alt Hacker NewsWe are training a culture of passive consumers who don’t create. People are attracted to activity and action. The next generation is inundated with creation through their phone. They don’t see the space to create. They sit at home alone wondering why they are alone. The reality is because they are consumers not creators. You must produce.
I think a lot about something I've heard game devs say. Something like "players will always find a way to optimize the fun out of the game".
Controversial example: in Breath of the Wild, your weapons break really fast. But, they only break while fighting enemies and looting places, so you almost always end up with more/higher-powered weapons. It's the game's way of always giving you new weapons that have different quirky properties to keep combat interesting. But players don't like that friction and uncertainty: it's probably the most hated on aspect of the game. Players want to keep their same weapons the whole time, and miss out on the constant variety.
I think that in the same way, we've optimized the fun out of life. We collectively tend to avoid uncertainty and friction. We let yelp/google maps reviews tell us what restaurants are good. We watch movies at home instead of trekking all the way to the movie theater. Get food delivered and even dropped off at the door so we literally don't even have to speak to another human at all. We've been optimizing the fun out of life, and we didn't realize it until it was bad enough to be called a "loneliness epidemic"!!