Preconfigured To Seek Convenience?
Walking on the treadmill last night I was in one of those meditative flow states. The ones where you're at total peace, and letting your mind wander and entertain itself. A random shower-thought emerged: are we just preconfigured to seek convenience?
Entertaining the idea, I remembered early internet forums. To create a forum for a niche interest you had to do a little extra work, either using prebuilt software/coding it yourself and then rent some hosting.
Nowadays you'd make a discord server and start sending out invites. In a similar fashion, we had the same thing happen with Facebook groups (before discord) replacing things like fansites.
Outside the internet, we added a bunch of electronics and software to cars. Most modern cars will scream at us to change our oil after x miles/kilometers. Whereas before, we'd look at the odometer and decide if the old Honda deserves some fresh engine juice.
Thirty minutes prior to getting on the treadmill I was doing some coding. The standard library had everything I could have needed. But a library existed that made it easier. That wasn't enough, so I added abstractions on certain parts of that library to make it faster for me to code. Why? Convenience.
I don't know how I feel about all this. I don't consider it all bad per se (except the cars, give me back old manual-transmission cars). It all has trade offs.
We can make our fansites/forums easier. But we gave up decentralized sites, and control, to centralized platforms. Modern cars are cool. But are subject to bizarre crap like locking you out of repairing break pads (looking at you, Hyundai). I get to write code quicker. But if someone else has to read it, there might be a tiny bit more cognitive overhead with my arguably lazy abstractions.
Makes me wonder if we're just hard-coded like this. Our brains rejoicing when we find something that's even slightly more efficient than what we were previously engaged with. A new shiny thing that lends to efficiency, a paradigm shift from old to new. And on and on it'll go.