All these builders telling me I now have the power to do what I want when all I want is to figure out what I should want 🤔

These true believers of builderology vastly overestimate the ability of us non-building users to make choices of any sort, even random ones. Let alone tasteful ones shaped by clear goals and preferences.

Even for a decision as simple as what flavor of icecream to get, you can reduce me to terminal robotic indecision stasis by removing chocolate and pistachio from the menu. Most of us are Buridan's asses under a thin veneer of agentic human.

My icecream example here is a bit misleading, since it only applies after you've at least decided you want icecream, and are only dealing with flavor-choice overwhelm.

It is hard to see human desire outside the frame of an established goal/preference/value etc that products can orient towards. But if you keep working upstream of a specific decision, through a "5 whys" heuristic for eg., you eventually rise above the level of instrumental choices offered by products and get to existential angst. Eg.

1. Which flavor of icecream?
2. Icecream or french fries?
3. Eat something or not?
4. Leave TV/devices on or off?
5. Nap or stay awake?
6. What am I living for?

By the time you get to questions 5 and 6, you're in a place where product value propositions can't reach you. Not even random stimulations/temptations can hook you (because you've dulled even the basic novelty seeking bootstrapping process to the point you've turned it off).

Life itself reboots in those 5/6 moments of angst.

Delver at contraptions.venkateshrao.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

Dad-Gen X, useful idiot janitor doing crypto, AI and health https://dannyiskandar.substack.com

Are you saying, this is like taking a degree in philosophy class? To think deeply about the world and root causes of all misery,issues, problem kind of thing?