The best experiences, from all facets of life, big and small, have the same final stamp of a feeling: Satisfaction.
Satisfaction needs time to brew. An attainable goal that can’t be attained just yet. It needs yearning along the way. A trek. A climb. A struggle. There is no short circuit.
Immediacy is the antidote to the thing we think is the poison. It is enticing because it zips you to the end—the point when we know that the yearning is over. And the next best thing to feeling satisfied is getting rid of the feeling of wanting to be satisfied.
It is so easy to conflate the two.
Most everything humans build solves for immediacy. Is it a faster way to get from this place to that place? We place value on that immediacy.
And so we think we are satisfied. But maybe we just got rid of the feeling of wanting to be satisfied. Something feels off because we feel that distance between those two things even if we don’t recognize it.
Us coders, builders, writers, designers? We need to re-introduce satisfaction.
We’re all developing that skill in this arena as we speak. We have to. We’re past the point of wondering whether AI can expedite us toward the end—it can.
Look for where we need non-humans to zip us along and where we need our own fingerprints to create the necessary friction, if nothing else, as a way to brew satisfaction.