娱乐的“死重量”——瑞安·莫尔顿的文章 --- The Deadweight Loss of Entertainment – Ryan Moulton's Articles
It is undeniably the best time to be alone in human history. If you are sitting immobile on your couch with a phone under your thumb you have infinite information, infinite conversation partners, infinite movies, infinite games, infinite music, infinite video, infinite takes, infinite porn, infinite ragebait propaganda (whatever floats your boat) available for free or for at most a nominal subscription.
And yet despite this abundance, people consistently report being unhappy. We have fewer friends, participate less in public life, care less about our neighbors or our countrymen, feel that life outside of our phones is slowly but surely evaporating, and that our phones are a poor substitute that is slowly killing us all.
So if everyone is unhappy with the current situation, why don’t we just stop? Why don’t we all just go outside?
You guessed it. Equilibria! If nobody outside is doing the thing you want to do, you can’t do it. If nobody gets off their couch, then nobody is doing the thing you want to do. As everyone’s couch gets more entertaining, it can make everyone worse off!
Here’s the graph. We’ll get into the model details for you to nitpick in a sec, but first let me describe the basic behavior. The X-axis here is “How fun it is to be on my phone on my couch.” Don’t worry about the units yet. What we see is that as it becomes more fun to stay in, everyone gets less happy, until you reach a threshold where almost everyone has abandoned the outside world (the gooner singularity) and then everything gradually gets better again as couch living continues to improve and the Children of Men apocalypse outside no longer bothers you.
Ok now for the details for you to nitpick. I assume:
- There is a range of extroversion/introversion in the population. I model this as a coefficient that balances your utility between being with people and being alone. For the graph above I assume the population values of extroversion are distributed as a Beta(3,3) because it’s a nice normalish curve, and makes a nice sigmoid, but any distribution gives you the same conclusion.
- The value of doing things with other people is linear in the number of people doing it. You might object that you only need a small minimum number of people doing a thing to be happy, e.g. once you have enough people for a pickup game of soccer, you don’t really benefit from more. We’ll get to that later. For now assume that this is a niche interest or a small community where the number of people doing it still has incremental returns, things like “Are there kids playing in the local park” or “Does your block have a block party” or “Do my friends of friends host house parties that I’m invited to.” This also models things that require a very large amount of effort to organize that few people are willing to do, so you need a large amount of people choosing to invest in your community to get just a few willing to put in the hours, things like “Does your grade school have an active cub scout troop” or “Are there community choirs nearby.” At minimum, the density of people willing to do the thing determines how far you have to drive to do the thing, and how much of a pain it is to do.
This makes each agent’s payoff α*n for going outside, where α is their extroversion and n the number of people outside, and (1- α)β for staying in, where β is how fun their phone is, and they choose whichever they like better. One more thing:
- I’m starting the simulation at full participation. This is appropriate to model the gradual decline of community over time, but you get even more depressing results if you start with low participation like we saw after covid. Even ignoring the fact that 0 is an absorbing state, the gradual growth of the group often fails to attract the next most extroverted member, and stalls out well below the best case equilibrium. In an infinite continuous model this wouldn’t be a problem, but the real world has finite integer people who sometimes doom a group by dropping out or never joining.
These assumptions produce that graph, which you can view as an evolution of society over time. As the couch experience improves, marginally introverted people drop out of the community, which reduces the value of the community to everyone else, which causes even more people to drop out. In this fashion the level of community activity drops below what most people want, and everyone ends up less happy. Most people would prefer to be social until the x-axis reaches 100, if the level of social activity at the start of the graph could be sustained, but social activity falls off to near zero at half of that level because of this compounding process of marginal participants dropping out.
What happens if we cap the benefit of other people instead of making it fully linear? Maybe you live in NYC, and there are so many people around that the fraction of them that go outside is immaterial to you because there will always be enough. Maybe you’re interested mainly in football, and it’s so popular that the stadium will still fill up even if 80% of the population are hikikomori.
Here’s another graph where the benefit of other people caps out at 50% of them going outside. The situation is much better! Your couch can be pretty great before the activity starts seriously dying off. But again, just like before, once it reaches that critical threshold, average happiness gets worse for a bit before it gets better again in the world of only shut-ins.
So the moral of the story is, to avoid isolation and depression, move to a big city, pick popular hobbies, and if someone asks you to go caroling this Christmas, go even if you don’t want to, because it will make the experience better for everyone else.
The only way out of this trap is if everyone does more things than they want to. It’s now a good deed to just show up.
Here’s the colab if you want to play with the model assumptions yourself. Let me know if you find anything interesting! Thanks to gemini for reducing the activation energy of writing this to 0.
We feel time differently over our lives. As a toddler, an afternoon feels like an eternity. In middle age, “no matter how I try, those years just flow by, like a broken down dam.” For a 5 year old, a year was a fifth of their life, and feels like it. For a 40 year old, it is just another year.
If you take this model literally, that your experience of an interval reflects what fraction of your life the interval is, then we experience time logarithmically through our lives. Instead of middle age coming at 40 as linear time would suggest, in logarithmic time the midpoint of age 5 and age 80 is age 20. Childhood is one half of our life, and adulthood the other half.
This is a depressing thought to consider in (linear) middle age, but it is hard to escape the feeling that it is essentially true. Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match.
So how should this change how we live? Most directly, we should not waste children’s time. The motivation for making school more rewarding and less stultifying should not primarily be its effect on outcomes later in life, but rather that childhood is itself part of life, a very important part.
But what about those of us who are well into the flattening part of the curve, what can we do for ourselves? You can seek new experiences perhaps. If time goes faster because your life has fewer firsts and more routine, then it can be extended by adding firsts. You can learn new things, travel, take up hobbies, or new careers.
This works, to a point, but there are only so many firsts for you, and chasing this exclusively seems to lead to resentment. You remember the things you had as a kid. You remember the excitement and warmth of that world, how immediate and raw everything felt, and you want to go back. You start to regret that the world has changed, even though what changed the most is you.
You can’t go back, but you can come close. The easiest way to add firsts to your life is to become invested in those of someone else, have kids. Nostalgia is only futile and self destructive because it is a sublimated desire to give your own children the life you want them to have.
Firsts
The first set of new firsts that children give you are those you don’t remember from your own life, smiles, laughs, food, words, steps, first rain, first creek. Every week becomes so laden with meaning that it is almost oppressive. Instead of worrying that the weeks are all forgettable, as you might have in your former life, you instead worry that you will forget. They won’t remember it, so the burden falls on you. You are recording the events that will become the mythology of their identity when you later tell the stories back to them.
Then start the firsts that you do remember and that you can recreate for them. Let me tell you about one.
My scout troop was camped in an Indiana field on a November night. The grass was dewy just after dusk, but would be frosted by morning. One of the dads had set up a telescope a little ways from our tents. I hadn’t had any particular interest in it, and came over to it as an afterthought as a break in the middle of all our other games. What he showed me blew me away, Saturn and its rings, right there in front of my eyes, exactly the way I had seen it in all of the books. If you’ve seen this before, you know the feeling. If you haven’t, the best way I can describe it is that it makes space, for the first time, tangibly real. It’s all actually out there.
With a picture in a book or on a screen, you’re never entirely sure what’s between you and what you’re looking at. Your eyes can’t see the characteristic spectrum of hydrogen, oxygen, and sulphur the way Hubble would show you. Your eyes can’t collect light for half an hour. Space in books exists in the theoretical world of parabolas and water cycles instead of the physical world of homeruns and rain. But an optical telescope can’t lie to you. The very light that bounced off of Saturn’s rings a few minutes prior was hitting my own eyes, with nothing in between but glass and mirrors, the same Saturn that Galileo saw. It was as real as the dirt under my feet.
I’m the dad now, and now I’m the one setting up telescopes in fields to show kids Saturn. I can’t experience seeing it for the first time, I have already realized that realization, but I can listen to their gasps and see their wide eyes when they do, and so the experience is renewed.
Transformational experiences are only a small part. It can be as simple as seeing bread dough puff up overnight, or seeing a praying mantis on a fenceline, sledding down a hill a little too steep and screaming the whole way, or watching sparks curl up from a campfire. Children make you childlike. Skipping through the park as an adult man raises eyebrows (deservedly or not.) Skipping through the park as an adult man with your son or daughter skipping next to you on your arm is one of life’s greatest joys, both for you and for anyone who sees you. Whatever self-consciousness you would normally have melts away when your kids ask. You’ll play dress up or tag, climb trees or skip, blow dandelions or wear clover crowns, belt out songs or talk in pig latin. How could you refuse? You might do it reluctantly, as adulthood has conditioned you to, but you’ll love every minute of it, and you’ll be a kid again when you do.
Cycles
Many yearly traditions gradually get stale. You’ve done them many times. You’re not sure if you should put in the effort this year. Your jack-o-lanterns become fewer, and then vanish. You start to watch 4th of July fireworks on TV, then not at all. Your Christmas trees get smaller, your lights less ambitious. Some find all of these fun for their own sake, but if you are not the type of person who finds ritual appealing you will likely find yourself slowly disconnecting from holidays. You will find yourself asking what all the hustle bustle is for.
Kids. That’s who it’s for. Of all the experiences that children renew, traditions are renewed the most. When you put up a Christmas tree, it’s for kids. When you decorate for Halloween, it’s for kids. All of these holidays are in essence a celebration of childhood, and children let you see them all for the first time again. If you remember the excitement of galumphing excitedly downstairs on Christmas morning, you get to be the person creating that excitement. If you remember the terror and hilarity of being jump scared by your neighbors on Halloween, you get to be the person doing the scaring.
Moreover, children generate tradition. They turn your choices into traditions by accident. You do it once, they demand to do it again, and then it’s a tradition. You discover that you are the one creating tradition, that it all rests on you. It feels like an inappropriate amount of power. If I’m too tired to follow through on something, it just disappears forever. But by the same measure, I can now sieve all the traditions I was given to those that I love the most, make sure they continue, and add to them whatever I want to add to the world.
Trying to improvise vegetarian Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner has turned my adjustment of a random sweet potato casserole recipe from the internet into a family heirloom for my kids, just like my grandmother’s recipes that she cribbed from the flour packaging did for me. For my kids Loreena McKennitt’s recordings are the canonical Christmas songs, because that’s what I put on to recreate the feel of winter in a climate that doesn’t cooperate, but I make sure they recognize Andy Williams because that’s what my mom put on whenever we decorated the tree.
You can even add entire holidays. My kids and I celebrate the first rain in the fall that ends California’s fire season with fancy hot chocolate while we watch it come down outside. Others have introduced Yuri’s day and Pi day to name just a few. Any tradition you expose them to will feel to your kids like it is a hundred years old. You are creating the things that will have always been.
Eternity
When I was young my perception of time was that of a ray from high school geometry, a fixed starting point at birth, a second point to fix the direction of the line at the end of childhood, and then the future stretching off into infinity. I was aware of mortality of course, but I thought of the purpose of life as to somehow transcend that. The duration of my life was the time I had to create something that would keep going.
Maybe you find your great work, and your path to a small or big dent in the universe. If that is you, more power to you, and of such labor is the shape of the world made. But for most of us that start with that conception of our life, our ambitions and our conditions for contentment necessarily narrow over time. If you are the hero of a story, it is a smaller story than you thought.
Kids are a backstop that satisfies this in a more fundamental way than any other success can. We joke about every dad being declared the #1 Dad on Father’s Day, (and the fight to the death that must ensue when two #1 Dads meet) but those mass produced declarations of uniqueness are registering something real. For your own kids, you are the #1 Dad they could have. However you might feel you measure up against the world in every other way, there is one narrow but enormous domain in which you are unequivocally better than everyone else.
For my part, I no longer have to worry about my relationship to eternity, heat death, or whether the mighty will someday gaze upon my works and despair. I have sent a bit of myself into the future, and just have to pass the torch to them. That’s enough. In the end, they will undoubtedly be my greatest accomplishment, and raising them is the most worthwhile way I can choose to spend my days.
Kids have the urgency that forces you not to waste an hour, or a day, or a week. They want things from you now. They can’t wait, and they’re right. Time is not to be wasted, and they feel the waste more.
You recreate your memories in them. They recreate childishness in you. Life folds back on itself, but not quite the same. It loops, but continues. A helix.
Life, then, is the creation of childhoods. You have yours, and then you get to create childhoods for others. The time is yours, and theirs. Don’t waste it.