9 Comments
User's avatar
Salatiel's avatar

Excelente. Volvamos a ser humanos sociales. O al menos retomemos ese papel antes de perderlo por completo.

Steve Magness's avatar

Thanks so much.

Luca Gattoni-Celli's avatar

Great piece as usual. This topic makes almost everything else short of child welfare seem trivial by comparison. It seems upstream of a lot of problems and frustrations people have with how modern life has evolved.

In particular, the implications for dating are extreme. The apps are messed up at this point, and I think we all have a few friends are finding it incredibly hard to meet someone. I've talked to a close friend about where to meet women in person, we've been trying to figure it out for him for something like 2 or 3 years, it's comically difficult, especially for someone with more traditional values.

Steve Magness's avatar

Thanks, glad you found it helpful. I think we're in a period of rapid change in society, with a lot of downstream consequences we haven't even begun to wrestle with.

Luca Gattoni-Celli's avatar

I..... think you are probably correct.

Thrashing's avatar

Fair. You said engineer the environment, not muscle through. Point is who does the engineering? Laying out the gym clothes is still the individual designing for himself? The 2003 friction was designed by someone else and imposed….no one individual can rebuild that…..

Steve Magness's avatar

Rigging the environment is exactly so you don’t have to use willpower. No one is suggesting that we have to rebuild the world individually, but when it comes to what WE can do right now…it does little good to say “Go back to 2003…”

Thrashing's avatar

Right diagnosis, wrong scale. The old friction was institutional and involuntary (bells, one kitchen phone, teammates you couldnt avoid). Gyms only ever caught the motivated few....

You cant self impose an involuntary constraint.

The rebuild belongs to teams and schools and workplaces.....not willpower.

Steve Magness's avatar

No one said it was willpower. In the same way that willpower alone fails with exercise.