| After a lifetime of homes filled with endless physical books, I got rid of all my books to accommodate my health issues. I currently live in a small space that would likely constitute serious deprivation if it weren't for the internet. My cheap smartphone gives me endless reading material and games and conversation and banking in the palm of my hand. My sons and I have more than a hundred free or cheap games stored in the cloud instead of in endless shelving units intruding into our limited space. It's a very large part of why our lives work at all in such a cramped space. I wonder how much this feeling of deprivation talked about in the article is due to people generally making that swap -- of physical goods for virtual ones -- and failing to consciously recognize it. If you feel a proper home has a big living room where every wall is covered in tall storage units to hold your books, games and software, it's easy to not recognize that you actually have more games to play and more stuff to read with the incredible bonus that none of it needs to be dusted. It's easy to feel like you simply have less and infer that you must be deprived. I'm not saying there aren't real problems. I have real problems with not making enough money and not having certain important elements of a middle class life. I'm just saying that virtual goods make it difficult to compare our current lives to lives before the internet. How much does your Kindle library weigh? Practically nothing in some sense. Yet you may still have reading material equivalent to many bookshelves worth of physical books. You may even be holding more books in the palm of your hand than you ever physically owned back when owning dead tree books meant buying bookshelves and dedicating valuable living space to it. |