The Joy of Touching Grass (and Knobs, Buttons, and Boarding Passes)

Remember the old hotel ice machines? The kind where you'd slide your bucket under the chute and hear the avalanche of cubes crashing into it? There was 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 a 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 a 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 our increasingly dematerialized world.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Ian's previous appearance on the AoM Podcast: Episode #247 — The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Antidote to Excessive Irony
• Ian's Atlantic article "The End of Manual Transmission"
• Andy Rooney compilation

Connect With Ian Bogost

• The Small Stuff website
• Ian's website
• Ian's faculty page

0:00 Introduction

0:40 Ian Bogost and 'The Small Stuff'

2:25 What Kickstarted This Book

6:38 Happiness, Satisfaction, and Gratification

14:58 Gratification Is Everywhere — But Disappearing

18:28 Dematerialization: How the World Is Losing Sensory Richness

26:41 How Work Has Become Less Gratifying

33:09 How to Reclaim Your Sensory Life

38:35 Keep More Junk Around

44:38 Talk About Small Pleasures

48:17 Living Life Sideways (Orthogonality)

50:03 Wrap-Up

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