The Perception of Burden in Human Experience

If you were doing one single thing for the rest of your life, wouldn't you want to get good at it? If you ever ask yourself this, you may come to believe it's a worthwhile investment to spend some time to understand and get better at the one thing you do every day: Having experience. It's not a choice, it is a role you are assigned at birth. You are, above all, an experiencer.

Beings of humankind are eminently experiential, parts of Reality capable of experience. But being capable of experience is not what sets us apart, there are plenty of animals on earth having experience. What really makes our kind special is our awareness of it. It is an awareness not only of our current experience, but also of experiences we had in the past and the ones that may come in the future. This heightened awareness allows people to assess their experience in a way no other being known to us can.)) Essay / The Experiential Nature of Value

There's no doubt you are aware of your experience to some degree. How else would you choose what to do or not to do? However, becoming a good experiencer asks for a "higher" awareness – awareness of your experience "as such". It requires nontrivial effort. Thinking of experience as such is tricky because you are fully immersed in it, making it hard to grasp the way you'd grasp a film or a theater play.

We sometimes think of experience as something we have at a concert or a camping trip, but not what we have while typing e-mails at work or being stuck on traffic. It is also easier to think of moments in the past or future as experiences, forgetting that experience is first and foremost what you're having right now.

Taking your experience for granted is pitfall you can't afford. You can't afford to be oblivious to it because it is, truly, the only thing you have. Look around you, look at your hands, look up to the sky – this is as real and immediate as things get for you. And yet, sometimes it feels mundane unless you encounter something out of the ordinary. Because it's "always on", experience can become too familiar, enough for us to forget how special it is. But if you're reading these words, consider this an invitation to start thinking of experience as a gift, and a very special one. It gives meaning to an otherwise meaningless world. It makes the world "feel like something". It makes you feel like "you". Experience is strange and unique because it brings things into felt Reality.

To have experience is to have Reality "feel like something" to you. Consider that for a moment: To have experience is to feel. At the most fundamental level, to feel is to make a distinction. Making a distinction implies there being something to distinguish from. In other words, feeling requires perceptible differences. If to feel is to make distinctions among perceptible differences, the result of feeling is a categorization. The act of categorization produces, at minimum, two categories (e.g., black/white, yes/no, something/nothing, positive/negative). At a very primordial level, this is what experiencing is about, to have Reality feel one way or another to you.

In animals, this rudimentary, one-dimensional feeling has a name. It is known as "affect" and you can appreciate it in your own experience when you find something "pleasant" or "unpleasant". Affect is the primary way in which the environment feels like something to us, it is the way it "affects" us. It's a response we share with the rest of the animal kingdom because it has great adaptive value, i.e., being capable of affect allows organisms to adapt to their environment.

Psychologist Robert Zajonc (University of Michigan) articulates the adaptive value of affect in his influential 1980 paper "Feeling and Thinking":

"Affect is the first link in the evolution of complex adaptive functions that eventually differentiated animals from plants. And unlike language or cognition, affective responsiveness is universal among the animal species. A rabbit confronted by a snake has no time to consider all the perceivable attributes of the snake in the hope that he might be able to infer from them the likelihood of the snake's attack, the timing of the attack, or its direction. The rabbit cannot stop to contemplate the length of the snake's fangs of the geometry of its markings. If the rabbit is to escape, the action must be undertaken long before the completion of even a simple cognitive process — before, in fact, the rabbit has fully established and verifies that a nearby movement might reveal a snake in all its coiled glory. The decision to run must be made on the basis of minimal cognitive engagement." (p. 156)

To the rabbit, confronting the snake feels like "something". The rabbit's affective response makes the situation feel like "something to run away from", turning it into some kind of "cost" to be avoided. Human affectivity does something similar, it makes situations either costly to endure or rewarding to have. Affect, in a way, turns experience into a "cost function", but one that you can feel. In math, a cost function takes some input and returns a value that somehow represents the cost or reward associated to the input. The higher its absolute value, the higher the cost or the reward obtained. As if it were a cost function, your experience takes the situation you are living as input. Instead of returning a value, however, it returns a feeling. This feeling can be costly or rewarding to have and constitutes a primary appraisal of the experience you are having.

Thinking of affect as a one-dimensional feeling can make it easier to understand. As a phenomenon, however, it remains strangely complex. Although there's no definitive theory, any serious account will tell you how affective responses are not only a function of the situation being experienced, but also of your moods, your memory of past events, and your cognitive history.

You can take a closer look into your affective responses through introspection; if you do, there are two components that are easy to identify. The first one was already introduced, it is how pleasant or unpleasant a situation feels to you – psychologists call it "valence". The second one, less evident but still easy to identify, is a feeling of how much the situation is "drawing you in" or "pushing you out" – it's known variously as "arousal" or motivational intensity. You can think of it as a pulling force or as some type of "appetite"; that is, the situation you are living is either appetitive or unappetitive to you.

Pleasantness and appetitiveness, with these two component feelings, we can build an elementary yet very useful model of affect.

The model describes the affective response elicited by a situation across two axes: 1) Pleasant-Unpleasant (X-axis in the figure) and 2) Appetitive-Unappetitive (Y-axis in the figure). The combination of these two feelings yields an affective response which may or may not motivate behavior based on intensity. When the affective response crosses a threshold (the faint circle mark in the figure), the affective response compels you into eliciting behavior to either "engage" or "disengage" the situation (see the red and green zones in the figure). Similarly, there are situations where the affective response is simply not intense enough to compel you into action (see the central zone in the figure).

A situation's pleasantness and appetitiveness usually point in the same direction, i.e., you typically have an appetite for things that give you pleasant feelings (say, food) and are typically repelled by things that give you unpleasant ones (say, a scary insect). However, you can see that they are actually independent dimensions of affect by considering situations that you may exhibit an appetite for yet are unpleasant to experience. For example, in a highway accident you may notice how – despite the horror – people are drawn to watch it, maybe even yourself. For better or worse, some of the situations we live through have a compelling character that makes us feel like actively engaging them or disengaging them.

Because all experience is accompanied by an affective response and because this response is an embodied feeling of cost/reward, people are compelled to optimize their experience to keep it personally acceptable. We literally feel the consequences of not doing so on our own skins. The more intense your affective response is, the more you are motivated to engage or disengage the situation. Using your behavior, you constantly vote on whether the situations you live are worth having or if they too costly to endure.

After this brief discussion on affect we can formally introduce the concept of experiential costs. An experiential cost is anything that detracts from the experience you are having in the moment, anything that makes the present situation less valuable. In different words, an experiential cost is an experience you appraise as ‘costly’ or ‘burdensome’. The notion may be unfamiliar because people usually talk about these costs using metaphors: You don't tell a friend you are going through an experientially costly situation; instead, you describe it as painful, irritating, uncomfortable, or complicated.

• ✰ ⇢ Term / Sense of Burden, Effort

Generally speaking, if you find a situation somehow unpleasant or un-appetitive, you are dealing with experiential costs. You can also think of them as "disagreements" with your experience. When you are not in whole agreement with the situation you are living at any given moment, you are enduring an experiential cost of some form. The way experience works also makes it so that a situation may be rewarding as a whole despite containing elements that cause negative affect. When you identify these elements, they become targets that you may selectively engage or disengage to make your moment better.

People encounter experiential costs practically every day. At home, they are chores like doing laundry or taking the trash out. On the street, they are the impatience you feel waiting at a red light or the loud noise of a motorbike. At school, it's the boring lecture or the painful assignment. At work, it's the manual entry of data into a spreadsheet. If you're a manual worker, it may even be all of the work. Basically, an experiential cost is any experience you may be having and that you would choose not to have if you were given the option.

You can create value by giving a person the option to not endure an experiential cost. To explore this idea further, let's think about a relatable experience that is universally unwanted: Filing taxes.

The experience of filing taxes is itself taxing. Even after carefully considering pros and cons of paying taxes, it is not something you expect people to enjoy or be attracted to. And as much as people embrace taxation, the truth is that everyone files taxes under threat of punishment. If you enjoy hamburgers and see someone else enjoying one, you may find yourself feeling like eating a hamburger, but chances are you won't feel like filing taxes after someone tells you they are filing theirs. As an experience, filing taxes is draining and doesn't produce any tangible reward at the personal level, except, maybe, if you are owed a significant return. Filing is a behavior that is compelled by the government through a negative incentive, not one that you would produce freely.

But how burdensome is this experience, exactly? According to market research firm IBIS World, the tax preparation industry in the United States booked USD $10.8 billion in revenues during 2019.

In other words, Americans decided it was worth it to collectively pay these billions to use tax-filing software or to have someone else do their taxes instead of having to deal with the process directly. By helping people fill out the infamous US tax forms, firms and individuals in the tax preparation industry generated close to USD $1.9 billion in profits in 2019 – they "created value" by offering people a better version experience.

Just like in tax filing, value can be created by helping people deal with other situations they find experientially costly. People simply exhibit a willingness to pay for options to mitigate or avoid experiential costs.

If a costly situation is common enough, this may be an opportunity to create value at scale by providing a solution (e.g., a product or a service) that addresses the situation systematically. In other words, when a costly situation is common to a group of people, there is an “addressable market” that can be served by offering a more pleasant version of the experience. The more common and intense the inconvenience is, the bigger the economic opportunity of addressing it.

Traditional frameworks focus on discovering people's problems or unmet needs to identify business opportunities. Both "having a need" and "having a problem" are situations that can be articulated in terms of experiential costs.

Broadly construed, "needing X" could be thought of as a situation in which "not having X" makes the situation experientially costly. You "need X" only to the extent in which "not having X" becomes a problem (e.g., you only need an umbrella if it's raining). Conversely, "having a problem" could be thought of as an experientially costly situation that could be resolved by a missing something – a "solution". This solution is typically the product or service that can be developed and marketed to the people experiencing the problem.

In addition to needs and problems, product development frameworks also look for "paint points" that a user or customer may be experiencing along their journey to achieve a personal or business goal. For example, a bank customer looking to make a cash deposit may have to wait in line to be offered service. Pain points are another metaphor for experiential costs, useful to refer to experiential costs that are not intense enough to compel users or customers to stop achieving their goals. Paint points simply cause "pain" along the way.

The world of human-centered design offers one more useful metaphor for experiential costs: Thinking of them as "frictions". In the natural sciences, friction is a concept that refers to the resistance to motion of a mass, usually derived from the rubbing of one body with another. In mechanical systems (e.g., internal combustion engines) the presence of friction reduces efficiency. In the field of UX, the term friction is similarly used to refer to inefficiencies in people's interaction with a product or digital interface. Anna Cox, professor of human-computer interaction at University College London, calls frictions "points of difficulty encountered during users’ interaction with a technology". This notion can be generally applied to the experiences that individuals have while trying to achieve a goal.

You can think of the experiences that tally negatively in people's assessments of value (e.g., finding parking, standing in line at checkout) as experiential costs. Expecting significant costs or encountering them along the way can make us think twice if the journey is worth it, sometimes to the point of convincing us that it is not. You can also think of these costs as ‘frictions’ – experiential burdens or inefficiencies that, just like mechanical friction, hold us back and make us spend additional time and resources before we achieve our goal.)) Essay / Assessments of Value in Everyday Life

Thinking of experiential costs as frictions can make the idea easy to relate with. If you want to read more about frictions, check out Understanding Friction.

The concepts of media and engagement can be used to explore experiential costs further. You may be familiar with the notion that every experienced situation can be deconstructed as a combination of these two elements:

The ideas of media and engagement are abstractions that let us talk about the world in experiential terms. We can think of them as the "ingredients" of perceived Reality. You can appreciate this if you consider that media that is not engaged is not experienced and that, in the absence of media, there is nothing to experience.)) Essay / Creation and Consumption of Experience

With this in mind, you can say that any situation that contains "unwanted" media and/or engagement is burdensome in some regard. In other words, you are enduring an experiential cost if the situation you are living is:

• Exposing you to unwanted media (consider a situation where you are forced to see an advertisement without your consent).

• Exposing you to unwanted engagement (consider a situation where a party next door is making it hard to sleep).

• Compelling you to engage in a way you would prefer not to engage (consider a situation at a restaurant where you receive poor service and feel compelled to ask for the manager).

• Any combination of the three scenarios above.

However, as discussed in the section about needs and problems about, people may also endure an experiential cost when they are "missing" something. In other words, you can also endure an experiential cost when the situation you are living is:

• Depriving you of wanted media (consider a situation where it starts raining and you wish you had an umbrella).

• Depriving you of wanted engagement (consider a situation at a party that is not lively enough to be entertaining).

• Not letting you engage in a way you would prefer to engage (consider a situation where your car is not starting).

• Any combination of the three scenarios above.

Thinking of media and engagement that is wanted but missing can help us make the connection to another very traditional concept, that of "opportunity costs".

By devoting ourselves to any one course of action or experience, we necessarily give up the opportunity of doing certain other things we consider worthwhile. The forgone value of any such decision is known as opportunity cost. Everyone is familiar with the burdens that a sacrificed opportunity imposes on the mind. Sacrificing an opportunity leaves you wondering if you made the right choice. On occasion, it may even feel as regret. Even the forward-looking thought of forgoing a valuable experience is capable of burdening our minds, a feeling known as "fear of missing out" or "FOMO". Because opportunity costs find their origin in experiences wanted but forgone, it is only natural to say that opportunity costs are experiential in nature. Because if you cannot feel the cost – does it matter? As every other cost, opportunity costs only make sense from an experiential stand point.

One last idea to share here is that there is always a "solution" to any costly situation you may encounter. This solution is a combination of media and engagement that is missing in the situation that could mitigate or nullify the burdens you're feeling if you find them. Sometimes, what is missing is something trivial like a toy, a product, or a service; some other times, it is of more transcendence, like a place we are fond of or the presence of a loved one. Sometimes what is missing will be conveniently within reach; some other times, you have to fight for it; and yet some other times, it is simply gone forever.

The good experiencer understands this. The good experiencer knows when the situation at hand is experientially costly. The good experiencer is feeling-aware. But beyond that, the good experiencer knows when the feeling is something to be dealt with or something simply to be embraced.

Topic / On the Aesthetic of Affectivity

Key / The Human Sense of Value