We 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.
chamomeal|1 month ago
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"!!
publicdebates|1 month ago
publicdebates|1 month ago
Yes, addictive consumption is bad, and apps shouldn't be designed for that. And as long as they are, we should try to find ways to undo the damage and help people heal and recover from content addiction, and find alternatives to it.
But that's not to say that consuming is inherently bad.
Consider that a conversation is genuinely an interactive, dynamic, mutual event where you both are both consuming and creating content. One person creates a topic out of recent memories or recites a joke, the other person hears it, and enjoys it. This is an act of consumption. It's not wrong or bad or harmful or blameworthy. It's the other end of creation, a necessary part of it.
In your ideal world, where we have people endlessly creating, who would consume what they create? We need both. We need platforms to share our creations, and to consume the creations of others. Real life has been a neglected platform for this, especially for countless lonely people who have no one to interact with.