[CatWChainsaw]

Sibling comments are rather affronted at this, but I happen to agree that leaning into technology to reclaim what we lost to technology in the first place is not actually solving a problem, it's slapping a bandage on and juicing up with some morphine.

Technology can't give a person more than the set amount of time, energy, and attention they have by virtue of being human. We're cramming more and more into our lives, but I doubt that in general we feel more satisfied and fulfilled. You can add and add until you can't. At some point you need to subtract. In this community there's likely to be at least some stigma around not optimizing every last second of your life, and personally I think that attitude should be stigmatized. It's insulting to personal dignity.

[TeMPOraL]

But optimization is exactly what you called for - subtracting things, rearranging things. Because the issue is that we have little choice in how much stuff we have to cram in our lives. That's the social problem of technology: it's a ratchet.

Consider a clock. Why do you need to know what time is it, with minute accuracy? Because you need to synchronize in time with other people. Why do you need that? Because everyone else does that and it's now a basic part of how society functions. You owning a clock is a default expectation.

How did it came to be this way? The first clocks invented weren't very useful for this (they were for navigation at sea, though), because approximately no one had them. But then someone put clocks on church towers and someone else miniaturized them, and at some point we crossed from it being a convenience to it being necessity.

Same story with calendars, todo lists, having a phone at home, having a phone in your pocket, having a bank account. Emerging additions to this list include having credit/debit cards, having smartphones, having social media accounts. Individually, we can do little about it; at some point, resisting costs more than giving in.

[CatWChainsaw]

I think we're agreeing just from different angles. We seem to have the same opinion about the veritable rat race of being forced to juggle ever more things, because technology. It seems that where we're not agreeing is 'optimizing'. IMO the end goal of optimization is to do as much as possible, which is additive. I can see on a personal level some optimizing might be subtractive, but for society as a whole I don't think so.