Silicon Valley has spent twenty years making everything effortless. Apps deliver food, cars drive themselves, doors open on their own. Georgia Tech professor and author Ian Bogost says we’ve lost something in that convenience — the texture of actually experiencing the physical world.
His new book, “The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life,” argues that everyday sensory experiences are being stripped away from our lives. Not just by tech, but by bureaucracy, efficiency logic, economics, and regulatory frameworks. He calls this process dematerialization — the slow erasure of tangible, physical interaction from daily existence.
The idea started with a 2022 Atlantic article about the death of stick shift cars. The response was enormous. Bogost spent a year trying to understand why people cared so much about a manual transmission, and realized the grief was about something bigger: the sense that real, embodied experiences are disappearing.
“Ordinary people don’t need to wait for capitalism to be solved before they can start experiencing their lives fully,” Bogost told TechCrunch. That’s not a dismissal of systemic problems — it’s a recognition that waiting for utopia means missing the breeze coming through the window right now.
The book isn’t anti-technology, despite what you might expect. It’s more about paying attention to what makes life feel real again. Sometimes that’s a toaster. Sometimes it’s a slushie. The meaning is in the small stuff.
