1166: Making Moments More Meaningful with Dr. Ian Bogost

Pete Mockaitis
Ian, welcome!

Ian Bogost
Thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to talk about having a more gratifying life and work and career experience. And you know, Ian, I don’t know if you would think of it this way, but when I think of gratification, I think of Cow Clicker. Can you tell us what this is about?

Ian Bogost
Yeah, this is one of my legacies. This is from, gosh, 15 or more years ago now I made this Facebook game called Cow Clicker. And this was in the day when Farmville was really popular and people were like, you know, sending you updates from their farm on your Facebook feed.

And I thought the whole thing was ridiculous. And I kind of thought Facebook was a little ridiculous, too. It was this, like, weird way of using your friendships and your connections when they were useful to you and not really engaging with those people as kind of full people.

So I made Cow Clicker, and the way that Cow Clicker worked is that you clicked on a cow, picture of a cow that I drew, and it would move. And then you could click it again six hours later, and you could invite your friends into your pasture. And it kind of ran away from me at that point. It got very complicated.

But you’re absolutely right, because I mistook my critique of Facebook for something different than it really was for the people who played and enjoyed Cow Clicker. And what they liked about it was that they got to click on a cow, and the cow mooed, and that was delightful. And then they got on with their day and they came back and did it again.

It took me many years to come to terms with what I had really made and why it was meaningful and valuable to people and how I’d sort of mistaken what I had in mind and my head for what really happened, which was a little bit of delight, delivered a little bit of delight to people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s beautiful. And I’m thinking about, I’ve heard a legend that Daniel Kahneman once said, “I love being wrong. It’s the way I know I’ve really learned something,” which is a lovely frame.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, I mean, I think I’ve been wrong a lot in my career and I’ve tried to learn from it. Or maybe wrong isn’t exactly how I’d put it, that my thinking has evolved and I’ve tried really hard to shift my thinking as the world has shown me new things.

And so this new work on gratification is it comes from me being wrong many times, like layered wrong-nesses over the course of the last 30 years. And one of them is definitely how wrong I was about games. One of my jobs is being a game designer. And I used to think that games were important because they could show you how, like, complexity works.

And then I thought games were important because they were kind of like toys, like you could play with them. And now I realize they’re more just things that you have no reason to interact with and that don’t apologize for that fact.

And there’s tons of stuff like that in the world. All the time we’re surrounded by it, that it’s just there for us to encounter. All we have to do is accept it. So I love being wrong so I can learn in that way. And certainly the book and the work that I’ve been doing is born of many different layers of wrong headedness.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that a lot. And so let’s hear a little bit of the story. So you kind of created it as a critique and then you’re like, “Isn’t this kind of weird and silly and exploitative?” And what was your arc of discovery there?

Ian Bogost
Well, I mean, it took me so long to discover that it was more interesting than I thought. The fact that people got the critique right away. They understood that Farmville was ridiculous and that Facebook was exploitative.

And I was there making those arguments, like, in 2010. It was long before the whole kind of like tech lash came about and people started doubting whether big tech was doing them any favors. But back then, everybody loved Facebook. It let you connect with your friends, right? It was amazing. Like, what’s there not to like? Maybe they didn’t love Farmville so much. So some people got it.

But then others were enjoying themselves. And I guess at that time in my life, I couldn’t quite grasp that they were enjoying themselves with this ridiculous, unenjoyable object that I’d made, or that I thought was unenjoyable.

And I had game designer friends, and I think the chief among them was Raph Koster, who’s a well known game designer in the multiplayer online game space, and he was like, “Ian, you know, I think you’ve got this wrong. Like, you made something amazing and delightful and people are playing it, and you need to learn from it in that way.” And I was like, “Yeah, whatever F.”

And then the years went by. And, by the way, I blew up Cow Clicker in a Cowpocalypse in 2011. And there was like a cow rapture, all the cows went away. It had really become an obsession of mine, and I couldn’t handle it anymore.

And so I just kind of got rid of it by making the cows go away. Although you could still click the spot where the cow used to be, until Facebook changed their software and then it stopped working without my intervention, maybe five years later.

But I realized, I think it was maybe two or three years ago, I did a story for The Atlantic where I went to this cow therapy farm where you can hug a cow as, like, a therapeutic act. And I was like, “This is my opportunity to come to terms with my cow problem, you know?”

And the cows had been rescued from this, like, traumatic escape where they’d escaped a slaughterhouse in St. Louis where I lived, and there was a huge outpouring of sentiment in favor of the cows, and the cows were, you know, save the cows.

One of them they named Chico and everybody was in the streets with the cows running around. And they saved them and sent them to this, like, cow ashram where they help people feel better about their lives.

So I used that as a way of trying to understand the experience and, you know, like just the idea that these simple tiny things, like clicking on a cow, that that might be it. That might be enough, you know? That might be enough. And that took me, I mean, it took me 10 years. It took me 10 years.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it might be enough for what exactly?

Ian Bogost
It might be enough to make your life meaningful. It might add a little bit more contentment, that you need to feel guilty about or weird about. And it’s not the same as, like, pursuing a career in order that you can achieve the next promotion or help your clients or, you know, finding your life partner and building an environment in which you want to live together. It’s not big stuff like that.

But those small encounters, like clicking a cow, that they can still deliver, not just meaningless meaning, but deep, rich meaning. And I would say that some of the other interests that I had at the same time as I was working on Cow Clicker, but I couldn’t quite recognize, like I was writing about toasters and slippers and other kind of seemingly unimportant elements of the build environment.

And they seem like oddities or curiosities, like how weird it is that someone will pay attention to, you know, the design of a toaster? But don’t you experience delight when you make bread in the morning, when you hear it pop up, and you see it and you smell it, and you feel the warmth and you see the brownness?

Those kinds of encounters started to get, they just really started to interest me. And I was like, “Hmm, I’ll put that in the back of my head.” And over the years since then, I’ve been trying to build a kind of theory, a way of understanding what little tiny experiences like clicking on a cow or making toast have to teach us about feeling larger scale contentment in our lives at work, at home and elsewhere.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing, and I know you love your cow puns, so I, too, am struck by the notion that clicking cow could really “moo-ve” the needle on mental health.

Ian Bogost
There you go. That’s it. You’re doing it.

Pete Mockaitis
So deep, rich moments. If anyone is scratching their head saying, “Huh? Click cow? Looking at a toaster? What do you mean, Ian?”

Ian Bogost
So here’s a different example, right? I recently re-watched “Mad Men,” the television show. And you know, it takes place in an office in the 1960s. And an office of the 1960s is totally different from an office in the contemporary world.

And one of the things that I noticed was the telephones, you know, the function of telephones in that era. A large part of their lives at work was making calls, taking calls, answering phones, pressing the buttons on those phones, dialing the phones.

That’s not, like, why you do the work. You don’t go to work at the start of the day in order to use telephones. You do it in order to get work done, to call your clients, to close deals, to, in their case, assemble the advertising campaigns that they’re selling.

But along the way, you spend a lot of time using the telephone. And that makes the telephone like a big part of your life in the 1960s, and it was designed in a way that made that experience delightful, tangible. It had heft.

You picked it up. There was an intimacy to the voice on the other end of the line. You held it very close to your mouth, in a way that also felt intimate, right? If you had multiple lines, you press the chunky buttons.

So I became, like, as I was watching this, you know, after having having written the book, I thought, “Wow, that’s a perfect example of the kind of phenomenon that gives you meaning, but that doesn’t feel like it should be meaningful.”

Because what you’re really after is like accomplishing goals normally, but along the way, you have the experience of doing, in the case of a workplace, you have the experience of doing the work, the moment-to-moment encounters that make up your daily life.

And those are much more meaningful than we give them credit for. Or maybe a different way to put it is that you better make them meaningful because so much of your life is comprised of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So they are meaningful. And I guess we got to go right for the core of that. It’s, like, what do we mean by meaningful? What makes something meaningful versus not meaningful?

Ian Bogost
So this concept which I call gratification, which is all about being connected to the physical world, this gives you a sense of grounding, it makes you feel purpose. And, also, we live in these physical human bodies that we carry with us everywhere we go, whether we like it or not.

We may think that a lot of our lives have been mediated or digitized, or we don’t really need our bodies anymore, or that they’re secondary to our computers and our smartphones, but they’re not. We still live in the world inside these bodies.

And so the sense of, like, sensory connection with the world, with your home life, with your work life, that adds this kind of base layer of contentment. It’s not the same as happiness or as satisfaction, which is more about like goals and the future and accomplishing things and having purpose. All that stuff is great. I’m not against any of that.

But along the way, you can derive much smaller but still equally meaningful encounters from being connected to the physical world around you. And so my advocacy here, whether it’s for cows on your screen or telephones in your office, or whatever else you might find, and we can talk about more examples that haven’t been outmoded by technology, like handsets have, is that by embracing that, by realizing it’s a huge part of your daily life, you can become more content than you would be if you didn’t.

It’s not trying to replace that purpose and that ambition that you might feel in your job, but rather to amend it. And also to give you a sense of maybe where some of that unhappiness or discontentment might come from, maybe you just feel disconnected from the moment-to-moment actions of your work rather than the purpose or goals of the job.

Pete Mockaitis
Disconnected. Well, I’m thinking about the mindfulness literature in terms of being present and in the moment, and many monks or everyday meditators find this kind of a concept. Like, their breath is meaningful and they’re unaware that it’s meaningful until they stop and attend to that and that alone.

Ian Bogost
Right. So I think, in the contemporary world in the West, we’ve leaned on mindfulness as a way of trying to give ourselves a break, you know? Like, that’s sort of been the interpretation, the Western interpretation of Buddhist-style mindful meditation, that, “I’m harried. I have all these goals and all these ambitions. I have all this stuff I have to do. I need a way of overcoming that sense of anxiety and being one with myself.”

But we don’t do it in order to really be one with ourselves or with our breath or with our telephony or with our cows or whatever. We do it in order to give ourselves pause. It’s, like, we have all these ambitions and all this stuff we’ve got to do, “Let me just take a break so I can get right back to doing all those ambitions that I have.”

And I think the difference between gratification, what I call gratification and mindfulness, is that it’s not in your head. Like, that idea that we can think our way through and out of any problem, I think that’s mistaken.

Some of the way that we live is through our bodies alone, and so you can’t think your way out of your bodily encounters. One reason you can’t do that, Pete, is that they happen to you in the moment in which they take place, right?

Like, when the phone rings and you hear it ring, you can’t sort of go, “Well, I’ll, like, process the sensation of the phone ringing later. I’ll save that up. I’ve got other things to do right now.” And so the sensory engagement, well, you could turn off your phone, of course, right?

When you go out on a walk and you feel the texture of the gravel under your feet, or you feel the heat in the air closing in on you, that happens right then, in the moment. And you can’t sort of put it away in order that you can make sense of it later.

When we’re at work, in particular, our time is kind of not our own. It’s structured by others. We’re often told what to do and where to do it. And so maybe you can take a break and kind of catch your breath, go to the break room. Some people work at home where they can, literally, go do a little bit of yoga or something like that. That can help.

But it shouldn’t and it cannot be a replacement for the moment-to-moment experience of doing your job. So either you figure out how to make that experience meaningful or more meaningful as you do it, not for the ends that it provides, but for the experience that it delivers in the moment, or you’re just going to be like less happy than you could with your lot.

Pete Mockaitis
Less happy than you could be. Well, that’s certainly valuable in and of itself. And it’s funny, sort of like the motivational purpose frame of the mindfulness as well, it’s like you have more meaning and gratification in the moment as is.

And I would also suggest that the show is called How to Be Awesome at Your Job, in so doing, all kinds of good additional result-oriented benefits could accrue to us if you’re more present in a conversation, for example. People just like that. That’s part of what makes a person charismatic or likable. you know, improves leadership, etc.

Or, you just not being stressed, harried, disconnected elsewhere is just going to aid your capacity to think and be creative and make decisions and all kinds of other things on top of just having a gratified, meaningful sensory experience in those moments as well.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, I hear what you’re saying. And here’s the way I’ve been thinking about this. Most of our lives, most of the things that we pursue because we think they’re valuable are kind of goal-oriented, outcome-oriented.

We’re very goal-oriented people and we live in a very goal-oriented and outcome-oriented culture. There’s probably pros and cons to that, but that’s the way it is. I think, all in all, it’s a good thing. Like, we want to accomplish stuff, right? And that’s one of those things that we want to accomplish is purpose, meaning, and, you know, like material success, maybe.

You want to be better at your job so you can get promoted, you get a better job. Maybe you could start your company, whatever it might be. All of that is fine. I think that we need to take a break from it from time to time.

And we need to, in order to experience those kind of moment-to-moment pleasures, you need them first not to have any purpose other than to deliver the experience because, otherwise, you’re just instrumentalizing them, turning them into kind of, like, efficiency gain, hacks, or whatever, before you’ve even made sense of what they’re for, right?

So the first exercise is, “What does it even mean just to experience the sensory world as I encounter it? And then, why is it that that’s so hard to do?” And one of the reasons is that we’ve been kind of trained not to do it, right, or we’ve been, what I call it, dematerialized. We’ve been disconnected from all sorts of aspects of the physical world at work, at home, in every aspect of our lives.

But that said, I also think that you’re right, that if you imagine your overall contentment your whole life, everything in your life that’s going on, how happy you are with your job, with your family, with the car you own, with all of it, then one component of that is your sort of day-to-day sense of, “How good do I feel just moving through the world?”

And if you can build like a foundation like a bedrock, a bedrock part of your overall contentment that comes in part from a sense of gratification, like, you know, you take your coffee in the morning at work, and you pour it out into the mug in the kitchen, and you feel the warmth of the mug in your hand, and you smell the coffee having been brewed, and then you taste it, and it energizes you.

And also you have a moment of time that you can share with your coworkers. That little thing does fuel you up, right? Like, it gives you some sense of, “Okay, this is a thing that I do. It’s a ritual. And I’m also just having and I’m aware that I’m having that sensory experience.”

Now, what if I told you that you have that, like, all the time, constantly? And so you can build a sort of sense of overall pleasure that comes from the things you’re already doing that you don’t need to change, that then will give you a little bit of a of like a boost, you know?

But I don’t think that we ought to start by thinking of the purpose of gratification as sort of fueling us up to be more effective or more productive, because then we almost can’t experience it. You have to, like, learn how to experience it before allowing it to serve some of those higher order purposes that you’re thinking of.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you there in terms of your frame of reference, your intention, your mindset, perspective, attitude, beliefs, all that stuff with regard to how you approach it can alter the experience itself.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, totally. You know how, like, people feel, like sometimes people feel like their work is meaningless, like, they just don’t know why they’re doing it. And that’s one of the things that would make you uncomfortable, dissatisfied at work.

You brought up these games. Many years ago at my game studio, we made this game for a popular ice cream chain. It’s one of those where they, like, bash up the ice cream on a cold surface. You know what I mean? And it was this training game to help people figure out portioning because that’s where a lot of the profit was made or lost in the game.

And I learned a lot about this. This is just like a menial job, in a way, like a first job for 16-year-olds or like a minimum wage job. But it was really important to this company that the job be good. And one of the things we discovered was that the workers, the line workers, like one of their senses of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the job had to do with, like, why were they more or less successful? Why was their manager praising them or yelling at them?

And a lot of it had to do with the kind of mechanics of pulling ice cream, and the fact that they have different viscosities and, like, the mint was super thin, and the cake batter was super thick. So paying attention to those, like, small-scale physical differences.

In this case it’s ice cream, so it’s easier than if you do, like, knowledge work, but bear with me here. Knowing and, like, attending to the specifics of their physical acts, that had a lot to do with their overall sense of contentment or even just of clarity with the job, right?

Now, in the book, when I was researching the book, I talked to a lot of people in different professions, and one of the people I talked to does tile setting. So he works doing mostly residential construction, setting tile, and he was telling me all about, like, all the moment-to-moment attention and care and detail of the work of putting one tile next to the other, which, if you don’t know anything about it, you might think it’s easy, but it’s not.

And he told me how gratifying this was, and how much clarity he was able to achieve during the course of a day. He was able to think clearly, he was able to solve problems, not just over the course of the day or the project, but like moment to moment. He was really engaged with it.

And his name is Dan. And I said, “Dan, you know, a lot of people who work in knowledge work, work in office jobs, would love to have that kind of moment-to-moment clarity and contentment in what they do. But sometimes they just feel like they’re sending emails. You know what I mean?”

So the moment-to-moment experience really does matter not just because it might make you, like, more successful, but because it also gives that moment meaning. It allows you to understand what it’s for, why you’re doing it, especially why you’re doing it like many, many times a day or a week or a year, which is what our lives are. There’s a lot of repetition.

And so if we can find a way to make that repetition compelling, then it will feel less like boredom or like a slog, and more like something we want to do, not just to get through it, and not in order to achieve some greater further outcome from it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I think that something feeling like less of a slog is, and I don’t want to go into this loop because like this is, like, “Yeah, it’s awesome to be meaningful in the moment and that’s also super helpful.” So I guess I’m thinking, like, if an activity feels aversive, unpleasant, we will just naturally choose to do less of it, and often to our detriment.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, for sure. Or you’ll try to, yeah. And sometimes you can’t do less of it because that’s where the job is, you know? And then you’re really faced with a huge puzzle. And people, they get into their heads about this, they’re like, “I hate my job, I think. Maybe I need a new job.” And they might, right?

But what if what they really hate, or at least in that moment dislike, is not the job itself, not the outcomes, not the colleagues, not the purpose, not the career, not even the sector, but something about the moment-to-moment experience that they’re engaged with.

I have a colleague at the magazine, at The Atlantic, who got this, like, mechanical keyboard. All we do as writers is type, right? Like, that’s what the job is, is typing and talking on the phone. And, you know, it’s not just typing, but it’s a lot of typing.

He got one of those mechanical keyboards, it’s clicky clicky keyboards. You know, some people might find that irritating when it’s in the next cubicle, but he knew that the moment-to-moment experience of pressing buttons on the computer is what his job was composed of at a sort of atomic level.

And that having an apparatus at his desk that would make that experience more gratifying, it wouldn’t make his relationship with his coworkers easier or better. It wouldn’t make the stories he was editing or writing easier or better. It wouldn’t make his overall sense of career progress easier or better, but it would add something to that moment-to-moment experience of doing it, right?

So, I mean, you know, maybe there’s not a simple solution like that for everything, but I think that we’ve massively underestimated the degree to which the physical connection and contact, the sensory experience of work is a massive part of our sense of contentment at work, not just what we’re doing the work for, not just the money we’re getting paid, not just the purpose or the career advancement, but literally, what’s happening to you one moment to the next.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that example a lot. And when you talk about we’ve become dematerialized and we’re sort of trained to be in that fashion, it’s kind of funny. I’ve noticed, in the world of emails, for example, I pay for the software Superhuman, which I absolutely love.

And in some ways it has some extra features which are nice, but for the most part, I’m just using it as a more beautiful, faster, more responsive skin atop of Gmail. And it’s like Gmail can, for some, be zero dollar cost. You pay out in other ways.

And so I guess my dematerialized trained brain has a number of times thought to myself, “It’s so silly to pay money for this thing that doesn’t do anything, really.” And I try to convince myself, like, “Well, Pete, I mean, because it’s faster, you’re actually able to get the job done.”

Ian Bogost
Yeah, you’re trying to optimize.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like I have to resort to an economic productivity rationale to myself to feel okay with, “Yeah, I’m spending money because it makes email, which I don’t like doing, a more pleasant experience sensorially. And that is just fine and dandy.” I’m hearing loud and clear from you.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, no, I love the email example because it’s a huge part of all of our lives, right? I also paid for a Gmail client called Mimestream, and it’s not as fancy as yours. It’s really just an email client. But for some reason, my brain just rejects the Gmail client.

I load it up and I just cannot make sense of it. And Mimestream just looks a lot more like the email clients that I’m accustomed to. And it took me a minute to accept that all I was really buying was this sort of sense of visual similarity with, like, Apple Mail, which I use most of the time.

But once I accepted that, it was fine because that was real. Like, it’s real. Like, my sense of moment-to-moment visual contentment with email, which I also spend a lot of time with, that’s a huge part of my workday and my work life. And I will tell you, I literally feel better using my Gmail work account, like so noticeably so. I know that it’s improved my life because of this silly software program that I bought.

Here’s another gratification-oriented email work example that I’ll share with you. I’ve got one of these Logitech mouses, mice, whatever you call them.

And it’s got a button right where my thumb is. And I programmed this button in my mail client to delete emails so, like, a delete email button. Oh, I love pressing the delete email button. And I’ll just sit there and I’ll just delete, delete, delete, delete.

And that feeling of, like, email triage that all of us do, which it’s just a chore, “And don’t you have a delete button on your keyboard? Bogus!” I do. I do, indeed, have a delete button on my keyboard. But something about having, like, this dedicated email deletion button that I press many times a day, that gives me, like, enormous gratification.

It doesn’t really, like, solve the communication problems that generate the emails in the first place. Maybe I’m deleting some that I shouldn’t, but that’s a different problem, right? That’s a different problem than the one that I’m identifying. So you’re exactly onto it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I’m thinking about a Guy Ross, How I Built This interview with Paul English who made Kayak. And they sort of established you’re basically just a skin on top of some fancy technology that someone else made. He’s like, “Well, yeah, but that’s what we needed,” and which became a huge company.

Well, now I’m thinking that’s intriguing in terms of how we might choose to integrate delight, sensorial delight into things because I’m thinking about I’ve got this app called Do Habits. And what’s so funny is I like that when I tap it, there’s a little bit of a haptic sensation. And the user experienced designers, you know, they obsess over this all the time.

There’s a little haptic sensation and also makes a little string note. Like, mmm, you know? And so as I tap it, like I did how many minutes of exercise, like, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And it just feels great. And I find myself wanting to exercise more so I can tap it.

Ian Bogost
So you can tap more. Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, no, that’s totally real, though. I mean, think about, you know, and there are, like, kind of dark patterns to those sorts of designs. Like, you know, when you go into like a casino and you hear and see all of the sensations and sounds, it’s drawing you in and trying to capture your attention.

But the reason we like interacting with our smartphones or our smart watches or our devices is because they’re delightful to interact with. They have these smooth surfaces. They’re responsive. You can, like, have the little springy thing when you refresh a feed or something, and it bounces as though it’s a real physical object. Those things are designed to be delightful.

I mean, they’re not as delightful as they once were, I think. But they’re purposely designed in order they can give us some of that. You know, that’s simulated tactile feedback. I recently wrote a little software program for my smartwatch that is just a timer. It’s literally just a timer.

But I found that, like, most of what I do when I time things is I want, like, kind of multiple 30-second long time. Like, it’s 30 seconds, it’s five minutes to brew tea, or, you know, I’m going to do a minute of hard planks at when I’m exercising, or something. Like, I just don’t need an hour-long timer that much, which is the one that comes with the watch. And I made it work exactly like you’re describing. Tap, tap, tap to add 30 seconds.

Like, it’s silly, but the delight that I feel when I do that is real. Like, it’s not invented. You haven’t made it up. Have you ever gone, like, out of your way to go to, like, the coffee shop or the eatery that has, like, the nice cups or the takeaway plates that are, like, really thick, or those bamboo-like disposable or recyclable cutlery?

Like those sorts of experiences, you will even seek them out because they give you a richer sensory engagement than some alternative would. We’re kind of doing this all the time. We just sort of go, “Well, that’s obviously unimportant. Like, I don’t know why I’m doing that. There’s something wrong with me or something weird about it. I just need to keep that to myself and not share it.”

When, in fact, we all do share in all of that delight. It’s the same reason that, like, a noisy office or a quiet office, or one that’s too bright or not bright enough, or has the wrong color temperature bulbs, or where the carpet is, like, it used to be nice and plush and now it’s been worn down.

Those things have an impact on your day-to-day life. You may not want them to, or you may not take it as seriously as you should, but they absolutely do.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I’m also thinking about how when organizations or people give us sensorial delight or sensorial disgust, I have associations with that organization or that person. Like, if, for example, at one point, I rented an office, and in the bathroom they had the cheapest, thinnest commercial, industrial toilet paper that exists.

Ian Bogost
Totally. No, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And I know they did that just because it was cheaper, low cost. And yet, I felt a level of not being cared for?

Ian Bogost
Right. No, but, literally, I mean, you paused because it feels, I mean, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I think you paused because it feels weird to admit that, to admit that, you know, like you take a business meeting and you go to the restroom, and the toilet paper is like surprisingly thin.

And you’re thinking in your head, you’re like, “What is this company’s values, right? What are they all about?” And you’re not wrong to think that it’s sort of like, you know, like there’s an old joke that if you’re like boarding a plane, and you’re in the jet wing and you see, like, a bolt on the ground.

And you suddenly feel like, “Well, am I safe here?” Even though there’s no evidence that there’s any relationship between, like, the loose bolt and anything that’s been done, but it’s just like that. There is a sense of care that goes into the design and operation of these environments that we live in all the time, including our offices.

And that sense of care, it doesn’t just send messages, it actually delivers experiences that matter to us. I mean, I talk to a lot of people about work, okay? And the bathroom comes up all the time. All the time. Like, if folks feel like the bathroom is, like, too public, like it’s kind of in the wrong place, or they have to pass by too many people to go there, or there aren’t enough stalls, or the stalls aren’t big enough.

In America, we have these, you know, bathroom stalls that you can sort of see under and see around. And in Europe, they tend to have these enclosures with full doors that make you feel. The ones that have, like, the locking door that has the red and the green, you know, vacant-occupied, that gives you the sense that, “Okay, now I’m having privacy because I’m signaling it to someone else, and they’re not going to, like, rattle the door to see if someone’s inside.”

I know it sounds ridiculous to say that your contentment in your job might have something substantially to do with the design of the locks on the restroom stalls, but, honestly and truly, it does. It really does.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And then I’m thinking about the feedback that we choose to share with folks. And so I’m thinking about, I hired someone to paint my new office space, which I own and I’ve got co-working situation going on, which is pretty cool.

And so I got some bids for painters, and there was one who just seemed like he cared a lot. He’s very thoughtful and asking follow up questions and just kind of going through all the things in some detail and just sort of thinking, like, “Hmm, you know, I’d probably go with this sheen for this purpose, unless you were looking…”

Ian Bogost
That’s the stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
And so I just got the vibe, he really cares about the painting he’s doing. And so I hired him, and I didn’t hire someone else who cost a little bit less, and so they asked for some feedback on the form, and it’s, well, one, there’s some social pieces. It’s sort of, like, “I don’t really have a relationship with you. I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, I got the vibe you didn’t really care that much about my paint job because what I feel…’”

Ian Bogost
Yeah, I know exactly what you’re saying.

Pete Mockaitis
There was less sensorial delight and, yeah, I think that’s the case with a lot of things with regard to the feedback that we choose to give tends to be the one that feels most defensible, “Well, there’s a better price over here. Oh, they can better match my timeline.”

What they didn’t say is, “It felt like he didn’t really care about me and my job and my office the way the other guy did.” And so we won’t say that generally, and, thus, we won’t hear that. And we are devoid, we’re missing out on a huge important piece of feedback. And I think that that’s another reason why we feel silly about these sensorial little things we’re discussing is because other people won’t vocalize them to us unless they have to be our close friends or partners.

Ian Bogost
That’s exactly right. And, you know, one of the pieces of advice I give in the book is that if you can verbalize, just talking about these kinds of encounters, like we’re doing right now, it makes them feel less weird, less embarrassing, less, like, foolish.

And I have found, when I start talking to people about these kinds of experiences, you know, like, “Look, I really cared about the sheen of the paint,” or, “You know, have you noticed the wobbly knob? Like, the wobbly knobs really bothering me,” or whatever it might be, that people, they light up right away. They’re right there with you. They just have a hard time starting that kind of conversation.

And so verbalizing it, vocalizing it is one way of making it matter, of making it normal, of acknowledging that it’s a big part of life. And I think that the optimization, goal-oriented mentality that we have, not just as workers, but also as managers, sometimes makes us think that it’s, like, more noble not to care about these things.

That like, “Well, you should just be able to look past that and, like, get on with the important big stuff part of your job.” But that’s wrong, isn’t it? Because these little things eat at you, and they eat at you because they matter, because they’re happening multiple.

Like, you are seeing the walls of your office every moment of every day. And if the light reflects on them improperly because the wrong sheen was put on them, that colors every moment of every day of your work life. You better get it right, not just because it’s nice to get that kind of thing right, but because it actually really does impact your sensory experience of being at work and doing your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Ian, so we’ve had a lot of fun philosophically here. And if folks are thinking, “All right. Okay, I’m sold. All right, de-materialization has happened to our detriment. These sensorial things really do matter. And I don’t need to feel silly about it. I can talk about it. I can invest in making it swell,” do you have any top do’s or don’ts for us as we start living life with this new lens?

Ian Bogost
Yeah, I mean, I think the first one we’ve already talked about a little bit, which is just, if you accept these gifts as things that matter, I don’t want to say take it seriously because that puts too much of a burden on your brain.

But if you can be open to the idea that some of these small stuff encounters with the physical world are capable of delivering meaning, then the meaning will just kind of arrive. It’s happening to you all the time.

One way you can do that is just by, like, lingering a little bit longer in the experiences that you’re having wherever you are. And this will help you identify them to kind of feel the sensation of encountering them.

Like, sometimes, I just let my fingers sort of rub up against the keyboard. It just, like, grounds me, like, “Here I am with the keyboard.” And then I also sense the little nubs on the F and the J key that orient me for touch typing, which is like a tiny moment of gratification that I have.

So that’s one thing. Just, like, linger in these moments like a little bit longer. Talk about them, give them surface. But I think the big thing is that, if you are willing to accept that your life isn’t just made of big moments of accomplishment, and then nothing in between matters, but that your life is made of moments, then you can take those moments as they are given.

Even if they don’t do anything for you, even if it’s just, like, “Ah, you know, at this time of day, the way that the light shimmers off the sheen of the paint, huh, that’s beautiful.” That’s enough, right? So dividing your day up into moments every now and then, and just taking in the moment. Not being mindful about it, not trying to, like, bend your brain to accept them or what have you. Just allow yourself to have a moment. That’s another thing you can do.

And then, you know, I think this is a little bit harder, but in the workplace, I think that accepting and even communicating up the chain that some of the trappings of physical life, you know, whether you work from home or whether you work remotely, whether you are in a co-work situation, whether you work a normal job at a workplace, that the physical environment in which you work has an outsized impact on what you’re able to get done at that work, right?

Which means that maybe, like, little tiny changes would make your life a lot, “Oh, actually, if we just had this different kind of coffee cup, I think it would be a lot better.” Like, being willing to make those kinds of small asks where you find the opportunity for improvement is maybe also something that people can do right away, you know?

And then one last thing I’ll throw out there that’s more about your home life than your work life. Find things to do outside of work that are sensorily different from the ones that you do at work. I don’t mean, like, that have different goals. I mean that whatever your sensory life is in your job, find ways of exercising a diversity of sensory encounters outside of it.

So, you know, if you’re a knowledge worker and you’re spending all your time at your keyboard with your computer sitting down, then something that you do while you’re standing up and outside, that’s an interesting experience, not because you need to garden or because it’s better to knit than to move symbols around between SaaS systems, but just because it gives you a different sensory encounter.

It, like, rejuvenates you in order that you can come back and appreciate the world of work, of the moment-to-moment experience of work with kind of renewed attention. So there’s a few ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I like that a lot. And I think just pausing in order to do that. And I’m thinking about, I remember when I first got an iPhone that had the face ID unlock feature, I thought it was so cool. And I guess I’ve grown accustomed to it, as maybe we do sensory habituation stuff.

And I remember my wife asked me, because whenever I did it, I would flash a real big smile, and she’s like, “Do you have to smile for it to work?” I was like, “No, I just really like doing it.”

Ian Bogost
I mean, I think what you’re expressing is the sentiment of wonder. And if you believe, I really believe this, that there’s nothing whatsoever that isn’t worthy of wonder. And we do forget that. We forget it as we grow older, in general, but then we forget it as the things that were once wondrous become more familiar.

And they’re still wondrous, right? Every day, we’re surrounded by all these miracles. And then there are new ones, too. So being open to feeling that sense of wonder, and really thinking about sensation, about your presence in the world as a human body, as a series of gifts, I think that that’ll change your whole life.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, lovely. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Ian Bogost
This is one from the Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa, he says, “When you ask how you should do things, it’s like trying to buy a pair of gloves so you don’t have to touch. One doesn’t have to think about how, one just does it.”

I love that. I love that idea that we’re stuck in our heads and we’re mistaking effort for something that requires none.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Ian Bogost
One of the things I’ve become really interested in over the past few years are a series of research experiments carried out by an Oxford University psychologist named Charles Spence and a group of colleagues that he works with.

And one of the things that he works on is what’s called multimodal perception, which is the idea that, like, seemingly unrelated things can change your experience of sensation. So one of my favorite versions of this study is, like, changing the color or shape of a spoon with which you eat yogurt actually changes people’s understanding of the taste of it, or how much they think they enjoy it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite book?

Ian Bogost
One of my favorite books ever is a novella by Nicholson Baker called the Mezzanine. It’s been around for many, many years. And it’s about a man who is riding an escalator from the ground floor of his office building to the mezzanine level of his office building, and that’s the whole book.

And it sounds ridiculous, I know, but over the course of the ride, he reflects on all of these ordinary experiences that he’s had, you know, having lunch, buying shoelaces, and it just is this vivid celebration of the depth and magic of ordinary life. It’s a really short little easy read that I love to come back to.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Ian Bogost
One that I love that isn’t technological, or at least not in that way, is the Pigma Micron archival ink pens. You know what I mean? I use them in 0.1 millimeter thickness.

And I just find that the smallness and the precision of writing with them, they invite a kind of precision of thought or action. Even if what I’m doing doesn’t have it, it sort of inspires me to think better and more deliberately about what I’m writing down and why I’m writing it down.

Pete Mockaitis
Any favorite habit?

Ian Bogost
Lingering a little longer than needed in anything that I’m doing. And, especially, to the point of, like, if something feels like a little boring, if you’re like, “This is a little strange. Like, what am I doing?” a little awkward, a little weird, that’s something I try to notice.

It’s just a good sign that I’m about to find something new inside of something familiar. So seeking out that kind of sense of weirdness or embarrassment or boredom by letting something resonate a little longer, that’s something I try to do just when it occurs to me without pressure.

Pete Mockaitis
And speaking of resonating, is there any key thing you share with folks that really seems to resonate, they quote back to you often?

Ian Bogost
I think the idea that your life is made of moments, that you can divide it up a lot of ways, but one of them is in these tiny chunks of time that don’t feel like they mean very much individually, but that add up to a lot over time.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Ian Bogost
My website is Bogost.com, that’s B-O-G-O-S-T.com. And the book is SmallStuffBook.com.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Ian Bogost
I think it would be to realize that your work life is more than just your goals and your ambitions and the outcomes that those produce. It is those things, but it’s more than that. It’s also, and maybe when you think about it, it’s even kind of mostly the experience of doing the work, of being in the workplace and getting the work done with the people that you’re doing it with.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ian, thank you.

Ian Bogost
Thank you so much for having me.