It's worth noting that not everything that's good for you is enjoyable, especially in the moment.
Avoiding everything that's a "drag" means staying alone, passively consuming easy media, not exercising, eating hyper-palatble junk food, getting obese and probably depressed, etc.
> I should note that their life in the 70s (in a middle-class college town) was not some idyllic paradise without the Internet, either. Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu, and days were spent running dreary errands to shop for boring things that we now can get with a click. The rotary-dial telephone that hung in the kitchen was the heartbeat of the house, since replaced by Facebook and smartphones.
While I agree that those cloying clickbait articles/videos idealizing random pre-smartphone teen photos and videos are obnoxious (as someone who grew up in that era). I think the modern emphasis on mindlessly reducing "friction" is going to prove ultimately unwise, though probably uncorrected as generational turnover causes people to forget what was lost, and certain degradation gets redefined as "normal" and accepted.
> My parents were always busy and exhausted.
So are modern parents, and all indications are they are more exhausted.
An accessible intro is Michael Easter's book The Comfort Crisis, which, while a little pop-sciencey, explores the idea that making our lives more and more comfortable (across various axes) creates a feedback cycle that shrinks our comfort zones, making some of the more rewarding (but potentially challenging/uncomfortable) things in life seem unthinkable.
For me this was a bit of a "once you've seen it you can't unsee it" kind of thing. Letting convenience be your primary metric for success often produces totally unsatisfying results, anywhere from how you build cities to the way you eat a meal.
The arc of the original World of Warcraft (broader social impacts aside) is an interesting microcosm to explore: players continually asked for convenience features that would simplify the most tedious aspects of the game and reduce social friction (organizing groups, traveling etc), but as they made things more convenient over the years, many people found that the game actually began to lose something important. The response culminated in a very successful re-release of the original, inconvenient, game after 15 years.
Look up universe 25 and mouse utopia experiments. Exactly predicted this.
Comfort is also correlated to it, but I don't think it's exactly it either. A/C is very comfortable, and certainly there are psychological and physiological downsides to it. But I don't think there's any major rewarding experiences which A/C makes impossible or unthinkable. Maybe the taste of a cool glass of water after working all day in the hot sun? Some amount of resilience to high heat which makes traveling in hot places slightly more enjoyable? Experiencing the changing seasons more directly and consistently than just seeing a changing set of colors out your window? None of these are exactly trivial, but it doesn't seem like "optimizing for comfort removes all the color from life" is exactly right either.
Maybe it's just that suffering just for suffering's sake doesn't do anything. If you were in the universe where all houses are magically air conditioned 24/7 and offered to build a machine to make them uncomfortably hot for 4 months a year and uncomfortably cold for another 4 months a year, selling on the idea that, you know, variety is the spice of life, a little constant hardship toughens you up, I don't think anybody would buy that on its own.
But clearly people DO seem to go kind of crazy without pressure and challenges, whether you frame it as "convenience" or "comfort" or "eustress deficiency" or whatever. There's an entire category of hobbies and interests that are entirely based around doing uncomfortable or dangerous or stressful things (thrill-seeking). And even things like weightlifting, marathons, saunas, physically stressful things are often pleasurable and seem to obviously build character and resilience outside of just the act of lifting heavy things until it hurts too much to continue. I think weightlifting is a good analogy; hardly anyone would lift weights if there was no extrinsic reward at the end of it (e.g. health, vanity, bragging rights). The important thing isn't the inconvenience and uncomfortableness of lifting weights, it's something else.
Maybe "responsibility"? "self-actualization"? I think that's maybe closer to it.
The AC thing interests me as a topic–purely my opinion, but I do think that living in a very narrow temperature range changes your relationship with the outside world, and there's all sorts of good stuff to be done outside that's much harder to get motivated to do if the delta with what you're used to is too big.
As an anecdote: I mostly disliked hot weather in the past, but years ago when I got hooked on running, I found that I disliked the treadmill more than the heat, so I ran outside through a muggy NYC summer. It was miserable to get started but got a bit easier every year, and over time I've noticed, from the digital thermometer on my desk, that the temperature where I have to stop working and turn the AC on has slowly crept upwards. My running club puts on a 5k summer race series–if you'd asked me 10 years ago whether I'd want to run up a hill in the swampy Brooklyn heat every other Wednesday, I would have laughed out loud at the absurdity of the idea–but today it is genuinely something I love, and has been a highlight of my year for several years now.
All that to say, your point about suffering for suffering's sake stands: I cannot sleep without AC above a certain temperature/humidity, and I don't see any reason to force myself to suffer through restless sweaty nights. On the flip-side, though... I have never had more visceral, euphoric appreciation for the comforts of modern life than after a cold and drizzly backpacking trip where we spent the entire time damp and never really, fully warmed up for multiple days. 20-something years later I have the most vivid memory of getting in a hot shower when we got home.
100%.. people tend to understand this much better with physical exercise.
Social connections have as much of an impact on mortality as e.g. smoking [1].
Yes, quitting smoking, working out, and talking to people is not pleasant - it is also healthy and good for you.
When I was an obese smoker who avoided people, I was stressed out by a lot of other things going on. As soon as those stressors were gone, the bad habits also went away without so much effort.
It's worth considering how many of these perceptions of "discomfort" are caused by other aspects of culture, not nature or nationality or era. All my stress was coming from trying way too hard as an insecure younger person.
I don’t enjoy going to the gym, but I love swimming and hiking, and love that. I haven’t worked out in a gym for years, I don’t want to, and I’m quite healthy and reasonably active.
Some people are just introverts, and I think the ‘optimal’ amount of IRL time is different for every individual. Much like my gym vs swimming example; quality social interaction can take many forms; some of my closest and most meaningful friendships over decades have been based on games (voice calls; discord chats; hanging out in person sometimes and going on trips together sometimes), and that works for me; and I don’t think I’m missing anything.
Prioritise genuine human and social interaction, and for introverts, get out of the comfort zone once in a while (being a hermit is not good). But whatever form that takes is secondary to the quality and how it fits your personality and quirks.
> I don’t enjoy going to the gym, but I love swimming and hiking, and love that. I haven’t worked out in a gym for years, I don’t want to, and I’m quite healthy and reasonably active.
But that's a problem of the modern low-friction era. If cars hadn't been invented and you had to walk/carry things everywhere it wouldn't matter. No 10,000 steps nonsense. No what do I enjoy better: weights or swimming or hiking? You'd get a lot of exercise by just going about your life.
> Some people are just introverts, and I think the ‘optimal’ amount of IRL time is different for every individual.
I am an introvert, and a big basis of my comment is the personal realization that my drive to get IRL social time was actually insufficient to give me the amount of IRL social time I needed. I'm a lot happier if it's foisted on me and I have less control.
I always wonder if people say these things actually believe it.
Like are there people who really prefer junk food over good food even in the moment, or have to get their will power up to read a good book?
It just seems a sentiment that is so foreign to my exisetence.
Yes these people are more common than not.
I was once so depressed that I didn't leave my room except to use the bathroom for months, and in that time I developed lethargy so extreme that I couldn't even play causal FPS video games competently. My brain simply didn't work as well, despite having all the calories it needed.
30+ years forward, I moved to a new country, and we only have one kid. We haven't had this kind of big dinner for decades since my grandma passed away in the late 90s.
The families are getting smaller and more atomized, so only people who are VERY into big dinners throw them.
I am retired now and lucky to have my (now adult) children living nearby. Every Friday I cook a large pizza dinner for everyone, their spouses, and their children, and any friends they want to invite. I will always be an introvert, but this weekly meal is the highlight of my week.
The difference between this and what my parents did is that I host for my own pleasure and for what it does to bind the family together. I don't expect reciprocal invitations, and no obligation is ever implied (I hope).
Hopefully it helps the next generation stay connected and maybe your kids pick up this habit when older and it becomes a tradition.
TBH, if I were to retire today, I'd love to do that, too. I only have one son, so probably it's not going to be a big dinner, but I'd also invite friends of the family, too.
My grandma had four kids who all married and gave her ten nephews in total. On new year's eve we had this large dinners where pretty much 20 people gathered (sometimes more, when nephews got old enough to bring their partner OR some other uncle/aunt from other sides of the family joined).
That’s just anyone who has small kids. Or works in healthcare, childcare, or any service industry really. It has nothing to do with 1975 vs 2025 (unless you’re one of the small amount of people who work remotely, and you don’t have kids or a spouse who falls into one of the above categories).
Also after a few years you stop getting so many colds.
Simultaneously, air pollution is down, which lowers symptoms.
So it wouldn't surprise me if respiratory incidence is down. Of course there were also more kids in the 1970s, to your point.
That’s very likely true.
> one big difference is indoor air ventilation standards improved dramatically, leading to less spread of disease indoors.
I don’t know if this is. In 1975 air conditioning was much less prevalent, so people were much more likely to open windows. Buildings were also much leakier.
And it’s not simple as building ventilation has steadily improved, so teasing out the impact is almost impossible. In the 80s there was a big push for energy efficiency, so we went from 15 cfm/person in 1973 to 5 in 1981 then back to 20 in 1989.
But building envelopes also got much tighter, so there’s less uncontrolled ventilation.
I think respiratory flu is far less common now than it was. I have had a legit case of the flu only once in my adult life. After spending 15 years teaching in a public school, I had countless colds but never caught the flu. Of course, annual flu vaccines might have helped. Those weren't available in the 70s.
Strep throat was also a very common complaint in the letters. Throat cultures, home visits from the pediatrician, etc., were frequent, especially for my brother. I haven't seen a single case of strep in my extended family since. Maybe just lucky.
Many things have improved over the decades, but we do have an array of exciting tick-borne illnesses to make up for it!
They’re not far less common in average. Rates have gone down a bit with the annual flu shot, but there’s a few things going on.
-Flu rates vary wildly by year and decade. There were a few big pandemics where a very large percentage of people got the flu.
-There was no way to easily test for the flu, so people said they had it more frequently than they did.
In a given year about 12% of kids will come down with symptomatic influence which is not too far off from what we can estimate that historic numbers were in an average year.
>Strep
I looked up studies on this. Nothing conclusive, but likely no large change.
Recommendations about when to test have changed though because it turns out that if you culture every kid with a runny nose a large percentage of them will come back positive even though their symptoms are viral.
So you’re probably right that you notice fewer diagnosed strep cases, but there aren’t actually fewer symptomatic cases.
They can be fun, but I and almost everyone that I'm friends with much prefer to simply visit and hang out with no plans at all. Just be there, maybe chat a bit, maybe ignore each other and read a book for a few hours, maybe find something to eat / do a lightweight potluck. Which rather sucked that COVID ended up shutting down almost all of our communal places to visit for that.
Then at some point middle class Americans began copying these sorts of upper-middle class styled parties (again, as a form of class signalling; maybe partially because all the rich people in the movies and on TV and in magazines are doing it, and you want to seem like them), but Americans also fancied themselves as classless egalitarians, so it didn't really keep because the whole "conspicuous consumption" clashes with modern suburban ideals.
understandable, but if you think about it, it's kinda the price of keeping your "social network" alive. people nowadays understand that romantic relationships need maintenance and effort, but don't (yet?) understand that friendship require at least some maintenance as well. i guess that was even true-r before social media when you weren't constantly updated about what happened in friend X, Y and Z's lives.
most people nowadays don't really want to pay that price to keep relationships alive... and it's showing.
> My parents were always busy and exhausted.
what i'm about to write is absolutely anecdotical, but: i don't see people my age (30-40 years old) like super-relaxed either.
Nowadays, we definitely get together much less often but also it's usually at a restaurant.