Below, Ian Bogost shares five key insights from his new book, The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life.
Ian is a professor of computer science and engineering, film and media studies, and art and design at Washington University in St. Louis. A contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of eleven books, he explores how technology, media, and the ordinary objects of everyday life shape our experiences. His award-winning games have been held in collections internationally, including at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and played by millions.
What’s the Big Idea?
We’ve become so focused on happiness and efficiency that we’ve forgotten how to enjoy the ordinary physical world. Gratification is everywhere—you just have to notice it.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Ian himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.
1. Happiness isn’t enough.
Most of us spend a lot of time thinking about happiness. We want to be good parents, good partners, good friends. We want meaningful work, healthy bodies, strong communities. Those are worthwhile goals, but they’re also enormous. They can take years to achieve, and even then, it’s hard to know whether you’ve succeeded. If happiness becomes the only measure of a good life, then most ordinary days can start to feel merely in service of some future payoff.
Another kind of pleasure that we almost never talk about is gratification. Gratification is immediate. It comes from direct encounters with the physical world—with the things your hands touch, your ears hear, and your eyes notice. Think about the last time you held a hot paper coffee takeout cup in both hands. Without even realizing it, you probably rotated it slowly, letting the ridges of the cooling sleeve brush across your fingertips while the warmth spread through your palms. Nothing important happened in that moment. But it probably felt good. That’s gratification. So is the sound of a zipper closing, or leaves crunching under your shoes.
We’ve been taught to think these experiences are background noise, while the “real” parts of life happen somewhere else. But those tiny moments aren’t distractions from a meaningful life; they’re part of what makes life meaningful in the first place.
Gratification doesn’t compete with happiness. You don’t have to choose one or the other. You can still pursue all the big things that matter—love, family, purpose, accomplishment. Gratification simply gives you another way to experience contentment that’s available, not someday, but today. Every ordinary day contains hundreds of opportunities to feel more alive.
2. You lost touch with the physical world.
If gratification comes from our encounters with the physical world, why don’t we experience more of it? Because over the last century—and especially over the last couple of decades—we’ve slowly lost touch with that world.
Remember when you had to turn the restroom faucet on and off yourself? You judged how much water you wanted. You felt the resistance of the handle. Today, you wave your hands under a sensor. It doesn’t even work most of the time! But even if it does, it amounts to one tiny interaction that’s disappeared.
You used to punch the giant button on a vending machine. You used to turn the key in a car ignition. Hurl coins into tollway catch basins. Tear the perforated edges off computer paper. Tape theater tickets to the back of the cabinet door so as not to lose them. Those interactions have been replaced by sensors, apps, automation, touchscreens, and obsolescence.
“Optimizing life came at a hidden cost.”
None of those changes is bad on its own. In fact, many of them are improvements. Your smartphone is more convenient than carrying a map, a boarding pass, a wallet, and a camera. Paying tolls without stopping is genuinely great. But optimizing life came at a hidden cost. We lost thousands of small physical encounters that once connected us to the world around us. I call this process dematerialization. We still accomplish the same tasks, but we no longer feel them in quite the same way.
The result isn’t just that life gets easier. It also gets flatter. A rich variety of textures, sounds, movements, and objects is replaced by screens, automated systems, economic circumstances, and bureaucratic institutions. You didn’t choose any of those changes, and it’s not your fault that they happened to you.
The good news is that the physical world hasn’t disappeared. It still surrounds us. Every day you button a shirt, zip a jacket, wash a dish, pet a dog, sharpen a pencil, or open a window. Those experiences never went away, because each of us lives in a human body in the physical world for every moment of every day. Once you understand that this world is still offering itself, you can begin reconnecting with the ordinary experiences that make everyday life feel vivid again.
3. Gratification is hiding in plain sight.
We’ve been trained to think that the meaningful parts of life are the extraordinary ones: a vacation, a promotion, a graduation, a wedding. And those moments do matter, but they don’t happen often. Wouldn’t you like to feel contentment every day?
Luckily, most of life is made of ordinary activities. Cooking dinner. Folding laundry. Walking the dog. Watering plants. Sweeping the floor. Tightening a screw. Painting a wall. Getting a haircut. None of these activities seem particularly important, but those ordinary moments are rich with sensory experience. They’re full of textures, sounds, smells, movements, and other small opportunities to collaborate with the physical world. The pleasure isn’t hidden in some special object or expensive experience. It’s inside the things you’re already doing.
“The pleasure isn’t hidden in some special object or expensive experience.”
One of the people I write about told me how unexpectedly gratifying it was to paint his basement. Not because he loved home improvement, and not because he was proud of the finished project, but because of the simple experience of working with the thick, squelchy masonry paint itself. The density of it. The shwak-chlupf sound it made when he spread it. The sight of its whiteness coating the red-brown brick. He couldn’t stop talking about it.
That story captures the whole idea. Gratification isn’t rare. It’s ordinary. The problem isn’t that there’s too little of it in the world. It’s that we’ve forgotten how abundant it is. Once you begin looking, you’ll discover that everyday life has been quietly offering these moments all along.
4. Learn to feel more gratified.
Gratification is something anyone can cultivate. That doesn’t mean buying special products or taking up elaborate hobbies. It doesn’t require moving to the countryside, quitting your job, or giving up your smartphone. One of the central premises of living a more gratifying life is that you don’t have to change your life very much at all. What you do have to change is your relationship to ordinary experience.
We’ve learned to treat everyday interactions as obstacles to get past on the way to something more important. The dishes need doing. The leaves need raking. The grocery shopping needs finishing. We rush through these activities because we’ve decided they don’t count as life. They’re just the price of getting to the good parts. But what if they are the good parts?
Learning to feel more gratified begins with giving yourself permission to inhabit these ordinary moments instead of trying to escape them. Linger in them slightly longer and they will open up like flowers. The next time you’re walking across a parking lot, listen to the sound your shoes make on the pavement. Feel the air. Note the temperature. None of that changes your day, but it changes how you inhabit it. Let yourself enjoy the sound of scissors during a haircut. The rhythm of chopping vegetables. The weight of a watering can. The crunch of gravel beneath your feet as you walk. The warmth of the summer sun on your face.
“Learning to feel more gratified begins with giving yourself permission to inhabit these ordinary moments.”
The goal isn’t to force yourself to notice everything, practice mindfulness, or perform gratitude exercises. It’s simply to remain open to the pleasures that ordinary life is already offering to your body rather than your brain. The more often you welcome those moments instead of dismissing them, the easier they become to recognize. Gratification isn’t another task to add to your schedule. It’s another way of experiencing the day you already have.
5. The life you have is richer than you think.
Gratification is a way to live in your body rather than just your mind. Modern life encourages us to spend most of our time inside our own heads. We’re planning the future. Replaying the past. Solving problems. Managing responsibilities. Generating ideas. Manipulating abstractions. Trying to become happier tomorrow than we are today. And we have to do those things, but while we’re busy thinking about life, we sometimes forget to experience it.
Gratification pulls us back into the present—not in some mystical or meditative way, but in a physical one. It reminds us that we’re not just minds pursuing intangible goals. We’re also bodies moving through a real world, full of objects, places, people, weather, sounds, textures, and ordinary encounters that ask something of us in return. The ask is simple: acceptance.
Build a relationship with the physical world. That world, and all the small stuff in it, is your life. When you reconnect with that world, your circumstances may not change. You might still have the same job, commute, responsibilities, and worries. But those things no longer exhaust the meaning of your day. The ordinary moments in between them begin to matter again. The life you already have is richer than you think.
Enjoy our full library of Book Bites—read by the authors!—in the Next Big Idea App:
