Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AoM Podcast. Remember those old hotel ice machines? The kind where you slide your bucket under the chute and hear the avalanche of cubes crashing into it? There’s something so fun and strangely gratifying about that thing. Or think about breaking an icicle off the edge of a roof. Such a gratifying feeling from such a small act. My guest has written an ode to the outsized pleasures that arise from these kinds of everyday interactions with the physical world. His name is Ian Bogost, and his new book is The Small Stuff. Today on the show, Ian argues that fulfilling life isn’t built solely by chasing the big components of happiness, but also by embracing the small moments of gratification that are woven throughout ordinary life. We discuss how those moments can be found in tactile experiences like shifting to manual transmission, turning a well-made knob, or flipping through the pages of a real menu.
We explore how these small opportunities for engagement, for contact, connection, and control have been disappearing as the world becomes more digitized and automated and everything becomes a touchscreen. And Ian shares how opportunities for sensory enchantment can still be found in an increasingly dematerialized world. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/smallstuff.
All right. Ian Bogost, welcome back to the show.
Ian Bogost:
Great to be here.
Brett McKay:
So the last time we had you on was 10 years ago.
Ian Bogost:
My God.
Brett McKay:
It’s been a long time. We discussed your book, Play Anything. I really enjoyed that conversation. You got a new book out where you explore really taking the time to experience and enjoy the small pleasures that come with interacting with our material world. So we’re talking about the way a coffee cup feels in your hand or the feeling of painting a wall with really nice paint. What kickstarted this exploration? Was there a moment you had, you were enjoying some small thing where you thought, I should write an entire book about this?
Ian Bogost:
Yeah. It’s a really great opportunity for me to kind of spill the beans on my life, I guess, because I mean, for your listeners who remember our conversation about my last book 10 years ago, I realized I was working on this project then and maybe even before then. And the playbook was really about ordinary life too. It was about enjoying the constraints of everyday life and not so much turning it into a game, but understanding what we could learn from the concepts of play and fun that related to ordinary life. And even before that, I’d been writing about toasters and slippers and slushies and that kind of thing at The Atlantic. And I did this philosophy book about things. And I think I’ve just been obsessed with this my whole life. And it was only over the last five years that it coalesced and I allowed it to happen.
And the catalyst was a story I did a few years ago, maybe in 2022, about the end of the stick shift automobile for The Atlantic, which is not a new idea. And people have been lamenting or writing elegies to the stick shift car for years and years, but it continues to decline and electric vehicles don’t have multi-speed transmissions at all. So we’re kind of at the end of the line. I got so much response from that story, so many readers. And they wrote in and they sent me postcards and they were just very deeply connected to that example. And that was when I realized, oh wait, this is bigger than I’ve given it credit for. This isn’t just about the stick shift. And it’s kind of related to all those prior thoughts I’d had and was maybe a little ashamed about. Why am I so interested in toasters and doorknobs and slushy machines and all the rest?
And I decided to just sit down and try to figure it out and put it together. And that was the start of the book.
Brett McKay:
When people were writing you about the stick shift article, what were they saying? I mean, what was it that caused the reaction?
Ian Bogost:
Yeah. What was interesting is that it was somewhat nostalgic and elegiac at times. Like well, I remember my father teaching me how to drive one or I still enjoy driving it, but I missed the time when the friction point was harder to find. But it was not like tender or it wasn’t about loss. It was about this deep sense of connection that people were describing with that particular apparatus. And some of it was mechanical, but some of it was more conceptual, like just watching someone else drive one and seeing and hearing the gears change even if you didn’t have your hand on the gear shift. And it opened up new ideas. There’s a story I tell in the book about this. Somebody wrote me like this. They wrote me a physical letter and there was like a stamp on it. And I remember having that stamp in a stamp collection as a kid.
And it just opened up this whole list of things that felt similar, like tearing off the perforations of stamps and licking them and putting them on envelopes. And I realized that I think what people were telling me was I didn’t choose this change in my life. I didn’t choose not to have that sense of contact and control and engagement and delight, but it happened anyway. It wasn’t even quite a loss. It was more like a strong longing for that kind of contact with the world. It was very subtle and even difficult to describe. A lot of people are obsessed with nostalgia right now and that’s not it. It’s not about looking backward. It was just about these very deep rich examples of feeling strongly connected to the physical world.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. You talk about in the book that connection to the physical world, whether you’re shifting a car or licking a stamp. We look back and we think, well man, that was kind of mundane.
Ian Bogost:
Yeah. Didn’t matter, right?
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Okay. And that’s why you don’t miss it.
Ian Bogost:
Oh yeah. Well, who cares?
Brett McKay:
But you also talk about how it feels good. It feels good when you do pay attention. And something you do at the beginning of the book is you delineate three ideas. It’s happiness, satisfaction, and gratification. Yeah. What is the difference between happiness, satisfaction and gratification? And why did you think it was important to differentiate them?
Ian Bogost:
I’m going to start with the why did I think it was important? We have for some reason kind of overloaded contentment into one singular concept, and that’s usually happiness. So when we think about what it means to be content in your life, there’s kind of one flavor of it and we’ve named it happiness. And nobody really quite knows what happiness is. If you ask someone, “Are you happy?” They’ll be like, “I don’t know. What would it mean to be happy?” And the psychologists and behavioral scientists, whatever who study it, the way that they define this term is often by just asking people overall if they’re happy, which is sort of like a circular argument. So I think of happiness as big picture, overall life contentment, all things being equal, how are things going? It’s usually associated with big stuff, right? The opposite of small stuff. So is your job well matched to you?
Do you feel purpose in doing it? Are you happy at home? Are your partnerships and relationships good? Do you feel like your community is something you’re engaged with? Are you healthy? Are your children doing well? Do you have the resources you need to get by? It’s that sort of very big picture kind of stuff. And what might make you happier is like saving up for a big vacation or a bigger house or getting your kids into the right school or finding the right life partner or advancing in your career or whatever it might be. So that’s happiness, big picture contentment. It’s hard. It requires work. It’s usually something that you don’t experience in the present, but more like as you reflect on what’s just happened to you in the past. So it’s kind of retrospective. Satisfaction is still big, but it’s smaller. And I think of satisfaction as pride in accomplishment.
So you finish a project at your job or you’re doing some work around the house and you look at the garden you built or whatever it is, and you kind of put your hands in your hips and you stare at it and you think, huh, I did well there. Or people sometimes talk about being satisfied when they eat a nice meal. When they cook a nice meal, oh, it’s a really satisfying meal. And they mean like they’ve ingested it and now they feel full of it, but also they’ve connected with the kin, the people in their lives around the table and broken bread together. And that’s satisfying too. Pride and accomplishment. It’s still big. It’s still hard, but it works at a smaller scale. It’s often associated with smaller scale projects on the way to bigger picture happiness. And then gratification is a totally different kind of contentment.
And it’s the one the book’s about, and it’s the one that I think we’ve undervalued and maybe even just looked past on our path to satisfaction and happiness. Gratification is the sensory enchantment of everyday life, the good feeling of connecting your body and your senses with the physical and material world in which you live. It’s weird because it happens to you in the moment. It’s not a past tense kind of thing, and it’s not a future planning kind of thing. When you have a good sensory experience, that feeling of the gear shift in your hand, the rowdness of it or the coolness or the chunk chunk of it as it moves through the gears, you can’t save that for later. It happens right in the moment. A breeze hits your face on a warm day and you feel its cooling effect. That’s something that happens to you right away.
Or like right now as I’m talking to you, I can touch the smooth walnut desk in front of me where like the oils of my hands have over months and years smoothed it out and made it a little shiny. And that sensation, I either take it right now or it’s gone forever, but that gone forever is not really a problem because it’s right there the next moment as much as I want it. So gratification is happening to us all the time in a way if we simply learn to allow the gifts of the physical world to be gifts that we receive rather than that we ignore. So that good feeling of contact connection and control of the physical environment could be natural, it could be designed, it could be human constructed. Anything that you make contact with, with your body has the opportunity to gratify.
So those are maybe not the only ways of slicing up the world of contentment, but to me, they were an extremely useful way of dividing up different categories. And I just want to say, I’m in favor of all of them. This is not an argument against happiness. It’s rather an argument that happiness doesn’t tell the whole picture, the whole story of what a good life feels like. And gratification has a big role to play in that life.
Brett McKay:
So gratification is kind of, is it like stop and smell the roses type?
Ian Bogost:
Yeah. Or don’t stop and smell the roses, just smell them. There’s no need to stop. You smell the roses. You’re walking past them and oh, there’s roses. And that’s it. That’s like an interesting distinction because we have this sense that somehow doing things of any kind requires not doing something else that we have to steal time or energy from big picture, big stuff, accomplishments in order to do small. And I think that’s why we overlook them. So yeah, just smell the roses instead of stop and smell the roses if you want.
Brett McKay:
So gratification is happening. It can happen all the time. You just have to pay attention to it.
Ian Bogost:
So it’s interesting. Yes, I totally agree with that, but I’ve actually tried not to use attention as the way of helping people find the feeling of gratification because it kind of puts the effort back into your brain. We live in our heads so much. And we’re just like tied in knots all the time about how we can feel better. And attention is like, oh, I need to pay attention. I forgot to feel the tink of the dishes against one another as I was putting them away in the cupboard. Darn, I missed that opportunity for gratification. And that’s not really how it works. It’s more like acceptance than attention. Because I was talking about my desk and in the few minutes since we’ve talked about my desk, the desk is still there. I just stopped paying attention to it, stopped noticing it. I stopped kind of engaging with it.
And now it’s back and I’m talking about it again and here it is and I can feel it once more. So I think of it as this enormous surplus gratification. There’s this tremendous surplus of sensory life that’s always available to us. It’s like a stream that’s constantly running and all you need to do is kind of dip your toe in and you feel it’s current. And it’s always there. It’s always accessible and available so long as you’re a physical body in the world. So that’s a shift I think is really important, that shift from attention to acceptance.
Brett McKay:
Okay. I like that. Yeah, because I can see that becoming another chore.
Ian Bogost:
Right. Exactly. Oh gosh. Keep a gratification journal. Make sure you have this many gratification experiences. And that you’re just going to lose if you take that attitude.
Brett McKay:
And I mean, one of the examples of a gratifying experience that you described in the book, and when I read it, I was like, oh yeah, I felt that too, is the feeling after you make a turn in a car. And then you let the steering wheel go straight and it just runs through your hands.
Ian Bogost:
Oh I love it.
Brett McKay:
And it feels great. But I think if I were to think about it, I got to really pay attention to how this feels. I think I would lose that gratifying experience.
Ian Bogost:
Yeah. And your brain can’t handle it. Speaking of brains. There’s a reason why we stop sensing things moment to moment and sort of that we can kind of get on with the work that we’re actually doing. So if you’re typing on a keyboard, you don’t feel the keyboard physically all the time or you’d kind of lose your mind. But if you stop for a minute and you extend the sensation of feeling those keys and the clickiness of them, then you can sense them in a gratifying way. And then you can kind of go back into the experience of using them for a purpose. So that idea of occupying a moment, like you’re driving and you feel the wheel. And every now and then, maybe not every turn, but every 10th or 20th turn, you kind of let it happen. It rises above the noise and you’re reminded, oh yes, I do.
I love this. I love that sensation. I’m glad I got the car that had the thick leather steering wheel or the ribbed wooden one. And that’s it. That’s all I’m asking. Occupy that moment and then move on to the next because another one will be available. But sometimes it feels strange to do that. Even like the steering wheel is like, I think everyone can agree that it’s immensely gratifying, that it’s delightful to feel that, but they probably haven’t talked about it before. They haven’t allowed it to feel good or to be normal that it would feel good. And that’s some work that has to be done to make gratification accessible.
Brett McKay:
All right. So gratification’s everywhere. It’s easy to experience, but you argue that despite being easy to experience, the opportunities to experience gratification are decreasing in our modern world. Why is that?
Ian Bogost:
Yeah. It’s a little bit weird and counterintuitive because if gratification is everywhere, why do we feel so ungratified? And it goes back to something like the stick shift. It’s like we used to have a more diverse set of sensory engagements that were not just available to us, but we kind of like had to deal with all the time. Maybe you didn’t have to shift your car, but you had to roll the window down with the roller instead of using the button. Although the button is also gratifying. I don’t have a key. You have a key to your car, but you don’t put the key in the ignition anymore. It just sits in your pocket because that’s more convenient. Then you press a button. And pressing the button might be gratifying, but you don’t get to jingle the keys in your hand. I have a brand new minivan that we bought and it yells at me if I close the hatch with my hand. If I sort of feel the tension of it pulling down, it’ll take, no, that’s inappropriate. It beeps and it wants me to press the button instead so it can use a motor to do it on its own. We have all these systems like that of automation and convenience. And some of them are bureaucratic and some of them are economic, but they have distanced us. They’ve disconnected us from those physical encounters in the world.
Maybe the best example, one that everybody knows and has experienced is the way that a public restroom works. You don’t get to use the faucet anymore.
Brett McKay:
No.
Ian Bogost:
You don’t turn the knob, you don’t set it to the temperature and the pressure you want. You put your hands under it and hope that it operates by sensor. And then the soap is like that and the towel dispenser is like that. And the toilet you just came out of flushed for you. And those may not seem like, maybe you even think, well, I don’t want to touch anything in the bathroom. You’re like, I’d rather not touch. But you didn’t make the choice to do that. That choice was made for you in order that the whole world could be made more efficient, mostly for other people’s benefit. And here you are decoupled from those tangible experiences that you once had to engage with. And this stuff is just everywhere now. All this stuff that we used to do, we used to get to do. And now we just kind of can’t anymore.
Every now and then one of them pokes its head out and reminds you. And I think that’s what the stick shift did. Another one that people seem to light up about when I bring it up is the. Remember during the COVID pandemic and all the restaurants stopped using menus and they had a QR code on the table?
Brett McKay:
Yes, I hate this.
Ian Bogost:
You don’t have to touch a menu anymore. And that just kind of persisted. And there was something just magical and delightful and gratifying about going out to eat and being handed a menu. And it was big and you could kind of hide in it and maybe it was laminated or maybe it wasn’t and you could spill salsa on it. And you sort of entered the space of the menu and perused the options in a different way than using your phone, which is the same place that you get email and notifications and kind of do everything. And that’s another good example of this phenomenon I call dematerialization where you don’t get to use a menu anymore. Now that whole experience just siphoned back through your phone. And it’s certainly more convenient. There’s less printing, there’s less waste. You don’t have to spill on it. You don’t have to touch something that someone else touched.
But at the same time, you miss out on this small encounter with a very particular thing in the world. And I think if you start to look around and think about it, you realize just how many of those kind of experiences have been outmoded.
Brett McKay:
So yeah, you talk about it’s the world is being dematerialized.
Ian Bogost:
Yeah, that’s the name I give for it.
That name for being disconnected from sensory life, from sensory experience, to the point that it’s taken as a given that you wouldn’t want to be, which is really the biggest loss, that it’s a waste of time to have a menu or that it’s obviously undesirable to turn on a faucet or to shift a car or to be able to open a door by force of hand and muscle instead of by pushing a button. There’s economic factors too. As I mentioned, one that I talk about in the book fairly extensively is just ownership in general is harder to access. If you own an automobile or a homer or a lawnmower for that matter, then you have this apparatus that you have an opportunity to repair, to engage with, or to tend to, or to improve and you have an incentive to do so. But if you just lease your car and then you hire out your lawn care and maybe you can’t afford to buy a home and so you’re just renting and you’ll be punished if you try to make a change to your apartment or your condo because they’ll take it out of your security deposit, then those are also dematerializing experiences, places where you would have had a reason and an incentive to contact the world and now you have a disincentive instead.
Brett McKay:
I think the car’s a great place to see that dematerialization. We mentioned the stick shift, but also we don’t have knobs anymore. Everything’s on the screen.
Ian Bogost:
Oh the knobs. Yeah. The knobs.
Brett McKay:
I love knobs on a car. And actually, I think some car makers are bringing them back.
Ian Bogost:
The tides are turning finally. Yeah, because it’s unsafe to look at a screen on your car while you’re driving. But it’s funny that we required that kind of safety rationale to turn back. And that’s really what it took was the realization that you can’t look at the road while you’re also trying to change your climate control with your fingertips on a screen instead of concluding the correct answer, which is that knobs are delightful. People just love to have a knob and a dial. And obviously the fact that it’s safer to use one is great, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s just that we love the nurled knobs and the click of turning them. So it’s almost like there was this feedback loop of the reason why it was delightful and gratifying to operate a car, but also safer to operate one that you could do by touch rather than turning your eyes off the road also made it more gratifying.
It was like a connection between the designed environment and the industrial design choices that automakers made and the sense of gratification you got out of them. But then we decided that everything should be a touch screen, basically. Elevators are like this too. I noticed this more and more. You don’t press the buttons on an elevator. There’s a touch screen outside and you press your floor and this allows it to be routed more efficiently, but then you don’t get to press the button anymore. And that’s a loss. You just love pressing the button as a way of saying to the elevator, “Here I am. We are together.” So this stuff is everywhere. And the knobs, the loss of knobs is I think a very palpable example because they were so rich and gratifying experience.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Another one where you see vending machines, they also are going to the screens, which I don’t like. The screens.
Ian Bogost:
Yeah.
Brett McKay:
I like the big button. I love the big button.
Ian Bogost:
It’s one of my strongest and most delightful memories from being a kid was the big fat button on the vending machine. Feeling the coin drop into the machine too. You don’t get to do that anymore.Maybe you could swipe a card. And that’s also gratifying with that chunk clunk of the quarter falling into the vending machine. And then there was a big old button. And there would usually be one that was larger than the others, like the lead soda. And you kind of hit it with your fist.
That sense of like, I mean, it’s not a violent act to hit it. It was more just like you really had to physically connect with the vending machine. And there was this sense of contact and of presence, of engagement with it that I also felt in other kinds of apparatuses, like an old telephone handset is like that where it’s heavy and you can kind of feel the intimacy of it near your mouth and against your ear. And there was something about these kinds of objects that just made you feel like they were partners. I mean, I talk about this in the book that it sounds ridiculous at first, but I really, really mean it. If you can treat these objects in your life as friends, more like pets than like entities, like inanimate objects, then that’s one way to find gratification again. And I think that sense of like going up to the vending machine and just knowing you’re going to get to push the button, it’s a kind of friendship.
And we just decided that that kind of friendship was not desirable or useless or a waste of time or just something that we were going to accidentally erase from the world. And that’s the sense that you’re missing when you don’t have it anymore.
Brett McKay:
Another one where you see a screen replacing things, soda fountains.
Ian Bogost:
Yeah.
Brett McKay:
So QuikTrip has been replacing their soda fountains with those digital screens where they got a bajillion flavors. But I don’t like them because when you hit pour, I feel like I don’t have as much control over what I get in my cup.
Ian Bogost:
Yeah. It’s like a stick shift, isn’t it? And it’s funny because people are totally ready to talk about feeling control of their automobile. It’s like a performance experience to drive a machine like that. But it’s kind of the same thing with almost anything with a toaster or with a soda fountain.
The way you describe it as control is like a sense that your intentions, your body and your sort of whole sensory apparatus that’s engaging with it, the way that that machine is designed and the way that it responds to your interaction, that those are all like copacetic, that they’re working kind of together and that they match. It’s almost like being with someone that you know very well and you’re going to finish one another’s sentences. It’s that kind of feeling, but with the physical world. And in this respect, there is a sense that the designed environment used to be more deliberate and it used to offer that kind of sense of partnership more than it does today. In part because the reason those systems are designed the way they are is to make them more efficient to operate for the QuikTrip vendor or the QuikTrip franchisee rather than for you, someone looking to get the most out of your soda dispensing experience.
But you do still get to dispense the ice, right? And you feel it fall into the last. It’s not gone. It’s just different. It’s like a sign, oh yeah, this is something that’s still there, but it’s shifted. I love that example. And there’s a reason why people love the soda fountain, the self-serve soda fountain. It’s because it’s gratifying.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. It is gratifying. I love getting it when you just get it perfect. You know how much you got to press and how long and you get it just right. That’s a very gratifying feeling.
Ian Bogost:
I love that. That sense of weird goals that people set for themselves that kind of don’t matter, that’s a good sign that gratification is happening too. We are a very goal oriented culture now, and I think to a fault really. It’s one of the problems. It’s one of the reasons why we’re so obsessed with big stuff, happiness pursuits, instead of treating gratification as enough, at least on occasion. But one of the things that small goals can provide is an excuse to engage with those gratifying encounters more fully and more deliberately. And even when you mess up, it’s still delightful like, oh, I kind of got too much foam and I’m going to pour it out into the drain and then I’m going to go back to the well and get more. That too is gratifying. And again, I think that the more you take seriously, even if it feels foolish, maybe especially if it feels foolish, if you take seriously those kinds of moments, which you know in your heart are delightful, that you’re enjoying them and allow them to be delightful, accept that gift of delight that you’re offering, then they sometimes open like a flower.
They show even more delights right behind them. And the soda fountain’s a great example. I wish I’d talked about it in the book.
Brett McKay:
So yeah, the world’s becoming dematerialized. You mentioned that we’re kind of turning to a renter society. Everything’s becoming a subscription. And so it gives us fewer opportunities to tinker with our stuff and mess with it. But you also talk about how our work is becoming dematerialized and work has become less gratifying.
Ian Bogost:
Yeah.
Brett McKay:
What are some ways that work has become less gratifying you think?
Ian Bogost:
One of the most obvious ways is in the white collar world, you’ve heard this term email job where nobody kind of knows what they’re doing or why. They’re just moving symbols around on a computer because everything got digitized. And that sense of like not really knowing what you’re doing moment to moment and how it connects with the world, I think that’s a widespread sensibility in white collar work, but also in professional work. And this is a distinction that we don’t need to go into in detail, but when I think of a professional, I don’t think of just a white collar worker. I think of someone who have to have special education or licensure and like a lawyer, a doctor, an architect, a real estate broker. Those are professions. And the interesting thing about professions is that they used to require specific contact with specific places and people in the world.
Like you have to go to the clinic or do rounds in the hospital if you’re a doctor or the lawyer has to go to the courtroom or to another law office to take a deposition and the architect has to be on the job site or the real estate broker does. So those kinds of experiences, they still exist, but they’re less and less necessary because we can do so many things online. Even if you work in like sales and like how would a salesperson have worked decades ago? You would’ve made telephone calls, you would’ve taken lunches, you would’ve gone on site to meetings to close the deal. You would’ve schmoozed and now you’re sending emails. Maybe you’re getting on Zoom. So there are just less surface area for physical contact in the world. And that’s in the sort of office job kind of space. In the trades, people are very interested in trade work all of a sudden.
And one reason is because it’s more gratifying. It connects gratification, satisfaction and happiness more. And we know that so-called blue collar jobs and industry in America have been on the decline for decades. And one of the things about that kind of work, it was sometimes dangerous and there were downsides to that kind of work too, but it was strongly gratifying to be a plumber or a tile setter or to work a trade because every moment of your job is deeply connected, not just to outcomes, but to the experience of doing it. You know why you’re doing what you’re doing moment to moment.
So the resurgence of interest in trade work isn’t just because of AI or because actually a tradesperson can make quite a bit of money these days. It’s a good business to be in, but also because there’s a strong coupling between gratification and satisfaction in the work that I think is missing from office work these days. And then of course there’s a whole business of work from home and hybrid work, which has been an issue that we’ve been debating since before the COVID pandemic, but especially during and after. People really believe they don’t want to be in the office. They don’t want to commute. They want time to do their laundry or whatever to do a workout, but they’re also a little confused about why and what they lose by not being able to move through the world in order to get to work and get from it and be with their coworkers and just be in the kitchen making a coffee in the morning and feeling the warmth of the mug and using the particular mug that you use at work.
That’s a part of your work life too.
Brett McKay:
As you’re talking, I was thinking about my dad’s office when I was a kid. He was a federal game warden. And I loved going to his office because it was just a sensory delight. You’d go in, it had faux wood paneling and I loved touching it. And I loved going into his office in particular because he had a typewriter. Loved hitting the keys. And the thing I remember the most that I really loved was for the tickets that he would issue hunters, duck hunters, it was on carbon copy paper. Oh, I remember that stuff. That was so good. And first I love the smell. It just smelled really good. And then I just loved writing and that satisfying feeling of seeing your writing on the white page go through the yellow into the pink.
Ian Bogost:
These are such great examples. And it has nothing to do with the work. It was all mechanisms you needed in order to get the work done, but the experience of doing the work, the moment to moment experience of doing it, or in your case, sort of encountering it as a spectator, that provided enormous background gratification that just happened as a part of everyday life. I remember when carbon paper was used in credit card transactions every time you wanted it.
Brett McKay:
Oh, that was a satisfying thing to watch.
Ian Bogost:
Yeah.That chunk chunk of the reader. And it took more time. And there’s a reason why it got replaced with digital systems, but it was satisfying to do. It was satisfying to hear, to watch. And then you get the paper. And even the sort of feeling of the ink on your hands, you sometimes make a mess with the carbon paper, that too was gratifying because it was like, here I am alive on earth with this ink and that is something meaningful. Now I can go wash it off by turning the faucet on in the sink. And it’s like the life of gratification opened up new moments of gratification along the way. I love that example of the office because I could see it, your father’s office. I could see it in my mind’s eye the moment you brought it up, even without knowing exactly what kind of office you were talking about.
Because the design world was more varied. Like that wood paneling was an example of a gratifying visual and textural encounter that these days you just wouldn’t find. Everything’s white.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Everything’s white. Well, speaking of credit cards, another thing that’s gone away that was gratifying was the credit card itself. It had the embossed print with your credit card number. That’s gone. Or it had the hologram of the eagle. And it was fun when you were a kid, you take your mom’s credit card out and you make it shine in the light. That’s gone too. No more.
Ian Bogost:
Delightful. I mean, it’s so easy to find these examples. It’s like the world just delivers them. And that sense of loss or of dematerialization really is widespread, but at the same time, it’s not fully lost. So I have a credit card in my wallet still and yeah, it’s not embossed anymore. And yes, it doesn’t have the hologram, but it’s still a physical object that I can take in and out of my wallet. It has smoothness or I can feel like the edges where they’ve started to wear. There’s a little chip with an indentation and I can run my finger across it. Or when I seed it into the reader and I feel it click in, that’s still gratifying. So it’s still there. It’s not left us because we still live in our bodies with objects that are made of atoms and we have to engage with.
Brett McKay:
All right. Let’s talk about some ways we can reclaim our sensory life and experience more of this gratifying feeling. How can thinking like Andy Rooney help us do that? And for our listeners who aren’t familiar with Andy Rooney, can you explain it?
Ian Bogost:
Yeah. It’s possible that it’s been a while. So Andy Rooney was best known as a TV personality who appeared on 60 Minutes on the TV magazine 60 Minutes at the end of the broadcast. And this was like a weekly news magazine back in the days of three networks. And every Sunday would come on and it would be like an hour of very hardcore intense, deep, difficult news about the world. And then at the end, Andy Rooney would sit at this messy desk and he would talk about some ordinary thing like pocket knives or towel dispensers or soap. And he had this kind of disposition, this kind of like curmudgeonly disposition. And that allowed him a kind of ability to get underneath things, to talk about them in a different way. And through doing so, he drew attention to this kind of ordinary truth of real reality of like respecting someone who had a pocket knife because they could fix things or of talking about like using the largest possible knife to cut an olive because he felt that sense of control that we were talking about earlier with the big vending machine button.
And this was just an enormous. It was daring and brave to give the world this gift of analysis of ordinary life in this primetime slot on television when everyone watched television to get information. And in a way that treated it as seriously as important current events, which is what the rest of the program was about. And he did this for years and years and years and only retired in his 90s. And I just find him, he sometimes said things he shouldn’t have, but that deep respect and commitment to truth seeking in every crevice and corner of the world, that is just an amazing gift that Andy Rooney gave us and that we can take, that we can just take and do in our own lives.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And you seem to be doing that with your work, with your articles in the Atlantic or your Twitter feed. I was a big follower of your Twitter feed and you’d make these observations. This something Andy Rooney would talk about. One of them was that I remember, because I’ve had this exact same thought, it was about ice cream scoops. So you go to the ice cream shop and you say, I want one scoop of ice cream because you’re full. You want something sweet, but you don’t want to overdo it. So you ask for a scoop and you think you’re going to get one single scoop. And then you see the scoop person put one in and then they go back for another scoop. And then another scoop is like, wait a minute, this is not a scoop of ice cream. This is three scoops of ice cream.
Ian Bogost:
Right. Right. It’s just like an amazing little thing, like this small moment. And in this kind of Andy Rooney way, it’s kind of a gripe. Gripes are one way of getting to the truth. It’s almost like caricatures are a way of getting to the truth. People gripe just to complain. People mistake gripes for complaints sometimes when what they really are is an attempt to get underneath something.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I think the gripes are, that’s when we typically notice the material world.
Ian Bogost:
It’s like the world has made its way above the fray and you can see it.
Brett McKay:
So I mean, annoyances can lead to gratification. I mean, here’s an example that I was thinking of. Let’s take your zipper gets stuck. And that’s frustrating. So you have to give it a close look and you have to look at the mechanism of the zipper and you have to remove some of the cloth or maybe you have to line up the teeth better. And then after a few seconds of fiddling with it, which itself can be kind of satisfying, you have that gratifying feeling of the zip of those interlocking teeth after being stymied. So annoyance can lead to gratification if you use it to ask, “What’s going on here?”
Ian Bogost:
Yeah. Nuisance embarrassment is another one that’s like that. If you feel like, this is a little weird. Why am I doing this? Or you feel like even shame like, oh, did someone see me pull eight towels out of the dispenser or whatever? Those are tells. Those are moments where you can kind of go, oh, okay, this is where gratification happens. Instead of feeling embarrassed or grouchy or ashamed or whatever, let me kind of get through that feeling. Let me use it as a bored. Let me use it as a way to get through that initial sentiment and then get onto allowing the gratifying sensation to open up and to deliver itself to me. So that’s one thing you can do is to pay attention to your sense of grouchiness or to embarrassment and just allow yourself to move through them. Or at a higher level, take any moment you’re in and just let it linger a little longer than it would otherwise.
Like we were talking about with the steering wheel. It’s not really about doing anything different. You’re not stopping. You’re not searching your brain for whether you’re paying attention to your steering wheel. You’re just letting that moment linger slightly longer than it would. And that’s when you kind of realize, oh yes, the delight of my steering wheel. And you can do that almost all the time. All you need is just like another second. Just spend like another second in that space and then you’ll feel more comfortable doing so, but you’ll also receive that little payload of gratification more often. And then it’s like a drip, drip, drip feeling of contentment. Instead of filling the glass of contentment all the way, all at once, like happiness tries to do, gratification delivers little bits of it over time.
Brett McKay:
So everyone seems to be minimalism maxing.
Ian Bogost:
Yeah.
Brett McKay:
But you make the case that we need to start keeping more junk around.
Ian Bogost:
Yeah. I mean, to the point of, you brought up your father’s office. I have some examples from my dad’s office too, like business cards. I remember his business cards. I love a good business card. They were printed in a certain way that I could feel the texture of the type on them and that kind of thing. And just having some junk can really help because you have something to engage with physically. I have a little notepad I use at my desk, even though I don’t write with a pen and paper. I’ll sort of plan my day with a pen and paper. And then every week I tear it off and I crumple it up and I put it in the waste basket or I don’t put it in the waste basket. Or when you go somewhere and you get like a receipt and you just kind of keep it around or a ticket from a show or the program from the concert or a flyer that gets delivered to your door, whatever it is, those are just additional opportunities not to get information, not to solve problems, just to engage with a wider variety of textural experiences.
One of the things I love doing is like crinkling soda or water cans and putting them into the recycling.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Well, that’s a gratifying feeling when you stomp it and you get it.
Ian Bogost:
Right. And I remember that being a much bigger part of life, even before recycling was widespread than it is today. Now you’re just like, well, I’ll just toss it into the recycling because it’ll take care of itself. But you used to have to take that stuff out yourself. And that was one of the ways that the world sort of encouraged you to engage with that kind of detritus. Having things you can rummage through, that junk drawer experience, a little cup full of pens, something that gives you an opportunity to take a little break from the norm, to engage with your senses in a different way, and then to get back to it, that can be really gratifying. One of the things people do a lot at work is they’ll decorate their workspaces, their cubicles or whatever, but they usually do it just visually. And if you have like a toy, I have a Rubik’s cube on my desk and I just can’t stand the Rubik’s cube.
I’m not trying to solve it, but I’ll pick it up every now and then and spin it a little. It has that plastic creaky sound, you know what I mean? The Rubik’s cube has. Can you hear it? If I put it next to the microphone? It’s not exactly like keeping junk around, but the thing that’s here is not just here to be decor or here to signal something about my style or my attitude. It’s also there for me to see, to touch, to hear.
Brett McKay:
You mentioned tickets. How do you do that? Because it seems like more and more tickets are going digital.
Ian Bogost:
Yeah. They went the QR code route with the menus. And that feels like a particular loss to me because that sense of being deeply engaged with this piece of paper that you could easily lose and that maybe cost you hundreds of dollars and then you’re out the opportunity to go to the show.
Brett McKay:
The stakes were high.
Ian Bogost:
Yeah, the stakes were high and so it connected you to it. But usually when there’s a loss like that, a dematerializing effect, there’s something else that takes its place that’s available. And that might be the program that you get at the theater. Some people will bring back their playbill from a Broadway show and they’ll put it in an album. But it’s equally gratifying to take the brochure of the program and kind of like roll it up and put it in your jacket pocket. And then not really trying to save it for later necessarily. You just want a thing that gives you this sort of additional sensory connection to the experience. Or maybe you find it a year later in your jacket pocket when the seasons roll around again. And yeah, you remember going to the show, but then there’s this little surprise that you can engage with and perhaps just throw away.
I mean, it’s been turned into commerce. Now you can buy a souvenir instead where you used to have the ticket to take with you. And that’s okay, I think. I mean, I think we need to recognize that as the world has shifted, taking advantage of opportunities to be engaged with our senses is something that’s worth pursuing, that’s even worth spending money on. So you can buy these souvenir tickets now for certain shows or you go to like a football game or whatever and you buy the version of the ticket that you used to get on paper and now you’ve got to pay money and it’s put behind plastic and it feels ridiculous, but it’s okay because what you’re trying to get is like a tactile experience, not just a memory. And getting that via a service or even an object is all right. Is all right.That counts as living in the world in a more engaged way as well.
Brett McKay:
Our family, we prefer paper tickets and we fly. Always get paper. I haven’t done the phone yet. We haven’t done it. But there’s a hierarchy of paper tickets. There’s the one that you get at the self-service kiosk is that flimsy paper. I’ll take that. But my favorite paper plane tickets are when you get them at the gate. And it’s the hard card stock and then they’re still using the computer that’s running cobalt or whatever. I love that ticket. It’s sturdy and I love the way it feels and it bends and it perforates. You can tear it. It’s gratifying.
Ian Bogost:
And the thing about that example is that it’s not gone. It’s not gone. It’s not automatic.
But the thing I love about this is you can go up to the gate agent and you can ask them for a boarding pass. They won’t blink. They’ll print one for you right away. And then you’ll have it and you can hold it and you can fold it and you can tear off that little bit that you’re talking about. And you can put it in the seat in front of you and forget it, or you can put it in your bag and take it home. It’s still there and still available and you might as well take advantage of it if that moment is worthwhile to you, which in your case it is. There’s other people like, I don’t want to have that ticket. I’m actually fine with the gratifying feeling of hearing and seeing the QR code scan. So it’s not like there’s a right way to do this, but where it’s available, just take it.
And even the experience of going to the gate agent and looking them in the eyes and talking to them with actual language, that’s a moment of gratification too that’s available to you where you connect with another person doing their work.
And they’re right there. They’re right there. All you need to do is not be embarrassed or ashamed or think it’s weird to do it because it’s perfectly normal.
Brett McKay:
Another way you can experience more gratifying moments is to talk about them. And that’s something I’ve noticed as we had this conversation. I’ve been, as we’ve been talking, more and more memories of gratifying experiences have popped up in my head. You talked about this in the book, you had a discussion with a colleague about Diet Coke vessels that led you down this gratification rabbit hole. What happened there?
Ian Bogost:
Yeah. I was at a work trip out of town and a colleague of mine who was, I’m really into Diet Coke and she is too. And we were talking about Diet Coke delivery vessels. I prefer the fountain. Some people prefer the bottle, which is like a glass bottle is one thing, but those plastic bottles, I just can’t really abide them.
Brett McKay:
It’s the worst. It’s always flat.
Ian Bogost:
It’s always flat. And I just don’t like holding them. We were talking about this and she brought up those big, usually they were red tumbler cups that used to go to a place like Pizza Hut or whatever. They were all over the American South, which is where I remember seeing giant cups and the feeling of putting your whole face inside of them. And she asked me, she was like, “Does it taste better? Is there a science to it? Does it taste better?” And I talked to this food scientist friend of mine about it at length and the whole discussion is in the book. But the point is like, yes, all of that matters. And it’s not so much about what’s better. It’s about the experience of difference. It’s about engaging with the feeling of the carbonation hitting your face in a cup from an open lid or from one that’s delivered to you at a table at a restaurant versus just sipping it through the opening of a can.
Those things matter. They’re worth doing. And the varied versions of them also give you kind of different surface areas for gratification. But as you said, maybe even more important than that is just normalizing them, making them feel like they’re a real and active and reasonable part of your life. And that’s where the talking comes in. I’ve found, not just over the course of our conversation, but as I’ve been talking about gratification now with lots and lots of different people, they’re all very willing. They’re right there with me at every moment. None of it feels weird or strange once you start talking about it. But before you start talking about it, it does feel weird and strange. It feels like, are they going to think I’m crazy for having a favorite Diet Coke delivery vessel? And then it turns out, no. No, you’re right there with me on the bottles.
So just giving this stuff voice. You’re at the airport and you say to your travel companion, “I think I’m going to go get a boarding pass.” And they’re like, “Great idea. Then we’ll have a boarding pass.That’s all it takes.” And then you have it or you talk about why you like it. So that part is so easy to do. It just requires a little bit of openness
Brett McKay:
And I mean, you can share stuff on the internet. That’s one of the things I missed about Twitter in the early days. People just share stuff like that. And then it got really serious and had to be your hot takes.
Ian Bogost:
I mean, one of the best things about the social internet at its best when it’s really working is that it really did give us an excuse to talk about our ordinary lives. That’s sort of what’s happening now provocation that Twitter and other platforms offered. And yeah, people would post their meals and whatever, but there was an opportunity and a deep engagement with mundane ordinary life that was deeply rich and normalizing. And it hasn’t been entirely lost, but that was what I liked the most about the heyday of Twitter was that ability to talk about things like we’re discussing now and to have people treat them as insightful and to recognize them as valuable. That’s harder to do. Now it’s all like politics or argument or what have you.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. One more thing you mentioned that you can do to experience more gratifying moments in your life is to live your life sideways. What does that mean?
Ian Bogost:
So there’s this concept called orthogonality that I borrowed from mathematics and from game design. And basically all it means is it’s interesting when you’re in a system that has something that does one thing and then there’s something else that does it kind of like perpendicular to it. So in game design, we talk about like in chess, think about in chess, you’ve got pieces that move like a rook does in straight lines. And then you’ve got pieces that move like a bishop or a queen does on diagonals. So they’re like literally orthogonal to one another. And what that does is it gives you a different sensation. There’s different kind of strategies you can use in a game of chess, but you could also think about your sensory life as one that can benefit from orthogonality. So whatever it is that you normally encounter with your body and your senses at home or at work or in whatever you do, if you seek out opportunities for sensory engagement that are orthogonal to it, that are different from the norm, then you’re kind of creating this opportunity for a more diverse sensory regimen.
So a simple example is if you work in an office all day and you’re sitting and you come home and you’re like, “Actually, I just want to feel if my fingers sink into the wet moistness of the dirt outside in my garden,” that’s orthogonality. And the trick is not to turn it into a task or a job or a goal, but what you’re really looking for is just a different sensory experience than you have in your normal routine or in your day. When you stop and you’re like, “I think I work at home, I’m going to go downstairs and I’m going to make lunch.” That’s also an opportunity for orthogonality. Something different from what you do in your ordinary life or in the ordinary moments that you encounter. Exercise your senses in different ways.
Brett McKay:
I love that. Well, Ian, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Ian Bogost:
The book is called The Small Stuff. If you go to smallstuffbook.com, that’s the easiest way to get from there to more information about it and you can find it at your favorite bookseller. The rest of my work is at bogost.com, B-O-G-O-S-T.com. And I’m just really grateful for the opportunity to talk to you about it.
Brett McKay:
My guest here is Ian Bogost. He’s the author of the book, The Small Stuff. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, bogost.com. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
