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- Hacker News
- I can’t imagine ever affording such a nice apartment.by GPerson
- The fanciness is mostly decorations, which can cost a huge amount but don't have to, especially if you buy secondhand.by QuercusMax
- In the US, it's pretty easy. My wife used to live in the Tenderloin for $2400/mo and her place was nicer than this because she was good at putting things together. I don't happen to have a photo of the whole studio handy, but here's the view from the window: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/b/b7/Photo_-_San_Fran...by arjie
- That's a super tiny apartment. The niceness comes from caring, not from money.by boxed
- At least in whatever apartment you can afford you won't trip constantly due to each of the four rooms having slightly different floor heights. And you won't have a wall that extends into another room but somehow not take up the space, like you're in some perpetual "House of Blue Leaves"-esque horror. Your apartment will be real and not made by AI.by garciansmith
- I think about this stuff a lot. It's crazy how I, like, water plants with clean water that's literally on tap. Warm showers on-demand are a daily miracle.
Immediate illumination for why people don't quite feel like royalty despite all this would be achieved by replacing the aesthetic of this presentation with mis-matched uncomfortable and ugly furniture picked up off the side of the road, in a cheap split-level or ratty single wide with carpet that should have been replaced a decade ago and fucked-up window blinds et c., a kitchen table piled with a mess of homework and a pile of 20 medical bills and "EOB" letters and crap generated by a single brief visit to a hospital some of which are almost certainly in error and will take hours on the phone to correct, and so on. The presentation is upper-middle-class and comfy as hell. It's an aesthetic that my family is only slowly and haltingly and with much bargain-hunting (even Ikea is kinda spendy, IMO) struggling toward even with top-10% (for the US, let alone globally!) household income, and will never quite achieve because reality doesn't look like that. I know it's not the main point of the site, but the way they've elected to illustrate this notion is interesting in that it suggests a critique of, or elaboration on, the actual main point.
Like, I'm scrolling through this and my thoughts are on how expensive this environment is. I don't have my spices in cute well-sealing matching jars that look nice on a shelf... because that shit's expensive. Mine are mostly stale... because non-stale spices are expensive and take effort and education to track down. Hell some of mine are probably contaminated with heavy metals and I don't know it. Behind all of this is price-anxiety and ambient stress.
The core idea is sound and worth highlighting, but the reality of "so much is available extremely cheap in nearly unlimited quantity and variety! Isn't that fantastically amazing!" is exhausted parents doom-scrolling the Netflix catalog for an hour before going to bed having watched nothing, as they stress about whether their kids' dental appointment tomorrow is going to turn up anything so expensive they have to defer it and scrimp and save to pay for it.
by incorporeal - If we could somehow start getting the upper-middle class and the upper class, and the upper-upper class to appreciate the ordinary abundance, it might cure them of the greed that drives wealth extraction at the detriment of those in lower classes. Like if everyone in the healthcare industry, from clinician to supplier to R&D to administrators, were satisfied with an ordinarily abundant life, then those medical bills wouldn't be so high in the first place. We're technologically capable of giving every human this ordinary comfort, security against crisis, and 30 hour work weeks.by goda90
- > "...doom-scrolling..."
This may be the load-bearing point of your lament.
by MarkusQ - >Mine are mostly stale... because non-stale spices are expensive and take effort and education to track down.
Not really though. The spices at the grocery store are not stale when you buy them, and will not go stale for 1-2 years once opened. If your spices are stale it's because you don't cook very often and you aren't using them up.
Also let's keep in mind that people had even less furniture in the past, and much of it you had to build yourself out of trees you cut down yourself. Healthcare was leeches and dental care was nonexistent. These "basic human rights" were incredible luxuries only a century or two ago.
by Legend2440 - Wonderful, and even misses a lot of things! Glass windows that let light in but not cold and rain. Smokeless cooking. Mattresses that don't need to be fluffed up. We're accustomed to so, so many things. Toilets!by riffraff
- Air conditioning!by lisper
- Just the computer on which you're typing this comment! The amount of crazy stuff happening every time you type a key is mindblowingby hacb
- Many people in low income countries still lack every item on this list except for smallpox eradication and the sewing machine (indirectly, through imported second hand clothing).
One thing that I have found very interesting is reading what recipients of direct cash transfers do with the money: https://live.givedirectly.org
These are some of the worlds poorest people who get a transfer of several hundred to a thousand dollars via a charity called Give Directly. Although most of the money gets invested into business ventures, one interesting thing that comes up frequently is people buying straw mattresses for $20-30. The people who do this were frequently sleeping on hard dirt before getting the money.
by elil17 - I love the animation on the website. In a world where everyone is complaining about everything, it's nice to see a post like this. Also it reminded me how grateful I should be for the comfortable life I'm living, thank you for that.
- My 87 year old grandma drives her Suzuki Alto from 2000 to her cottage on a hill in the forest. It's a log cabin, 200+ years old. No running water, no electricity except a gas driven generator that powers a pump, and sometimes power tools. There is a lake down the hill for washing oneself and candlelight. Since a few years there is a gas powered tiny fridge, before we only had a cool concrete food storage basement. Now the sandwiches taste normal, storing butter in summer would give a light sourness to them. My grandmothers ex boyfriend installed a solar panel, just enough to charge phones.
Being there for a longer time and coming back to normal life makes you really see what is necessary and not. Also how much work life was in the olden times.
by olelele - The same on a smaller scale happened with modern consumer computing. We like to complain but
* have OLED screens and dark modes which are amazing after sundown,
* virtually everything works on Linux, especially all effectively mandatory/government services (at least here in Poland),
* and with some hardware selection Linux works everywhere,
* batteries last ages and everything can be charged via USB-C,
* smartphone cameras now finally exceed my own vision, have amazing zoom and take great nighttime photos (although not of moving stuff yet),
* the ecosystem allows to magically summon a car,
* can have an e2e encrypted multimodal (video, photos, documents, text) conversation with virtually everyone we know, wherever they are in the world, live or asynchronously,
* not to mention LLMs just doing things for you like a tireless assistant.
All of these were a dream when I first set up a home server in 2004. Some like OLED were a dream I didn't even know I had, the LCD glow just annoyed me.
by blfr - This is an interesting premise, and I would like to read the article, but the weird scrolling makes that almost impossible; the pictures overlay the text to such an extent that I can only read a couple of lines at a time. I wish there were some browser feature that would force sites to use normal scrolling.by marssaxman
- Reader modeby carlosjobim
- I found the problem: the site can't handle a portrait-ratio browser window like I always use. After stretching the window out wide, the layout works.by marssaxman
- For me, the images and text are out of sync; by the time the focus in the image has moved to the next item, the text is already hidden under the image.by pimlottc
- This is so ironically on point.
I recall reading a shampoo bottle in the bathroom maybe 25 years ago because there was nothing else to read.
Meanwhile now you are correctly complaining about how weird the scrolling feels like.
by Aperocky - For the last year I've been on well water for the first time in my life. High iron, manganese and iron bacteria - safe, but tasted eggy and ruined shower heads, dishwashers, clothes, washing machine, kettles...
I just finished installing a whole-house filter & softener system and everyone is delighted. I told my kids that once a month we're going to serve untreated well-water with dinner, so we stay grateful for it.
by stuporglue - As a fellow filtered well-water maintainer... just give it time. Even the best filtration systems break down. There are lots of moving parts to keep that water clean. Odds are you'll see or smell that brown water soon enough!by snide
- I like this form of parenting. Make your life better for your kids, but reintroduce some challenge so that they learn to appreciate the comforts of life.by euthymiclabs
- To put a name on what a lot of folks in this thread are describing (I didn't see the term mentioned in the article): Negative Visualization [1].
Basically imagining living life without a given luxury (hot water, infinite music on tap, functioning eyesight, etc), really internalizing that feeling, and then practicing gratitude for the fact that you do indeed have that thing.
by abound - I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. For the last month I’ve been living in a camper van, working and traveling, which I’m really lucky to be able to do by choice. It’s lonely to be sure, but I also feel mentally far more resilient than I have in ages, and I’m trying to figure out why.
Being in nature is good for us, so that’s probably part of it, as is the constant practice of being self-reliant.
Another theory is friction. I can’t just roll out of bed to the couch, and back. I don’t have a fixed place to shower, so I swim in a river most days, and usually it’s freezing. Camping alone was terrifying at first, but objectively not that dangerous and not worth worrying about. All these little moments are a chance to exercise that mental muscle to do uncomfortable things.
Modern life is devoid of this friction. I could try to take a cold shower every day, but a not-cold one is just a turn of the wrist away. I could try to make myself go outside a bit every day, but I don’t need to.
This isn’t a new observation, but I can’t believe how stark the contrast is. I’m getting stuff done that I’ve been procrastinating on for years.
by physicles - but you might projecting deep purpose and meaning to your travails that you are subjecting yourself out of pure choice.
your heart knows that you can go back to comfortable modern life whenever you please so you wont really experience the pain that comes from hopelessness which i belive is really needed ingriedient to humble you.
by dominotw - Environmental design!
Make it so the path of least resistance takes you exactly where you want to go.
by andai - just don't go full-on chris mccandless
EDIT:
by m463 - Hedonic adaptation really is something. I have been deeply trying to appreciate these modern marvels more and more, but it's hard.
A hot shower, air almost 50 degrees cooler than the outside air coming out of my vents, communicating instantly thousands of miles away, it's all so easy to just forget and take for granted
by carlgreene