Why *Does* It Feel Like Things Are Always Getting Worse?
Why *Does* It Feel Like Things Are Always Getting Worse?
Is "density" a stand-in for other things?
I’ve got another sort of discussion question/half-baked thought for today’s piece. Some of you like it when I have a clear thesis, which I think is most of the time (clear doesn’t necessarily mean right, of course). Some of you like these open discussions. I like them, obviously, thought I write them sparingly. I find the comments more useful than my own thoughts in these cases, and often they help me revisit the topic with more clarity. It has been a little while since I’ve done one of these—last time I wondered whether urbanism was an artifact of lower economic development. I’m asking something sort of laterally related here today.
Is one of the things going in density/quality of life discussions something like mistaking the rising costs of labor for the inconveniences of density?
What got me thinking about this was reading something about supermarkets. I think it was in the comments section on an article about Piggly Wiggly possibly taking over a few D.C.-area Harris Teeters (for those of you in most of America, those are two regional Southern supermarket chains).
Someone commented that Harris Teeter used to be so much better. For example, the chain owned its own dairy farm and the milk sold in the supermarkets was from this specific farm, and was better than the commodity milk they sell now. (Maybe he’s right—I bought milk precisely once at Harris Teeter, because it went bad four days before the sell-by date.) Someone chimed in about how Giant, another regional chain, used to have butchers trimming meat on site.
I’ve seen a lot of comments like this before, over the years—about more personable customer service, about less of a rush and scrum (or about more polite behavior) when you went shopping, about restaurants feeling more hospitable and homey. I’ve always wondered whether this is even really true or not. Apparently, JD Vance shared a story once about an old refrigerator that supposedly kept lettuce fresher longer than any model available today. You hear these sorts of “quality of life is always deteriorating in little annoying ways” and “nobody makes anything like it used to be made” gripes all the time. Whether they’re true objectively is a separate question.
What interests me is whether we sort of see the country getting more crowded and more built up at the same time these annoyances creep into life, and it all kind of gets rolled into too much is going on, we’re building too much, we have too many people. If the inevitable cost increases of manual labor and personalized customer service in a highly developed economy feel like they’re emanating from density.
Do we perceive that phenomenon as “too many people competing for scarce resources” and not “a country too rich to pay going wages for butchers”?
I also had this thought in another context, when I was booking a reservation to a restaurant. I had read recently about a third-party site that sells reservations for lots of fancy New York City restaurants. (I.e., just like ticket scalping.) I learned a few years ago that between the early 2000s to the late 2010s, the wine tastings in Napa Valley had gone from overwhelmingly free to overwhelmingly $40 and up.
And I just wondered: why does it feel like you almost never used to have to make a reservation for a restaurant unless it was really special? Why did it feel like you could just pull up and get gas without waiting in a line of cars or looking for a pump? Why do the huge gas stations with a ton of pumps have less spare capacity than the little old-school two-pump shop? Why does Rural King out in Front Royal have free popcorn and coffee, and why did an old supermarket in my hometown have free coffee with real (shelf stable) cream, and why do centrally located stores today never seem to have these little treats? Why do so many new restaurants—like an upcoming donut-shop-in-the-morning/fine-dining-at-night place in my hometown—have some schtick?
Why does new development seem bundled with a kind of weird, artificial scarcity?
Why are there some places where you just walk in and get served and businesses seem to function, and other places where everything feels tight and under-supplied?
Is it labor markets? Density? Scale? Is it even a real thing we’re discerning, or just imagining?
My sense from picking this up in a lot of different little ways is that a lot of people have the almost automatic thought that building or doing or adding anything will just make this worse—whatever the heck this is.
Your turn!
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The following is a big, vague comment. But I think it's relevant.
Combining the insights of psychology and evolutionary anthropology, it is clear that human beings have a deep prejudice for noticing what is going wrong over what is going right. The fact that everything is okay is not in a threat to your existence. But failing to notice any negative, such as tiger or a snake or even overly spoiled food, could quickly lead to your demise. Thus, we are exquisitely attuned to what is going wrong.
Even though there are so many fewer immediate threats, we still remain attuned to the negative. That is why anxiety and depression are the most common mental illnesses. One of the most effective treatments for both is cognitive therapy which helps people decrease their focus on the negative and increase their focus on the positive therefore achieving a more realistic outlook.
Indeed, trying to figure out whether the trivial things of modern life are getting better or worse is probably an echo of the need of our ancestors to figure out whether tigers and snakes were becoming more common or not. Back then it mattered, now it's trivial.
This is a great question! I’ve noticed the gas station thing in particular, and at least in that case it seems like it’s due to changes in behavior. People now leave their cars at the pump even when they’re done gassing up to go buy stuff inside, rather than moving the car to a designated space and freeing up the pump. This happens even at a place like Buc-ees in Texas that has nearly 100 pumps and a giant parking lot as well. It happens at four-pump stations in small towns. And the only place it doesn’t seem to happen is Costco, because there’s no convenience store. The long lines there are for other reasons.
I don’t know if it’s like a psychologically-motivated small claim on space for a brief period of time (“I’m going in to buy overpriced chips and a drink for the drive so I’m entitled to stay at the pump for a few more minutes”), or laziness, or that it’s an excuse to get out of the car, but it didn’t seem to be that way even 10-15 years ago. People seemed to free up pumps faster, because they moved their cars sooner.