the house than before. Holiday gifts aside, there were extra supplies, gadgets, or indoor equipment — whatever helped them to cope with the COVID pandemic has now become a surplus that they have a hard time getting rid of.
Looking around my room, I see that I have a few new possessions as well. They didn't quite distract me from the political fiasco and stress during the past few years (though I doubt anything short of induced coma would suffice), but I do have less clutter to deal with now. If I had succumbed to my desires, I would have added a few more merchandise to my collection of dust-gathering-things.
At some point, I just realized that getting the things I want don't always make me happy.
Take books, for example: I derive far more joy in reading books than collecting them. Ideas and stories are rich in value and light in weight, but book ownership works the opposite way.
Despite my fondness for books, owning fewer of them has made me feel more at ease. Libraries are great for this reason: not only I can borrow books, so that I have fewer possessions to worry about when I move, I also end up saving more money and contribute less to waste production in the long run. (You can even loan audiobooks for free.)
And the more I think about this idea of "less is more", the more I begin to see it in other areas of my life.
Decisions, Decisions
Let's be clear: I still wish for material goods and I'm eager to seek wealth.
What I dislike is having conform to clichéd expectations: I don't care to own a mansion and I have no desire to spend time in luxury resorts. It'd be helpful to have the wealth to do so, I just don't have the desire to flaunt it.
And then, there's the prevalent issue of behavioral marketing and advertising. None of us really need to own the latest and trendiest things, whether it's clothing, game consoles, or digital subscriptions. In a world already full of stimuli, the last thing that we need is to wire our brain to more activities that elicit Pavlovian responses.
There are all sorts of expectations and nudges that influence how we make decisions on a daily basis. We want to believe that we have the free will to choose what's best for us, but we're already locked in invisible social and cultural confinements in the first place.
(Take diamonds, for example: even having known about the backstory of diamond marketing, many still consider it to be the better choice for jewelries — despite there are rarer gemstones available.)
Is this a direct jab at consumerism? Well, yes, because I don't consider a life of consumption to be a good way to live.
I tell my younger peers to seek to increase their income, but that doesn't mean that I support their use of added wealth to maximize consumption; I advocate wealth-seeking because many people come from an economically disadvantaged background, and I aim to better equalize the playing field. But if possible, I'd rather see more of that money directed at meaningful agendas rather than be used to increase consumption.
Modern Technologies, Modern Problems
I'm often reminded of the bearer vs firearm analogy when it comes to how we approach technologies. Some say that social media would induce harmful behaviors one way or another, while some insist that their operating organization is the one responsible for promoting a balanced usage.
Regardless of how we view these creations, it's clear that they have already left significant footprints in our society...
And, I do think smartphones are bad for us.
I know — I sure sound like a tech doomer when I say that, but I don't think this is the same claim as the "TVs are making people dumb" one in the 60s-70s. We're no longer dealing with regulated mass communication delivered through expensive, stationary electronics. Even in the most remote parts of the world today, there are people who own a palm-sized device that allows them to access the internet, consuming contents that range from somewhat reliable to entirely untrustworthy.
(While misinformation and disinformation were already abound prior to the arrival of smartphones, the affordability and ease of use of these devices have exacerbated their spread. The problem? Most people aren't equipped with even a modicum of media literacy skills to scrutinize the contents they consume, so they easily buy into and promote false information.)
While smartphones may offer many great conveniences, we lack the means to manage how they influence us once they are introduced into our life. In some circumstances, not owning a smartphone or not signing up for certain services could even lead to social ostracization or disadvantage, think professional networking and job search — if you had chosen to not make a LinkedIn account, what do you do when a referrer asks you to sign up for one?
Partly, this also stems from the fact that there isn't a human-centric smartphone ecosystem for consumers: all the commonly available brands are proprietary hardware loaded with partially closed-source software and bundled with invasive analytics. While there are open source alternatives to choose from, they often lack polish or require the owners to be technically well-versed, which makes it even more difficult for average users to switch to them.
About a decade and a half ago, smartphones were just brilliant inventions. But this was also before social media companies became tech Goliaths and tracking technologies became mature enough to serve their agendas. Smartphones nowadays are no longer meant to just enrich our lives; they are designed to track us and exploit our behaviors for commercial means. In today's world of data economy, devices and apps gather activity data and push ads one way or another, because most corporations' business interests — and the political backing of the countries they operate in — are at odds with healthy user behaviors.
I grew up with dumbphones, so I do appreciate having a palm-sized computer that can fit right into one hand; I wouldn't want to go back to lugging a brick around in my wallet. But despite the myriad of benefits that smartphones offer, it's hard for me to see them in an entirely positive light.
Behavioral Influences
Most of us belong to the generation of adults who grew up with access to internet and social media, and we're welcoming the next group that's born into the world of immersive virtual worlds and smart gadgets. The past twenty years have been an exciting time for behavioral and developmental psychology researchers, though their findings aren't so encouraging.
Growing up, I was quite addicted to online games, so much so that I would skip lunch and save my money to pay for the fees at net cafes. (Or I would wake up in the middle of the night to sneak to my dad's office, only to get a proper beating the next day.) My behaviors were out of my control: there were days that went by in a blur; all I could remember were events that transpired in the game world, barely recalling anything that happened in real life.
It alarms me that many of today's digital platforms have a familiar scent: they employ similar mechanisms that are found in popular online games, but wrapped in a different package.
While consumption and ownership of physical goods never slowed down, consumption of digital contents, especially user-generated ones on social media platforms, have surpassed it by many more folds. Coupled with the availability of smartphones, it's easier than ever for people to access digital contents anywhere at anytime.
Nowadays, whenever I notice someone else swiping through their phone without a purpose, I'm reminded of my younger self sprinting to net cafes — only this time, I'm witnessing adults driven by unconscious triggers and FOMO.
But I'm particularly concerned that young parents are unaware of how tech products are affecting their children, considering that the effects are many magnitudes more potent on developing minds. For those of us who were nurtured in the pre-smartphone era, we know that there's a healthier, despite somewhat less convenient, lifestyle choice. The current generation is born right into a world overloaded with stimuli — they don't have a non-gadget alternative to compare to. Whenever I shop for groceries, I would see children entertaining themselves with a smartphone or tablet, while their parents are busying about doing other things.
(Despite the reporting of virtual gambling systems in freemium games, tons of parents are uninformed of the issue. Heck, the adults are often the ones spending big bucks themselves.)
I can't imagine that I would fare any better if I were in those parents' position, having read about how demanding it is to raise children. But I can't help but to also wonder if the adults are oblivious of the consequences of their decisions... only time will tell, I guess.
An Anxious Life
Some weeks ago, I came across a skit that parodies productivity driven tech workers. The discomforting part is that it reminded me a little too much of my former self and coworkers.
This symptom of "striving to be efficient but not at all productive, trying to be mindful but not at all aware" are — based on my experiences — caused by over-optimization and mis-quantification of the different aspects of our life.
There are many apps and services that claim to help us reduce inefficiencies, but in practice, they are incapable of making wise decisions on our behalf. Much like a driver sweating to calculate the shortest path through a tight urban traffic — when the simpler answer would've been to just take a detour from the beginning or to leave at a less busy hour. This kind of perceived enhancement is often a selling point of, unsurprisingly, productivity apps. They may be able to automate your schedules or make time-saving recommendations based on your activities, but they could also just bring more complexity instead.
In sciences, there is a long history of turning abstract ideas into measurable concepts. Take temperature, for example, where Fahrenheit and Celsius are measurements used to convey the idea of hotness and coldness in numbers. This transformation involves a lot of careful thinking and experimenting, because it's easy to lose meaningful details of an idea when we turn them into numbers.
But the misuse of quantification is often what happens in the real world. A common case of this is when employers use "hours spent at work" as a proxy to measure the idea of "amount of work done": while counting hours may be applicable for simple manual labor like moving boxes, it's nonsensical for creative work such as composing or writing. Yet, if you just pay attention to numbers that you come across on a day-to-day basis, you will realize that is is a rather common occurrence. Grades and crime statistics are two other good examples.
Unlike the behaviors I mentioned in previous sections, habits driven by over-optimization and mis-quantification aren't perceived to be negative. How can being productive and tracking your activities be considered harmful? The abundance of related apps certainly reflect their popularity among consumers.
It's normal to want to write down our daily plans in order to keep track of them. But when your task management app awards you a cutesy "100% done" sticker for crossing off tasks, send you regular notifications in the form of encouraging pep talks, and have different levels of exclusive features locked behind subscription tiers, you should be cautious of whether it's helping you to become more organized — or is it just trying to get you to become a paying customer.
While few of us would choose to live a more frantic life, the datafication of our life inadvertently make us so. Even if the technologies themselves are neutral, the resulting side effects (whether or not by design) should warrant more of our attention.
Musings
Truth to be told, there are probably not that many people who would turn down this new way of life — once you're conditioned to the ease and behavioral influences, it's rather hard to give it up.
As much as I can appreciate the benefits, I think I would prefer to live without most of them, given that this lifestyle is only maintained through purchasing of newer and newer products. Recall what I wrote in the intro: I'm more interested in the value brought on by the goods rather than the economic value associated with their ownership. It's one fewer reason to own those products when there are almost as many downsides as there are upsides.
(Plus, reduction of physical clutter does also help to reduce stress. I don't mean "get rid of things at all cost"; it's to become conscious of what you choose to own in the first place. Also: repair is noble.)
As for digital technologies, while they may offer ease of access compared to their physical counterparts, it's debatable whether they will complicate or simplify our life. For one, owning additional accounts means that we will have more things to manage and protect. Synchronizing different schedules with a feature-packed online app is easier, but it may not be simpler than using our computer's own calendar software or using a physical planner.
Ultimately, it's worth paying a closer attention to the influence of services and products on our behaviors, especially those that seek to exploit and manipulative our natural tendencies. It'd be wise to stay away from anything that employs similar tactics to get us to spend more time and money than we need to.
I'd like to think that a simpler life is, indeed, a better life.