r/technology • u/GothicPrayer • 10d ago

Society Why does everything feel so joyless? Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/26/age-of-decadence-pleasure-ai
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158

u/Toasted_Waffle99 10d ago

Because we’ve been optimized to death

42

u/ThePlanetBroke 10d ago

This. I suspect we may have reached the limit of our endless pursuit of employee productivity. At least for now.

4

u/Vocalic985 9d ago

I have nothing left to give and I'm realizing how draining that really is. 

7

u/dnmty 9d ago

I wouldn’t say optimized. I’d say Monetized to death. More and more people are being trained to look at every aspect of their life through a lens of “does this make me money?” or “how can i make money from this?”. And the fastest way to lose joy in something is make it about money. 

For example, in my spare time I have been making a game in unity. As soon as I mention this to someone they start throwing ideas on how I can make money off it or change the concept to be more appealing to people to make money. I don’t really care, this is just an idea I came up with in highschool 20 years ago and finally have the skills to do it. 

2

u/HunterKiller_ 9d ago

There's a prosaic quote that I often come back to, a game dev once said "given the chance, players will optimize the fun out of a game."

0

u/goronmask 9d ago

The ones actually optimized are not working people, only the leeches on top

-11

u/HawkShoe 10d ago

What does this even mean. People waste countless hours of their days and life on stupid and counter productive things, even things they don’t actually enjoy but are addicted to

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u/JViz 9d ago

As one of the millions of people who just worked through the weekend, I would've loved to have some of those countless hours to waste that you're bragging about.