{"id":34127,"date":"2017-02-04T01:24:18","date_gmt":"2017-02-04T09:24:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/02\/retraining-our-desires-how-to-be-happy-in-the-coming-robot-age"},"modified":"2017-06-04T13:47:41","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T20:47:41","slug":"retraining-our-desires-how-to-be-happy-in-the-coming-robot-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/02\/retraining-our-desires-how-to-be-happy-in-the-coming-robot-age","title":{"rendered":"Retraining Our Desires: How to Be Happy in the Coming Robot Age"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/retraining-our-desires-how-to-be-happy-in-the-coming-robot-age.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>We will need a good dose of healthy stoicism if we are to survive in <a href=\"http:\/\/bigthink.com\/think-tank\/life-in-the-robot-age-when-were-all-unemployed\">the world after work<\/a>. Luxury items will be significantly reduced in the world we\u2019re imagining. Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca recommended that we adjust our desires to simple, reliable pleasures, like fresh water, decent bread, modest clothing, and good friends. Luxury pleasures are rare and unreliable so we suffer more when they fail to materialize.<\/p>\n<p>But chocolate cake is delicious and diamonds are beautiful. When Plato sketched a Spartan lifestyle in the <em>Republic<\/em>, his friends accused him of designing a city for pigs not humans \u2014 and they demanded that he add spices and luxury to the imagined utopia. While I\u2019m sensitive to this worry, I hasten to point out that many Americans are currently, and by their own initiative, downsizing their sense of the good life. The contemporary \u201ctiny house movement\u201d \u2014 which builds elegant housing around 1\/10th the size of average homes \u2014 is already the kind of stoic adjustment that Americans will need to make <a href=\"http:\/\/bigthink.com\/experts\/stephen-t-asma\">when we\u2019re all unemployed<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/bigthink.com\/think-tank\/retraining-our-desires-how-to-be-happy-in-the-coming-robot-age?utm_campaign=Echobox&amp;utm_medium=Social&amp;utm_source=Facebook#link_time=1486145554\">http:\/\/bigthink.com\/think-tank\/retraining-our-desires-how-to...1486145554<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We will need a good dose of healthy stoicism if we are to survive in the world after work. Luxury items will be significantly reduced in the world we\u2019re imagining. Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca recommended that we adjust our desires to simple, reliable pleasures, like fresh water, decent bread, modest clothing, and good [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":413,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1506,15,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-habitats","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/413"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34127"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65204,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34127\/revisions\/65204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}