Morale comes from having the nice things in your life correlated with effort. Cooking your own dinner is basically microdosing returns to investing effort: if you put in effort, you eat steak frites with peppercorn sauce. If you don’t, you get eat chicken and rice.
Thank you so much for articulating this!
I got into an argument with people at a rationalist flophouse over their consumption of Huel. My argument was basically “I don’t care how nutritive it is, you lose some kind of sovereignty over your own life if you eat nothing but liquid food pre-processed in some factory somewhere.” Someone else asked “But what if I know exactly the list of ingredients and how it’s made? Then I still control what ends up in my body?” and I couldn’t articulate why I disagreed.
I think it does something profound to your agency to have physical control over the basic inputs of your life. Stuff like getting food delivered at home, eating only pre-cooked meals, getting driven around everywhere as a kid (or an adult!), are things that I’m pretty sure erode your agency way more than we realize.
Thank you so much for articulating this!
I got into an argument with people at a rationalist flophouse over their consumption of Huel. My argument was basically “I don’t care how nutritive it is, you lose some kind of sovereignty over your own life if you eat nothing but liquid food pre-processed in some factory somewhere.” Someone else asked “But what if I know exactly the list of ingredients and how it’s made? Then I still control what ends up in my body?” and I couldn’t articulate why I disagreed.
I think it does something profound to your agency to have physical control over the basic inputs of your life. Stuff like getting food delivered at home, eating only pre-cooked meals, getting driven around everywhere as a kid (or an adult!), are things that I’m pretty sure erode your agency way more than we realize.