Instant Genius - Why rediscovering simple pleasures may be the key to happiness

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Every single day of our lives, we’re exposed to a vast multitude of experiences and interactions with the various people, objects and technologies in the wider world that surrounds us. The chances are that many of us give these moment-to-moment encounters very little thought. But could it be that our desire for convenience, efficiency and productivity has resulted in a widening rift that has ultimately disconnected us from many of the simple pleasures that life can provide? In this episode, we’re joined by Prof Ian Bogost, a computer science and design researcher based at Washington University and author, to talk about his latest book, The Small Stuff – The Sensory Enchantment of Everyday Life. He tells us why he proposes that our lives have been incrementally dematerialised thanks to the relentless technological drive for efficiency, why we find pleasure and gratification in sensory experiences, and how, by paying more attention to the simple act of doing rather than the final outcome of our actions, we can all live more deeply enriching lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Science Focus. Every single day of our lives, we're exposed to a vast multitude of experiences and interactions with the various people, objects and technologies in the wider world that surrounds us. The chances are that many of us give these moment-to-moment encounters very little thought. But could it be that our desire for convenience, efficiency and productivity has resulted in a widening rift that has ultimately disconnected us from many of the simple pleasures that life can provide? In this episode, we're joined by Professor Ian Bogost, a computer science and design researcher based at Washington University and author to talk about his latest book, The Small Stuff,

The Sensory Enchantment of Everyday Life. He tells us why he proposes that our lives have been incrementally dematerialized thanks to the relentless technological drive for efficiency, why we find pleasure and gratification in sensory experiences, and how? By paying more attention to the simple act of doing, rather than the final outcome of our actions, we can, all live more deeply enriching lives. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much. I'm glad to be here.

So today we're talking about your new book, The Small Stuff, the sensory enchantment of everyday life. So first off, that's a really fascinating title. And possibly why you chose the title might be because it runs in sort of opposition and in an argument to the popular expression we've all heard, don't sweat with small stuff. So first off, can you just briefly sum up the overarching idea of the book, please? You know, what is the small stuff we're talking about? Right. So when I say the small stuff, I mean all of the tiny, constant everyday encounters

that you have, especially with the physical and sensory world. So sometimes when people say that, don't sweat the small stuff, they're talking about like nuisances or like, oh, something went wrong. Don't worry about it. Get on to bigger things. And that's sort of the idea that I want to question, that we're so laser focused on big accomplishments, on our futures, on our careers or families or love life or what have you, the stuff that's associated with happiness, which I do a little bit of kind of critique of in the book. And we're much less focused on the everyday moment-to-moment encounters of the material world that we live in. So you think of the small stuff like the sound of our voices in your ears right now or for your listeners,

whatever it is, the garments on their body, the desk or the bus seat around and beneath them, those sensations, you know, you're just not supposed to even notice them. They're a waste of time. That's kind of the way we think about it. Pass them by in order to get to the big stuff, and I think that's wrong. So let's have a look into sort of one of the concepts, and it's the notion of gratification. So this means an awful lot of different things to different people. It does. It does. These words, you know, that we use, sometimes we don't think about, and it can be

useful just to use words we're already familiar with and sort of sharpen and redefine them. So one of the things I try to do in the book is to, like, reanimate the word gratification. This is not a new word. I'm not inventing it, but to make it more precise. So if you have like happiness, which is about your big picture overall contempt, how good is your life, and then something like satisfaction, which for me means like pride and accomplishment. I'm satisfied with a big project that I finished or even an excellent meal that can be satisfying. And gratification is this other thing,

this smaller scale, easier, more immediate experience of contentment that I associate with what I call sensory enchantment, with your body connecting to the physical world. Yeah, so we'll explore some of those ideas more deeply in a minute. But you talk about something that you call our lives are being dematerialized. So, you know, what do we mean by that? Yeah. I have this sensation that we have been slowly disconnected from the world that we live in. And that is largely due to advances in technology. But it's also due to efficiency,

kind of automation, bureaucratic changes, other sorts of socioeconomic shifts that have essentially made us less coupled, less tightly coupled to the world that we live in. And like there's some easy examples of this. One of them, of course, is just digital life. You know, you think about all the things you can do on your smartphone that, that you don't have to do in the physical world anymore. You can, you don't have to get an airline boarding pass. You don't have to get a ticket to a concert. You can order food. You can do all your work. You don't have to go anywhere. You can watch a movie and it's in, you know, 3D audio on your phone. That's one factor. But it's by no means the only one. And by the way, I'm not suggesting that we get rid of our smartphones, which some

people are saying, right? But another example that people seem to connect with very easily is like you, you know, if you're in an airport or an office building or a convention center and you try to go to the restroom and the washroom and you're like trying to wash your hands and you don't turn on the faucet any longer, you wave your hands under a sensor and then you do that with the towels and everything is trying to kind of live your life for you. Another, another, simple example in the design world, lately, elevators, you can't push the buttons any longer. There's like a touchscreen, and it sends you to the right floor, and it's done for efficiency to make the trips work well. And you may not think that you really cared about pushing the elevator button,

but I think all of us can admit that, yes, we do care about it. There's something about that experience that's just delightful, and we miss it. So there's lots and lots and lots of examples like that in the book and in everyone's head and mind, right? And that's what I mean by Dematerial. this kind of like slow disconnection from physical life that's happened over decades and that we almost haven't noticed. And then I just sort of discovered it. And that was one of the inspirations for writing the book. Yes, that's something that I was going to ask you. So how did we reach this point? Because it seems to me like a very, as you just sort of touched on there, incremental process. It's incremental. That's right. Yeah. I think that it's all about making things work

better. That's sort of the fundamental motivation. And that could be technological advances. So one of the things that I talk about in the book is the stick shift car, which I wrote a piece about for the Atlantic, was one of the ways I got inspired to write the book. And in the United States where I live, those are already kind of on the wane, but then electric vehicles are kind of making them outmoded entirely. And that experience of connecting to your car by driving a stick shift, everyone who does it just delights in it. But, you know, the material reasons to do so, it doesn't cost less anymore, it doesn't get better fuel economy. It's not cheaper to manufacture. It's certainly harder to drive that way and more irritating. So, you know, the changes, that's like a technological change that's technically better, but that when you reflect on it, like, makes you feel worse, then there's sort of the broader sense of like efficiency or optimization culture. So the motivations to put those faucets in buildings, like some people think it's about. saving resources, water or paper towels, but it doesn't really do that, actually. It's mostly about

managing labor and operating your building and how you have to send staff in to clean and manage the facilities and so on. So we're so focused on making things work more efficiently that what happens when you experience them became less important. And I think there's also socioeconomic and you know, material shifts. One of them is just how expensive life is these days. And so if you aren't in a position to own something that you can fix or improve, like a home or an automobile or a motorcycle or whatever it is, or a garden for that matter, it doesn't have to be a piece of equipment,

then you have less inspiration and less incentive to be connected to it. And then, of course, we've been kind of bureaucratized. And now instead of going down the hall and talking to the person who does accounting and handing over your paper receipts when you're filing an expense report or whatever, you log into some ERP system where you don't interact with anyone anymore and it's all turned into rules. So those are just some of the factors. I think it's like a broad scale, massive, cultural and social shift that has reproduced this dematerializing effect. So before we get into some sort of specific examples that I'd like to talk about, I think you'll

find throughout the course of this conversation that you're absolutely preaching to the converted, by the way. So I should say that. But so I'm kind of middle-aged now, you know, and I didn't have internet in my home until I was sort of 21 and things like this. Sure. Do you think, like, because some people will, perhaps younger people, like, you know, I don't want to generalize, but we'll read this sort of without probably digging into it deeply enough and think, well, that's just an old person's thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think there is that that sort of sense that we're all living online now. and it's fine. I think that this is a subtle point because there has been a lot of negative critique

of internet life over the past, let's say, 10 years. And we became very concerned with the idea that we were living through our smartphones and that that was the only place that our lives took place. And there was worries about addiction and compulsion, social media, and all this other stuff. And actually, it's great in many ways, in maybe in most ways. We are living better because of the way that smartphones and computers in the internet have shifted our lives. Not entirely so. And so I'm not saying give up your phone. I'm also not saying like, you know, buy a vinyl record player and reanimate those connections

to like media that's dead or something like that. I have this sense that actually people are mistaken about how one note their lives became. And even your smartphone is gratifying. Why do you think you want to touch it all the time? It's smooth on one side. And I have this textured case on the back of mine that I thought even when there's not an app running. So I think with young people, what I've found talking to them about the book is that there is a lure. There is a sort of drive.

They feel as though something is missing. And you're not just talking about internet life. You're also talking about a generation that got kind of like hold up inside during the COVID pandemic that has been. in large part prevented from interacting and engaging with the physical world because young people aren't allowed to go places and be there without being shoot off for loitering and so on. So I think it's more universal. It's not just that I'm like shaking my fist to the cloud. And what I'm really calling for is not like a return.

I mean, not at all, not a return to the past because we can't go back to the past. But also because we don't need to. The life that we live in our senses is happening to all of us, all the time. It's rich and there's a surplus of sensory experience available. So at every moment of every day when you stop and just allow it to kind of happen to you, and I feel the desk beneath my hands right now and it's smooth with the oils from my skin, that's a sensory experience too. It doesn't have to be big.

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What pairs with Reacher on Prime? Reaching for a sparkling punch delivered with Prime. It's an unbelievable feeling when you're enjoying a punch. At the same time, Reacher is enjoying punching people. Wow, he's still punching people. Entertainment meets fast delivery. It's on Prime. So let's move on to these, like, as you say, sensory experiences or tactile experiences. So, sort of, funny enough, a few days ago, before I knew I was going to be speaking to you,

I was speaking to my twin, who's a designer maker. And he just, for some reason, started talking to me about his love of vintage hand tools, planes and chisels and things, and not even the new ones. And he was saying, well, you know, am I weird? for liking these things? And I said, well, you know, I don't think so. I can understand that. But, you know, I think a lot of people will hear that and think, oh, you know, I'm exactly the same. So what is it about that experience? First of all, I think that that sense of weirdness of like embarrassment or oddity, that sort of feeling like, is this strange? That's a really good sign that you're on the right track. You know, and it's like, oh, no, it's not strange.

And the moment you talk to someone about it, they'll be right there with you, you know, So I think that having that kind of opportunity for discourse, just sharing those encounters as normal, the way that you talk about like a delightful meal to, like, feel the heft of this chisel in my hand. Isn't that gratifying? Yes. Of course it is. I do think that one of the things that's at work here with the example of like the hand tools, it's not like that they're not motorized or they're not power tools or that they make things harder or that they make you slow down.

I mean, those may be contributing. it's rather that it represents like a very specific sensory experience. And you want like a diversity of those experiences in your lives. We used to have a greater diversity of sensory encounter that just kind of happened to us all the time. And so each individual one didn't need to do quite so much work. It was like, well, now I'm using the chisel, you know, and now I'm pouring my coffee and now I'm holding my mug. And, you know, and now I'm typing at my typewriter.

And we kind of flattened a lot of that down. to, well, often to just the screen, but also, you know, we stopped doing it or we, you know, outsourced it to others or all of those kind of dematerializing effects came into play. And now we have just fewer opportunities for sensory contact. And then we started to believe, well, I don't need those. Those aren't important. I mean, thank goodness I don't have those anymore because now I can focus on my job or my, you know, my family or what have you. And those things are important, but there was also a loss. We just kind of didn't recognize it. Yeah. So let's sort of stick with.

with our home lives. Yeah. And so you've mentioned a couple of times restaurants and food. And I think this is a fantastic example. Because, you know, food and cooking is, you know, it's not, you're not just feeling it. You're tasting it, of course, smelling it, you know, even listening to it if you're cooking or something. And personally, I'm a really, not that you'd know from my build, but I'm very enthusiastic about, food, different cuisines, restaurants. And they're very enthusiastic cook. I cook from scratch every

day. I have done for decades. You know, I recognize that not everyone can do that. Maybe, you know, they haven't had the opportunity to learn. They don't have the time, et cetera. That gives me great pleasure every day. Like, it's sort of what you're talking about. Like, um, and something that I'd be very sad if I wasn't able to do. I think that one of the things about, cooking, for example, but really it extends to anything, is we need to understand the difference between outcomes and experiences. And they're braided together. So you cook in order that you can eat or you can feed your family. You need sustenance. And you also cook meals in order that you can commune with other people and you can sit down and eat together. That's delightful in purpose-filled.

But then you also cook to hear the onions sizzling or to hold the pot in your hand or even to clean it off at the end of the day or to, you know, to sort of re-season your cast-ine or whatever it is that you're doing when you're cooking, right? When you're setting the table and you feel the tink of the flatware against one another or when you're putting the clean dishes away and they rattle together as they go into the cupboard. All of those experiences are part of this, the same category, the same family. And it's not so much that we need to like maximize them or something. It's rather that as they happen, they don't serve any particular purpose. They're just happening to you, what I think you are experiencing when you say that you love cooking,

isn't just making food for your friends or family, and it isn't simply mastering the process of being a cook or having different cuisines available. It's that, too. It's also just that experience of hearing, of listening, of the heat from the, from the stove top of the, of the experience of cooking, right? This is not a radical idea in a way, except somehow it is. Somehow it became radical to say, hey, that's also a part of your life. That's a delightful and important part of your life. Let it happen to you. Enjoy it. Yeah, so sort of like if we expand the idea out of bit, like you mentioned there sort of the focus that lots of times we have on results or outcomes. Right. Rather than the process or the simple act of doing, you know, I got from A to B,

I made it there. It doesn't really matter how I did it. Correct. But that we're missing it. hugely important experience there, surely. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the really life-changing thing about this idea for me has been that that experience, that sensory experience is available all the time. It's not just when you're in the kitchen cooking. I think that's easy. That's easy to understand. Oh, I'll go into the kitchen and I'll sort of, you know, and yeah, it's delightful to smell the smells. But everything that you do all day long, you do in your human body because you're stuck inside it. And so at any moment, it's not that you have the opportunity or that you need to notice. It's rather that it's right there. It's constantly being delivered to your senses. And you don't have to overwhelm

yourself by forcing getting in your brain. Oh, I got to notice all of these gratifying opportunities all the time. Rather, it should be comforting that they're always right there and available. You can plug into them like a stream that's constantly flowing at any moment. And And it's also not just like natural or sort of wholesome things. Everyone will say, oh, the smell of onions, but also the like sigh of the airbreak on the bus when it stops before you and you're about to get on. That is also gratifying, even though it may not be the kind of thing you would think to seek out. So how about sort of maybe tangentially? A lot of people talk about, you know, as we were saying with smartphones, which you've mentioned a few times,

there's so many distractions around us. And people say apparently, you know, concentration spans are falling. Does that have anything to do with the fact that we're not physically interacting with the world around us so much, you know? Can you say anything about that? I think the way that you put it is really smart because it's like we're not, we're so tempted to just blame these phones for all our problems. And, you know, there's ups and downs to them. But rather what's kind of happened is, that there's been like a conversation between other dematerializing effects that have nothing to do with the smartphone

and the smartphone itself, which has also helped us dematerialized by sort of siphoning all of our experiences, work, play, food, entertainment. You know, you have no idea what someone's doing when they're looking at their phone or their computer. They could be anywhere doing anything. And so that's kind of amplified that sense of disconnection that we were already getting from other aspects of the world. And we've kind of like blamed it all on the smartphone. We've tried to hang all of the problems on this one device, which we do feel pulled toward because it offers so much and it's so compelling to use. But if you stop and think about it for a moment, it's just a mistake. Our lives are not run by our devices.

And you know this because no matter how much time you spend in your phone, so you still spend a whole lot of it elsewhere, right? You're walking to the subway. You're feeling your feet against the pavement. you're getting up in the morning and you're making the bed and smoothing out the sheet. You're in the shower and you feel the warm water. You're listening to the rain outside. You're cooking the onions we talked about. It's like all of that stuff.

We just decided, well, that doesn't matter. That's not real life. And so if you say real life is what happens on the smartphone because real life is work and real life is doing things as quickly as possible so I can move on to the next thing, then of course you will become obsessed with that kind of experience being the only one that matters. So rather than changing our lives, it's almost like, we, we're going to be. We just need to learn to live the lives we're already living slightly differently. And maybe that's not where all the solutions lie, but a large part of the reclamation of contentment can come from just that sort of shift of attitude or shift of frame. Yeah, so I think a lot of people listen to this who haven't read the book yet,

would be thinking, well, that sounds a lot like mindfulness practice, which has grown in popularity recently, or even something like Zen Buddhism. Yeah, and I do address this in the book, as you know. The difference between what I'm suggesting and mindfulness is pretty fundamental. So what we don't need more of is time in our heads. That's the opposite of what I'm suggesting. What we need more of is time in our bodies and time in our senses. And it's important to remember that the way that Zen Buddhism was adopted in the West, what mindfulness really means in Western culture isn't what it means in Eastern culture. It means something more like, I need to take a from my harried, busy life of accomplishment seeking in order that I can get back to accomplishment seeking as quickly as possible. And, you know, if you think about the attitude people have about meditation or about mindfulness,

you'll notice that they try to strip away sensory experience. Let me sit in a white room and be very still and be calm, and I'm going to remove all sensory experience. I'm going to try to reconnect with my mind in order that what, in order that what, right? In order that then you can sort of strip it of all of its anxiety and then get right back into being anxious again.

So I think that it's useful, and I'm not suggesting that mindfulness or meditation doesn't have a role, and I'm not against it. But that's sort of the wrong road to go down if what you want to do is get back in touch with your senses, which are available to you all the time. And this is consonant with Buddhism itself. There's an amazing line I have in the book

from this Tibetan Buddhist master, which I may not remember perfectly, but it's like asking how to get back in touch with your senses through your mind is like wearing a pair of gloves so you don't have to touch. You don't have to think about it. You just have to do it. You just have to allow your senses to be sensory again. And that's not even hard. It's just that we're not accustomed to it. So sort of sticking with this idea, I'm sort of sticking with the Japanese theme there. Full disclosure, I lived in Japan for several years when I was younger. So in terms of things like, they have the concept of the shocking inn, the craftsman that just does a single task over and over again, you know, ideally in the pursuit of mastery. And, you know, does that idea feed into a love of the small stuff, I suppose I'd say? It's a bit like your twin, too, with the chisels, right?

I think people who do craft or who are artisans, which I think is the way that that term is used, that Shokunin term is often translated in English as artisan. That's someone who is, you know, dedicated and devoted, maybe in a very one-node way in the Japanese tradition, to a specific task or practice. And I think it's useful as a compass bearing

rather than a model. And what I mean by that is like, it's a quite extreme position, right? The Shokunin idea. But if you look at the idea of deep dives into specific, not craft practice, but specific sensory experience in the production of some sort of outcome in an artisanal way, right? Like, you know, it could be woodblock printing or it could be sushi making or it could be, I mean, heck, it could be like preparing whatever reports you need to generate in Excel.

Like all of us have our opportunities for mastery. It's like if you think about that experience and all of the opportunities, for connection to little levers and knobs that can make it better or worse or that matter when you're performing those actions, that's the kind of thing you can do everywhere in your life. So rather than everyone becoming like a deep dive artisan or like pursuing a craft practice in order to counterbalance their office job or what have you, I think it's more a matter of using the experience of craftspeople. And I talk about some of these in the book, knitters and even like tradespeople whose job is like set tiles or duplom.

in the book. They are very, very connected to the moment to moment experience of a task, and you can be very, very connected to the moment to moment experience of every single task in your life without making one of them sort of your whole life. So that's the way I would kind of present it, you know? And I think that what's important here is that the happiness discourse suggests that in order to be more content, we have to change something. And it has to be hard to change, and we have to work out in 10,000 hours or whatever. Oh, I need to adopt some new, whole new experience and learn how to do it and go deep into it. And that's, well, first of all, you're probably not going to do it, but you don't even really need to.

So, sort of, you've kind of answered this already just there. But I was going to ask, like some people listening might think, well, you know, this is like I was saying earlier, people who don't have much time or something, or much money. You think, well, this, baby, this sort of experience is the preserve of the privilege. It's a sort of luxurious way to live. but that's not your thesis at all. No, I mean, I empathize with it, and I think it's right to an extent. And, you know, the idea of wealth allowing you to have opportunity is simply true. And, you know, I have this whole chapter about ownership, which we've already discussed.

And I think that's an area where it's particularly palpable. You know, so I own a home, and I have all sorts of things I do around the house that I'm incentivized and inspired to do as a kind of steward of this historic structure that I'm responsible for. And if I didn't have that opportunity, then all of the... those options would sort of close themselves down. But that said, if you just reflect on your senses, think about feeling, seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing things in your life. That's just a condition of humanity. That's not something that has to do with how much money you have. And in fact, a lot of people, when they become wealthier, they seem to be less and less interested in those

kinds of experiences. They're just pursuing more accomplishment, more wealth, more career advancement. I always lament how the sort of captains of industry of today, the billionaires and so on, they don't seem to be interested in anything other than the pursuit of further accrual of wealth, right? Well, I had a successful company, so now I'm going to go start another company rather than, heck, you know, I'm going to like distill whiskey or whatever it is, right? So in some ways, and I'm certainly not saying that the answer is to be impoverished, but in some ways the idea that your senses are available to you all the time.

no matter what, and that even you may be more attuned to them when they are all that you have. We have a lot of history of that in human society, right? We're extremely resilient people, creatures, human beings, and the delight and the meaning that we're able to derive from small stuff doesn't have anything to do with how much money we have. It has to do with how open we are to the gifts of the world delivers. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor Ian Bogost.

To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book, The Small Stuff, The Sensory Enchantment of Everyday Life. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person,

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