My daughter's car seat has a five-point harness. Shoulder straps, lap belt, crotch buckle, chest clip. It takes her about forty-five seconds to get buckled in if she's cooperating, twice that if she's not. Every single piece of that harness exists because a child died without it.
Nobody writes a nostalgic blog post about the era before car seats.
I keep seeing a certain kind of essay circulate — the one that puts a 1950s toaster next to a modern smart thermostat and says: look what we lost. Sometimes it's a $12 Casio watch next to an Apple Watch. Sometimes it's a timeline of objects getting needier. The format varies but the move is always the same: simple thing good, complicated thing bad, here's a product that fixes it.
And I get it. The feeling is real. I've been that person — standing at my own gear shelf at 7am, baby on my hip, trying to decide between three lenses when all I wanted was to take one photo before the light changed. The light was doing something beautiful on the kitchen wall and my daughter was eating yogurt and I stood there holding two lens caps like an idiot while the moment passed. Complexity has a cost. Cognitive overhead is real. The point at which more options stop enabling you and start taxing you is a real threshold, and most of us have crossed it somewhere.
That exhaustion deserves more than a diagnosis. It deserves to be taken seriously as a feeling before it gets turned into an argument. Because the impulse to simplify — to throw out the lenses, buy a point-and-shoot, go back — isn't stupid. It's the rational response of a person whose tools are consuming the attention they were supposed to serve.
But the essay that stops there — the one that draws a clean timeline from "simple" to "complicated" and lets you feel vaguely sad about it — is aiming the anger at the wrong target. The fatigue is real. The diagnosis is wrong. Feeling overwhelmed by your devices is not evidence that devices were better when they did less — or even that they were better when they were finished, which is the subtler and more honest version of the claim. It's evidence that you're tired. Those are different problems with different solutions, and collapsing them into a narrative about lost simplicity makes it harder to figure out which one you actually have.
The toaster burned your toast. Every time. There was no dial — or if there was, it was a liar. The TV had four channels and two of them were static. You missed phone calls constantly because you were in the shower, or the yard, or just not home. The car didn't track your location, but it also didn't have airbags for the first few decades. Things weren't simpler. You just had fewer choices about how they failed.
"Simple" is almost always a word for I don't remember the frustration. Nostalgia performs a specific trick: it preserves the ritual — pushing the lever, changing the channel — and erases the constraint that made the ritual mandatory. You pushed the lever because that was the only option. The lever wasn't elegant. It was all there was. What felt like simplicity was actually the absence of choice, which are different things that feel identical in retrospect.
The smart version of the nostalgia argument frames the maintenance burden as externalized labor — that all this updating and configuring and troubleshooting used to be someone else's job, and it got quietly shifted onto you. You're the IT department now, and nobody asked if you wanted the position.
It's a compelling frame. I felt it myself a few weeks ago when I realized my Apple Watch had silently disconnected from my phone after an upgrade. It was still on my wrist, still tracking my steps, still closing rings — but none of it was syncing. Weeks of activity data, just gone into the void. The fix was a full erase and restore: unpair, factory reset, re-pair, wait forty-five minutes, hope the backup takes. For a device whose entire job is to track my health. That feeling of I shouldn't have to do this is honest.
But the labor didn't get shifted. It got created. The toaster had no maintenance burden because it couldn't do anything worth maintaining. The work you're doing now — the updates, the configuration, the troubleshooting — didn't used to belong to someone else. It didn't exist. It came into being alongside the capability, and you bought the capability because you wanted what it could do.
There's a contradiction at the center of this that I want to take apart slowly, because I think it's the engine of the whole nostalgia genre: you can't simultaneously want ownership and want someone else to handle the complexity.
I know this because I live it. I maintain my own home server, my own NAS, my own network stack. When something breaks at 11pm, that's my problem. Nobody's shipping me a firmware update. Nobody's deprecating my setup to sell me the next tier. The labor is real, and it's mine, and I chose it with open eyes — and some nights, when I'm debugging a DNS issue while my daughter sleeps down the hall, I understand the nostalgia essayists perfectly. The desire to just have something work without needing me is not a character flaw. It's Tuesday.
But follow the logic: "I want to own my devices" and "I'm exhausted by maintaining my devices" are opposite requests. True ownership means you're the IT department. That's what owning a complex system is — not as a metaphor, but as a material fact. If you want someone else to handle updates, configuration, compatibility — that's a service. Which is a subscription. Which is the very thing these essays are angry about.
So: ownership means maintenance. Maintenance-free means renting.
But there's a third option nobody chose, and it's the one most people are actually living in: you paid full price for the hardware, but the company still controls the software. They ship updates on their schedule, not yours. They graft old firmware onto new hardware. They iterate in public and call it a product. You're not an owner — owners have control. You're not a renter — renters get support. You're doing unpaid QA for a company that already has your money.
That's a legitimate thing to be furious about, and it's a more precise fury than "things used to be simpler." The problem isn't complexity. The problem is that you paid for a finished product and received an ongoing obligation — not because the technology requires it, but because the business model does. Companies ship faster when the user absorbs the rough edges. That's not a law of physics. It's a choice they made.
And honestly — complexity is genuinely hard. I've spent twenty-plus years building software. I know what it costs to ship something that actually works across every edge case, every device, every user's slightly different configuration. Iterative shipping isn't inherently disrespectful. The question is who absorbs the cost of each iteration. When an update breaks something, does the company eat the recovery cost or does the user? When a feature ships half-finished, is the company honest about what's missing, or does it land on you to figure out why things stopped working?
You can feel the difference. You know which products were shipped by someone who imagined a person holding them, and which ones were shipped to hit a quarter. That's not perfection versus sloppiness. It's whether anyone on the team asked what happens to the person on the other end when this goes wrong? That's a culture decision, not a technical one.
So the binary I drew — own it or rent it — is too clean. The honest version has three categories: complexity you chose, complexity that was imposed by a business model, and complexity that exists because someone shipped their unfinished work to your wrist and called it a feature. The anger at that last category isn't nostalgia. It's consumer rights.
The nostalgia essay identifies the symptom with precision — the tiredness, the sense that your objects won't leave you alone. But it never moves from symptom to condition. Naming the condition means distinguishing between the three categories, because they have different causes and different solutions. You don't fix chosen complexity by simplifying — you fix it by choosing more deliberately. You don't fix imposed complexity by buying a Casio — you fix it by demanding better from the companies that imposed it. And you don't fix half-baked products with personal discipline — you fix them by refusing to accept "ship fast, let the user figure it out" as an industry norm. Collapsing all three into "things used to be simpler" is how you end up treating a systems problem with a lifestyle product.
A watch that tells time and does nothing else doesn't need firmware updates. That's not a design philosophy. It's a constraint imposed by the technology of 1989. Calling it a virtue is like praising a bicycle for never needing an oil change. True — but you're not going to ride it to another city.
But I want to be fair to the strongest version of that argument, because "finished" is a real thing to mourn. Not because the toaster was better — but because there's a specific psychological peace in a tool that has no future state. It will never change. It will never ask you to adapt to it. It's done, and done is a kind of rest. The Casio doesn't track your heart rate, but it also never makes you wonder if tomorrow's update will rearrange the interface. That peace is real, and I don't want to pretend it isn't. What I want to challenge is the conclusion people draw from it — that the solution is to go back, rather than to demand that the things we move forward with earn the complexity they carry.
So when I say "you chose the complication" — I mean it as a starting point for the first category, not a blanket verdict. And I'm not going to pretend that opting out is easy. Buying a dial thermostat at Home Depot is a real choice. Extracting your family from an ecosystem that holds your photos, your kid's school calendar, your pediatrician's portal, and ten years of muscle memory — that's not choosing. That's uprooting. Switching costs are engineered. Dark patterns are engineered. The path back gets narrower every year by design.
The nostalgia essays get something right: the anger is real. But they aim it at modernity instead of at the specific companies and specific business models that earned it. The companies would love for this to be a philosophical conversation about simplicity. That framing lets them off the hook. A pointed conversation about their half-finished products, their manufactured lock-in, their updates that remove features to sell them back — that's the one they'd rather you not have.
And it deserves asking who those defaults were built for in the first place — because the people most burdened by imposed complexity are rarely the people who designed the system.
So where does that leave us?
Both things are true: you have more agency than the nostalgia essay gives you credit for, and the environment is designed to make that agency harder to exercise than it should be. Neither you nor the industry gets a pass here.
My gear shelf was mine. Nobody dark-patterned me into buying the 70-200. But pretending you have no agency is its own trap — not because it's lazy, but because it lets the companies off the hook too. If you're just a helpless victim of modernity, there's nothing to hold them accountable for.
The question worth asking isn't when did things get complicated? It's why did I choose what I chose, do I still want it, and where I didn't choose — who benefits from my exhaustion?
I should say plainly: "you chose this" has limits as a frame. You can choose to not have a smartphone in roughly the way you can choose to not have a bank account — technically possible, practically a form of social withdrawal most people can't afford. The honest version of my argument isn't "just choose better." It's that even inside a system you can't fully opt out of, knowing which parts you chose, which were imposed, and which were shipped broken gives you something nostalgia doesn't: a clear target for your anger and a basis for demanding change.
I went through a phase where I hand-ground my coffee with a manual burr mill. Five minutes of winding the crank every morning, then a French press with water boiled on the stove. It was meditative. It was also objectively slower and worse than an electric grinder. I didn't do it because the manual process produced better coffee. I did it because the friction forced me to be in one place, doing one thing, for five minutes. The ritual was the point.
I could have gotten the same presence by sitting still and paying attention. But that's harder than it sounds. The hand grinder was a cheat code for presence — a physical constraint that manufactured the attention I couldn't generate on my own. I think that's what the nostalgia essays are actually reaching for. Not the toaster. Not the Casio. The state of mind that those objects happened to coexist with.
I notice this with my daughter constantly. She's three. The moments that feel most alive are the ones with the fewest inputs — not because simplicity is better, but because attention is finite and she can tell when she has all of mine. Three-year-olds are brutal empiricists about this. They don't care about your intentions. They register presence or absence, and they're never wrong.
The phone in my pocket knows her pediatrician's number and her immunization schedule and the weather at the park. It also knows how to pull me out of the room without my body moving. The old landline didn't make you more present — it just left you with fewer places to go. But the presence it accidentally created was real, even if the cause was constraint, not virtue.
The answer isn't fewer devices. It isn't a Casio or a hand grinder or an RSS reader. It's the hard, boring, unsexy work of deciding where your attention goes, over and over, every day, without a product to automate it for you. Nobody wants to hear that. It doesn't sell anything. It's just the truth sitting there, unmonetizable, waiting for you to do the work.
Her car seat is a nightmare of straps and clips and angles. It's the most annoying object in my daily life. When I buckle her in, sometimes she puts her hand on mine — not to help, not to resist, just to be part of it. And for those forty-five seconds, neither of us is anywhere else.
I would not trade a single buckle.