Ascetic and stoic practices have been around for a long time, and have been invented by many cultures. There are lots of reasons to practice them. Deliberately inconveniencing yourself by denying yourself Google feels more theatrical or symbolic than efficacious. We need tools to work together as human beings to confront real world challenges. Google’s a key tool for that work.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but I will note that there are a lot of alternatives to many of Google’s tools. Some are better, some are nearly as good, some are much worse, but I feel like you could get a long way to systems that help humans work together with all of the free and open source replacements that are out there.
In other words, I’m not so sure that Google and other Google-esque companies are a necessary component of tools to help us work together.
I think there’s something valuable that comes with intentionally denying oneself something that is normally integral to one’s life.
I could make a case here for the psychological (and ~spiritual) benefits of the kind of general resilience this helps train, but on a very practical level sometimes, for example, the internet goes out, and it’s useful to know what to do if you’ve lost access to Google Mail, Docs, Maps, or whatever else you rely on. Doing that in a controlled setting is likely to be better because you can plan for it so it doesn’t negatively impact your life beyond the scope of the practice, and it allows you to get hands on experience with the situation so that would be hard to get otherwise.
I think of this as the same reason people in jobs that require high reliability do things like war games and practice drills to make sure they know what to do in high stakes situations by practicing first when stakes are low so they can make mistakes and learn without negative impacts.
Ascetic and stoic practices have been around for a long time, and have been invented by many cultures. There are lots of reasons to practice them. Deliberately inconveniencing yourself by denying yourself Google feels more theatrical or symbolic than efficacious. We need tools to work together as human beings to confront real world challenges. Google’s a key tool for that work.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but I will note that there are a lot of alternatives to many of Google’s tools. Some are better, some are nearly as good, some are much worse, but I feel like you could get a long way to systems that help humans work together with all of the free and open source replacements that are out there.
In other words, I’m not so sure that Google and other Google-esque companies are a necessary component of tools to help us work together.
I think there’s something valuable that comes with intentionally denying oneself something that is normally integral to one’s life.
I could make a case here for the psychological (and ~spiritual) benefits of the kind of general resilience this helps train, but on a very practical level sometimes, for example, the internet goes out, and it’s useful to know what to do if you’ve lost access to Google Mail, Docs, Maps, or whatever else you rely on. Doing that in a controlled setting is likely to be better because you can plan for it so it doesn’t negatively impact your life beyond the scope of the practice, and it allows you to get hands on experience with the situation so that would be hard to get otherwise.
I think of this as the same reason people in jobs that require high reliability do things like war games and practice drills to make sure they know what to do in high stakes situations by practicing first when stakes are low so they can make mistakes and learn without negative impacts.