I’ve been dreaming about having a workshop of my own, a place where I can set everything up exactly the way I want it, leave it untouched, and return to find it in the same state. For me, that stability is essential for creative work. I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. My friend, the great animator Alex Budovsky — whose award-winning works include Bathtime in Clerkenwell and Brooklyn Breeze — keeps an old laptop precisely configured for his animation projects. He never connects it to the internet, simply to prevent updates from disrupting his carefully balanced setup.

That approach resonates deeply with me. In contrast, most of us live surrounded by constant, forced change. Our phones pull in dozens of app updates every day, almost none of which benefit us. I often open an app just once in a few months to check a single number, only to be greeted with pop-ups announcing “what’s new,” prompts to adjust settings, or demands to reset my password. This endless churn creates what’s called user fatigue, a subtle but real erosion of our time, patience, and focus. From the perspective of the software makers, it feels profoundly disrespectful to their users.

I don’t have definitive proof, but I can’t help wondering whether this exhaustion contributes, in part, to the growing pessimism we see around the world. People are tired of change, wary of the future, and grasping for the familiar — which may explain, at least partly, the appeal of reactionary, right-wing attitudes in many societies. But what if we addressed these small, everyday frustrations? What if technology, instead of wearing us down, respected our need for stability and space to create? Perhaps then we could reclaim the optimistic vision of humanity found in the old sci-fi novels — a future without wars, where our species works together toward an age of abundance.