Is Technology Making Our Lives Less Gratifying? (with Ian Bogost)

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Modern technology has generally made our lives faster, easier, and more convenient. But in swapping out stick shifts and paper menus for automatic transmissions and QR codes, have we accidentally optimized away many of the rich sensory experiences that make living so pleasurable?

Journalist, academic and award-winning video-game designer Ian Bogost joins host Jess Love to discuss insights from his book The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life. He makes the case that we’re losing some of the everyday pleasures of interacting with the world. But if technology has disconnected us from sensory gratification, can it also be part of the solution?

Life, Automated is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The host is Jess Love, senior director. Distributed by KQED.

The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life – Ian Bogost, Atria Books

Why Does Mario’s Jump Feel So Awesome – Game/Show, PBS Digital Studios

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Welcome to Life, Automated, the show where we explore what it means to live, work, and make decisions in a world increasingly shaped by machines Every spring and fall during migration season, I head to Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary here in Chicago. It’s this gorgeous strip of dunes and hedges and grasses hugging the side of Lake Michigan, a waypoint for hundreds of species of birds, and it’s hugely popular with birders, a lot of whom I’ve noticed walk through the sanctuary with their phones out.

They are almost certainly doing something related to birding, using popular apps like Merlin or eBird to ID bird calls or add to their own life lists. Or maybe they’re just taking pictures. I am aware of these possibilities because I, too, have downloaded these apps. I, too, am trying to take pictures. So here we all are on a beautiful, crisp morning with all of Lake Michigan on offer, and we’re staring at our phones.

I’m honestly not sure what to make of that. On the one hand, it’s birding. Whatever gets you out there, right? But on the other, what are we missing by letting technology mediate so much of this experience? I actually have this thought a lot because it’s not just birding. So much of modern life is mediated and warped by technology in ways we don’t always see because we’re just too close to it.

I knew I wanted to talk about this with Ian Bogost. Ian recently wrote a book called “The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life.” The book argues that we’re losing a lot of these sensory experiences that used to fill our everyday lives. As in the places we build, the objects we design, the technology we use.

Over time, in the name of convenience and efficiency, we’ve stripped them of a lot of texture, sights, sounds, physical sensations, all things that actually bring us a lot of joy. But here’s the thing. In addition to being a media scholar at Washington University in St. Louis and a journalist at The Atlantic, Ian is also a video game designer, hardly a Luddite. 

So have we traded some of the simple sensory pleasures of just being in the world for more streamlined bird identification, or is there more to it than that?

Life, Automated is a project of Kellogg’s Ryan Institute on Complexity distributed by KQED. I’m Jess Love and this is my conversation with Ian Bogost. I began by asking Ian if he could identify a moment when he first realized we’d lost some of the sensory pleasures of actually interacting with the world.

Ian Bogost: The big one, the one that’s easy to identify, is the one that I talk about in the book when I wrote this kinda monster story for The Atlantic about the stick shift, the end of the stick shift. It was a monster story in the sense that a lot of people read it, not that I thought it was gonna be important. I thought it was just a little thing, you know? And the reactions from that, just the volume of them, and the passion of people lamenting and remembering their experience controlling a machine in that way.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Ian was struck by the magnitude and variety of these responses. People really missed the stick shift, and it went beyond simple nostalgia. They missed these sensory moments, like the jerkiness of it all, seeing and feeling the gearshift move. Today’s automatic transmissions are more energy efficient than stick shifts ever were. They’re easier to learn. There’s no worrying about your clutch. Logically, there’s not really much to miss, and yet a lot of people still miss it and all the experiences that came along with it. 

Ian Bogost: And I was like, “Oh, okay. I see.” It’s like a family of experiences, and those… It’s not just one thing. It’s not just, like, being a gearhead or, like, wanting to control your vehicle. It’s rather that we’re surrounded by all of this stuff that seems like it’s just noise and that it’s something to get through to get to the big stuff, the good stuff. But no, those experiences matter, and they matter as first-order parts of our day-to-day lives, but then also our lives as a whole. And so it was that… That realization was confusing to me ’cause I didn’t feel like there was a name for it. I mean, I ended up naming it ‘gratification’ or borrowing the word gratification to name it. This thing that describes, like, what I call the sensory enchantment of everyday life. But I had this realization that we had all kind of agreed without agreeing that that stuff was not important, and so discovering that it was important and that it wasn’t just important to me but to everyone, that was really magical and enlightening and, kind of life-changing.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Gratification. That’s the term Ian gives to the magical, enlightening, and kind of life-changing sensory stuff that we encounter all day long, or at least that we used to encounter all day long but increasingly maybe aren’t getting quite as much of. 

Ian Bogost: So think about anything you do in your daily life. I mean, you have to go shopping for groceries. And, you know, in the past you’d have to make a list, and maybe you’d write that down on paper, on a piece of scratch paper with a pen that you particularly liked using, and then you’d put it in your pocket, and you’d sort of fold it up, and it would have a certain feel of the paper as it tore off.

And maybe the paper made a sound as you tore it. And then you’d get in your car, which maybe had a stick shift and maybe didn’t, but even if it didn’t, you’d turn the key in the ignition, and you’d press your foot down on the pedal, and you’d turn the knob on the radio physically as you drove to the store.

And you’d get the cart, and the cart wobbled a little bit, but you felt it underneath you and against the cold floor, beneath your feet, and then you’d touch the produce to figure out which ones met your desired level of ripeness and all the rest of it. And, you know, you can kind of fill in all those blanks.

So it’s like we automatically got this rich and diverse sensory experience just by doing things that we had to do every day. And we may not have thought of those things as desirable, like, “Ugh, I gotta go do the grocery shopping,” but since you had to go do it, you couldn’t just Instacart your way out of that problem, all this other stuff kind of came along for the ride.

So what we lost in part wasn’t just all of those sensory encounters I just mentioned, but the very idea that they were being delivered to us continuously, so much so that we almost didn’t notice them happening. And there’s so many other examples of this, right? Like the feel of an old school Western Electric style telephone handset, the heft of it, the kind of intimacy of your voice in your own ear and against your mouth, the ability to smash it down on the hook to hang it up, the sound of the ring, the quality of the sound along the copper line, the feeling of dialing the rotary mechanism or pressing the touch tone buttons.

It’s like that was just what making a phone call was, you know? And now it’s like, well, I’ve got this phone and the… and this has an app for a phone app on it, and it doesn’t really work well, but, like, that’s… But I, and I hate making phone calls anyway. It’s like, well, maybe what you hate is the experience that phone calls evolved into and the fact that they were so sensorily bereft that you didn’t even wanna pursue them.

And then it’s like a digital line, and it’s always dropping, and you can’t hear someone anyway and all, and all the rest of it. So, I found that people love identifying and talking about these, these feelings of sensory life that they remember but have lost. And the big thing, the big collective thing is they just happened automatically. They just happened to you. They were a part of the texture and the background noise of daily life, and then they weren’t. anymore. Like during the pandemic when all of us stopped going places, and we worked from home, and we ordered delivery all the time, and, QR codes for menus became a thing. And now you go to a restaurant, and you still have a QR code maybe for a menu, and you feel in your head and in your heart and in your fingertips, you’re like, “I want a menu,” but that’s not reasonable anymore to want. Even some of it is just like a place to live spatially while you’re looking at it, and to kind of distance yourself from this device you use all the time, and to peruse this artifact that is distinctive for the restaurant you’re in, or to spill salsa on it as you’re waiting to order. Whatever you know, whatever delight happens to you, all of that just happened. It was just right there all the time, and then it wasn’t anymore. So it’s like we didn’t even know what we were losing because we didn’t notice losing it. 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Listening to Ian speak, I realize how rare it is to hear someone actually describe these sensations, at least outside of a poem. The feel of a paper menu between your thumb and forefinger, the satisfaction of turning a key and feeling a motor roaring to life underneath you, rumbling your seat. It feels so intimate, almost vulgar. Like, wow, Ian, getting a little personal here, aren’t we? But maybe that’s just me. Look at me. I work at a university. I spend most days sitting in front of a computer, reading words, pressing keys, reading more words, and I do this around a lot of other people who are also sitting in front of computers, reading and typing. Am I unusually deprived of these everyday sensory pleasures, like some poor neglected houseplant assuming everyone else is as thirsty as I am? 

Ian Bogost: Well, the simple answer is this is everywhere. This dematerializing effect is everywhere and affects everyone. It affects us in different ways depending on all matter of factors, socioeconomics, where we live, the kind of job we have, the kind of life we lead, whether you have kids or not…what sort of vehicle you drive or if you don’t. All of these factors play in. 

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Ian says that, yeah, sure, some jobs lend themselves to more gratifying experiences than others, but technology is changing a lot of these jobs too, generally in ways that make them less gratifying. 

Ian Bogost: So we’re all in it together, I think. I think we’re in it differently together. And I think that, you know, but it’s not something where it’s like, “Well, I don’t make enough money to worry about being gratified.” Like, no, do you have a human body and live in the physical world? Then this is something of concern and interest to you. It’s not an indulgence that you only undertake once your Maslow’s needs have been met. It is part of those needs.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: We have spent decades designing technology that’s faster, easier, more convenient, culminating in lives that we increasingly spend online with fewer reasons to interact with the physical world at all. And now maybe we’re dealing with some unintended and unwanted side effects. Well, one answer is to spend less time online, less time scrolling, fewer video games. And we do seem to be at a moment where at least some people are stepping back from these things. There’s apparently a 175% uptick in Etsy searches for beginner needlepoint kits. But is that the only way? Is the only answer here to retreat from modern technology? Or can technology provide its own kinds of sensory gratification? And of course, what the heck should we make of these birding apps? I try to get an answer after the break.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: I’ve been talking with Ian Bogost about how technology has allowed us to optimize away so many of the physical interactions that used to fill our lives with sensory gratification. But we increasingly live in digital and virtual worlds, and I want to understand whether gratification can be found here too.

Jess Love: A different kind of gratification perhaps, but sensory gratification all the same. And I figure if there’s one place to look, it might be video games. So is gratification one of the things that you think about when you are designing games and virtual worlds? 

Ian Bogost: It didn’t used to be. In fact, in some ways I wish I had realized this far sooner, that maybe the thing about games in particular… Look, games are purposeless. They don’t need to exist. They seem stupid because they don’t, like, get something. It’s not like an app. It’s like, oh, I’ve got this productivity tool, even if it, like, is kind of questionable in terms of whether it makes you more productive, like groupware like Slack or something. Like, we know that a game doesn’t make you more productive. All it does is distract you or give you something to do with your fingers and your hands while something else is happening. And if you think about some of the most popular, most compelling kinds of digital games, like Candy Crush, say, right? Like, why is it so delightful to just move gems or candies around so that they match and then to watch the little explosions when they take place in front of you? It’s not because that particular kind of artifact has meaning in the way that a novel or a film does, which is the way that some people in the games universe want to think of games as this inherited medium that does for the twenty-first century what cinema did for the twentieth or what the novel did for the nineteenth. But, like, it’s just a thing. It’s just, like, an apparatus that you can manipulate, you know, that you can engage with and interact with. It’s almost like games are this place where we can go to experience, among other things, the pureness of gratifying experience. And it doesn’t even have to be a digital game, right?

Like, I play backgammon many nights with my daughter. We have a backgammon set set up in our house in a kind of permanent way. And like, one reason we love it is just the sound and sight of the dice spinning against the table as they resolve, and the feel of the checkers under our fingertips and as they slide across the surface and of course, the opportunity to look one another in the eye and to be present in that particular way.

I think games are like these, these kind of strange mysteries that give us a reason to do that kind of stuff, that gratifying experience, without any outcome. It’s just that they’re very deeply misunderstood as such, including among the communities that play and make games deliberately. Like, for many, many years, my interest and focus as a game developer was about the meaning of games, like the idea that they could be meaningful and serious, and you could make, like, kind of documentarian games or games about politics or about complex social and political and infrastructural issues.

And I made a lot of those games, and I think they were interesting, but maybe I was wrong about what was fundamentally the most interesting thing about games and other kinds of digital experiences was just this opportunity to interact with this alien machine for no reason other than to feel what it’s like to interact with it.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Yeah. Why does it feel so satisfying to watch those brightly colored Tetris shapes disappear in satisfying poof when you line them up just right? Sure, there’s the goal-oriented pleasures of solving a puzzle, but there’s also the sensory pleasures of tapping your finger and having your entire visual field just rearrange itself, or hearing that celebratory little jingle. So clearly it is possible to find gratification behind a screen. A lot of gratification. While I was editing this episode, a colleague of mine sent me a YouTube video called “Why Does Mario’s Jump Feel So Awesome?” This video actually breaks down why Mario’s jump feels so awesome. 

[Audio of Why Does Mario’s Jump Feel So Awesome?]

What made the jump for Super Mario Brothers so groundbreaking is that it had its own specific physics.

Jess Love [Voicover]: But I still wonder, when do screens provide this kind of gratification and when do they just distract us from the real world with all of its sensory pleasures? Like, are we better off enjoying Mario’s awesome jumps or just, like, jumping ourselves?

Jess Love: So I’ve always been fascinated by these tech-mediated experiences that change how we actually experience the physical world. So example would be, we take out our phone, you’ve got your Merlin app, and that tells you what bird call you’re hearing. 

Ian Bogost: Yeah. 

Jess Love: Or maybe you’re just taking out your phone to take a picture of the bird. And on the one hand, this does kind of get us out of that moment, but on the other hand, maybe that’s what got us outdoors in the first place. And to, to put this in the idea of, of games here, I’m sure you’re familiar with Pokemon Go. Sure. So I recently took my eight-year-old to the Field Museum here in Chicago. The place was completely overrun by eight-year-olds all attending a Pokemon exhibit, and there was this virtual game overlaid over the, you know, physical museum. And I just, I was like, are these hybrid experiences, are they giving us, like, a path toward gratification or away from gratification?

Ian Bogost: There is a famous photographer, of the 20th century named, named Garry Winogrand, and there’s this, like, quite, quite famous quote from, from Garry Winogrand, who took, like, so many photographs that he didn’t even bother developing them all. There’s, like, rolls and rolls and rolls of undeveloped film found after Garry Winogrand’s death and he took so many almost indiscriminately took pictures. And he has this amazing quote that goes something like, “I take pictures to see what the world looks like photographed.” And what’s so impressive about that idea to me, what’s so clarifying about it, is that it tells you something obvious that nevertheless needed to be said, which is that the world is different from the photograph. And when you look at a scene and you’re seeing it with your eyes and in your body, that’s different from framing it inside the boundaries of a viewfinder or on the emulsion of a film, let alone all of the properties of that film and how it was focused through the particular optical instrument that did so.

And the two things are different from one another. So there’s the world, and there’s your photograph of it, and one doesn’t replace the other, and both are equally amazing and delightful in different ways. Now, if you lived your entire life without photography, having known that photography existed, I’m not talking about, like, before photography was invented, you’re – It would be a less rich life; because photographs give you a way of, of looking at not just the world, but objects themselves or images on screens as we use them today. That’s amazing. Now, this idea that we have, that we have to have to give up or trade one for the other, that is so fascinating. Like, oh, I’m only inspired to go into the physical world if I have an incentive in the form of Pokémon that I can search and collect. Like, there’s something weird about that, but there’s also something weird about saying, “Ah, that’s an impure way of experiencing the museum or your neighborhood or whatever,” that you’re only going out into it in order that you can collect these, you know, commercialized rare creatures. We can have it both ways, and the more we accept that we can have it both ways, and even that we must have it both ways, the better off we will be. Now, if you find yourself wanting to live always and fully and entirely in one of those spheres over the other, that’s where I think maybe it’s not that you’re doing something wrong.

I don’t want to make a moral judgment. It’s like you are missing out. If you met someone, and they were like, “Well, I just don’t engage with photography. Photography is not something that I want to partake of,” you’d be like, “I don’t even know what you mean. Like, what does that mean?”

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Ian really doesn’t want to offer a moral judgment here. You want to go birding or visit a museum and take your phone out? Go for it. We don’t have to see that experience as but a pale imitation of the one provided by the physical world. We can see it as its own thing and enjoy it on its own terms for what it has to offer. And maybe the best thing to do if we are gonna get all judgy here is try to have both experiences. I hear all this, and in my head, I’m kind of nodding along. But my producer Jesse was listening in and he wasn’t fully buying it. Like really? We really aren’t gonna judge someone for having a big day out and then just staring at their phone? Can’t we just admit that they are objectively missing out? 

Jesse Dukes: I think this is a riff on Jess’s question about the sort of hybrid experiences, the Merlin app, the Pokemon Go. And you know, when you answered it, you sort of declined to make a value judgment, you know, sort of outdoors versus apps, digital spaces. You know, one of the things I do if I have time at the end of my workday, I live near the beach, and so I’ll grab my camera or, sometimes a fishing rod, sometimes a surfboard, and I’ll spend some time by the ocean if I can manage to do that. 

Ian Bogost: Amazing. I’m very jealous. It’s wonderful. 

Jesse Dukes: Yeah. I mean, that’s why I live where I live.

Ian Bogost: Totally. 

Jesse Dukes: And I will sometimes see people who are enjoying the same space I’m enjoying, and the way they’re doing it is by taking photos of each other or taking selfies and posing and standing in different places, and then kind of experimenting with different lightings and different backdrops and sort of throwing the outfit out so it catches the light in an interesting way. And I feel kind of sad because these people are actually kind of closing themselves off to the experience. You know, I am imagining that they’re optimizing for Instagram or TikTok or something like that. 

Ian Bogost: Well, they probably are. You’re probably right that they are optimizing for social media engagement, which is a kind of goal setting and a kind of accomplishment or a kind of outcome-oriented living. But even your version of it, which is more internal, it’s more in your head, is still kind of goal-oriented, right? Like, I’m gonna go and commune with nature and the beach, and I’m gonna do so in a purer way. And the truth is probably that both of these activities have something new to offer us about the environment, the beach, the weather, whatever it is. Cause, like, think about the … I know what you mean by, you see them throwing their garments or they have an accessory or something and they want it to catch the wind and get that in the photo, and that’s not something you’re doing, right? Like, they’re encountering the light glinting off of the fabric or maybe their shoes or sandals are off and in the sand, and they’re experiencing that sensation.

And so the thing is always more than the thing, and one of the reasons I’m not, I’m trying to not to make judgment isn’t because I don’t have judgments to make. I think that’s the easiest thing to do. But just to, like, stop and recognize, okay, you know, taking pictures for Instagram involves a different set of sensory experiences, than taking, you know, documentarian photos for the purpose of collecting for an album or whatever.

And that those, like, those offer different delights. That feels not like more measured. It’s not like it’s more Aristotelian, which maybe it is. It’s more just like “Huh, I wonder what it’s like to try the other thing.” Maybe I should, maybe I should be open to it if the, if the opportunity arises, or maybe at the very least, I should admit to myself that every act has a sensory payload, and that sensory payload is what I’m really interested in as the gratifying experience separate from the value or the fact of the outcome it produces.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Every act has a sensory payload separate from the outcome it produces. I like this a lot. Even in our increasingly slick, scentless, dial-less, lever-less, paperless, outcome-focused world, there is still no shortage of gratifying experiences on offer, and we don’t have to throw away our screens to find them. We just have to be a lot more intentional about recognizing them wherever they are, and maybe occasionally seeking out some new ones too, so we aren’t all just getting the same kind of sensory payload all the time. Because it really is about variety, and variety is exactly what we stand to lose when our lives are being streamlined for maximal efficiency.

Ian Bogost: Just, like, think about the nature of the sensory life that’s really easy and common for you. Like, you know, if you drive to work every day and you’re spending a lot of time in your car, and then you work an office job where you’re moving symbols around, on computers and through networks, then it’s not so much like that you need to get outside or you need to be in nature or something like that, or you need to bike instead of driving. It’s more like, “Where could I find sensory experience that is different?” Or what I call ‘orthogonal’ to that, to that experience. And, you know, maybe that means gardening, but not so that you can grow herbs or so that you can, like, feel good about having a tidy yard, but just so you can feel the wetness of soil under your fingertips and in your fingernails. And that’s kind of the purpose of it, not to do anything but just to spend time with other objects. Crafts or something like this, or hobbies too. 

Jess Love: I mean, I think these are great. I have a daughter who loves throwing rocks. We even built her a little tiny pond in our little Chicago backyard. She loves the sensory sensation of big rock, little rock. And I’m, like, kind of already, like, in this conversation, like, okay, I gotta, like, make some time this afternoon and just, like, sit down and throw rocks with her. But these are, these are all, like, individual things that we can do, and I’m curious if you’ve thought about things that we might be able to do collectively to maybe have more control over our environment.

Ian Bogost: Sure. Yeah, there is –  I think it’s very– Look, there are many cultural, economic, socio-economic, bureaucratic, technological, circumstances we find ourselves in that have contributed to our loss of gratifying sensation, to this process of dematerialization. And if you could remedy those, even in small part, I bet we would feel more gratified. I think one reason, at least in this book, that I tried to put the, like, just pause from worrying so much about systemic solutions isn’t because I don’t believe that systemic solutions are important or that these problems are worthy of those kinds of remedy, but because I think we have a predilection to think, “Well, I can’t do anything about this until the big problems are solved.”

If kids could go to the park in the first place because we built parks and we didn’t arrest them when they went there on their bikes on their own, or their parents, then we could talk. And I get it. I empathize with that position. I understand it. I just don’t wanna wait. I mean, I’ve worked on systemic problems and solutions for a big part of my career, and I’m still very interested in them. But for this moment, just like introducing the world to this idea of gratification, warming us up to doing it, I wanted to say, “You know what?” It’s a small stuff solution to a small stuff problem, actually, which doesn’t mean that big solutions wouldn’t help. 

Jess Love:So I don’t need to, like, solve all the world’s problems before I go sit outside and throw rocks.

Ian Bogost: That’s the key.

Jess Love [Voiceover]: Well, we thought we’d take our own advice and try to make our show credits just a little more gratifying. I’m Jess Love. Life, Automated is a project of the Ryan Institute on Complexity at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. We’re distributed by KQED. Our show was produced by Jesse Dukes with help from Tom Dixon. Music by Stephen Jackson. Recording help from Will Feeney and George Christensen. Marketing help from Ananya Mallapragada and Lauren Ko. Special thanks to Laura Pavin, Rob Mitchum, and of course, today’s guest, Ian Bogost. His new book is “The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life.” And if you like Life, Automated, consider sharing an episode with a friend. We’re a new show, and we’d love for more people to know about us.