Preferences

Unironically this: isn't writing on paper more fun than typing? Isn't painting with real paint and canvas more satisfying than with a stylus and an iPad? Isn't it more fun to make a home-cooked meal for your family than ordering out? Who stomps into the holiday celebration and tells mom that it'd be a lot more efficient to just get catering?

Isn't there something good about being embodied and understanding a medium of expression rather than attempting to translate ideas directly into results as quickly as possible?


To you maybe, to someone else maybe not. It's really hard to pin down a universal framing for existence.

My family eats out at a nice steak restaurant every Christmas no one wants to cook. None of us like to cook.

Yes, exactly: I'm not saying everyone loves to paint or cook or whatever, but that a lot of people do, and it's weird and bad for the response to this kind of article, in which someone shares that they are losing something they enjoyed, to be some form of "well, not everyone enjoys that."
To some people this is a gain, to some people this is a loss. Objectively it is changing things, and I can agree on having empathy for those who it changes something for negatively.

I feel like we are in a period of low empathy, understanding and caring for others as an aside from just this piece.

My particular brain feels the fun is diminished if I can't just click undo.
Depends on the purpose?

If you get your enjoyment from the process of cooking, by all means cook. But if you enjoy being with people and just eating food, catering is better.

Is your goal to efficiently get your thoughts to a medium as fast as possible, use a stylus or a keyboard. Do you enjoy the process of writing your thoughts down, use a fountain pen.

Or the easiest comparison: coffee. Do you want your fix of caffeine as fast as possible? Grab some gas station slop on the go for .99€. But if you're more about relaxing and slowly enjoying the process of selecting the optimal beans for this particular day, grinding them to perfection and brewing them just right with a pour-over technique or a fancy Italian espresso machine you refurbished yourself - then do that.

Same with code. I want to solve a problem I have or a client has. I get enjoyment from solving the problem. Having to tell the computer how to do that with a programming language is just a boring intermediate step on the way.

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