During my walks last week I listened to Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience. It’s an interesting book which argues that in the modern “mediated” world our normal experience of reality is dying. We notice less, we use our bodies less, we interact with our immediate environments less and we are way more impatient.

Nowadays a buffering video or a delay of a few milliseconds when a web page loads will leave many of us frustrated. We struggle to wait in line or chat with people next to us. All interstitial time is to be filled, boredom banished.

There is an anecdote told in the book of a problem faced by airport operators in Houston. Customers complained about wait times because they walked one minute to baggage reclaim and waited there for seven minutes. So someone thought to reverse this — they implemented a longer walk and a shorter wait. Complaints plummeted.

I was reminded of Zhuangzi’s parable, Three in the Morning.

But to wear out your brain trying to make things into one without realizing that they are all the same—this is called “three in the morning.” What do I mean by “three in the morning”? When the monkey trainer was handing out acorns, he said, “You get three in the morning and four at night.” This made all the monkeys furious. “Well, then,” he said, “you get four in the morning and three at night.” The monkeys were all delighted. There was no change in the reality behind the words, and yet the monkeys responded with joy and anger.

— Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, ch. 2, “Discussion on Making All Things Equal” (trans. Burton Watson)