It seems to me that there are a couple of things going on here. I spend a reasonable amount of time (probably a couple of hours of conscious effort each day; I’m not sure how significant I want to call sleep) meeting immediate physical needs, but those don’t factor much into my self-image or my long-term goals; I might spend an hour each day making and eating meals, but ensuring this isn’t a matter of long-term planning nor a cherished marker of personhood for me. Looked at another way, there are people that can’t eat or excrete normally because of one medical condition or another, but I don’t see them as proportionally less human.
I do spend a lot of time gaining access to abstract resources that ultimately secure my physiological satisfaction, on the other hand, and that is tied closely into my self-image, but it’s so far removed from its ultimate goal that I don’t feel that cutting out, say, apartment rental and replacing it with a proportional bill for Amazon AWS cycles would have much effect on my thoughts or actions further up the chain, assuming my mental and emotional machinery remains otherwise constant. I simply don’t think about the low-level logistics that much; it’s not my job. And I’m a financially independent adult; I’d expect the college student in the grandparent to be thinking about them in the most abstract possible way, if at all.
It seems to me that there are a couple of things going on here. I spend a reasonable amount of time (probably a couple of hours of conscious effort each day; I’m not sure how significant I want to call sleep) meeting immediate physical needs, but those don’t factor much into my self-image or my long-term goals; I might spend an hour each day making and eating meals, but ensuring this isn’t a matter of long-term planning nor a cherished marker of personhood for me. Looked at another way, there are people that can’t eat or excrete normally because of one medical condition or another, but I don’t see them as proportionally less human.
I do spend a lot of time gaining access to abstract resources that ultimately secure my physiological satisfaction, on the other hand, and that is tied closely into my self-image, but it’s so far removed from its ultimate goal that I don’t feel that cutting out, say, apartment rental and replacing it with a proportional bill for Amazon AWS cycles would have much effect on my thoughts or actions further up the chain, assuming my mental and emotional machinery remains otherwise constant. I simply don’t think about the low-level logistics that much; it’s not my job. And I’m a financially independent adult; I’d expect the college student in the grandparent to be thinking about them in the most abstract possible way, if at all.