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hattmall | on: Dopamine Fracking
This has been happening in the real world for far longer. It's basically the experience of many modern cities, or even worse suburbs.

Starbucks / Chipotle / Orange Theory / Target / Generic Brewery / Lime Scooter / Waymo / Subscribe N Save

So much of modern life has been comodified to optimize for things that aren't necessarily what's inline with the users interests and certainly don't do anything for cultural robustness.

designerarvid | parent | next
Guessing by your examples that you are American. Maybe you are aware, or perhaps not, that in Europe many view your culture as the one that has taken this to its extreme. Some envy it, some don’t.
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spwa4 | root | parent | next
Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small stores? (and for real, not fake). Or is your point that Europe has a different supermarket chain per country? Malls have the same stores across countries ... but they differ, somewhat, if you move from one country to the next. And they're fake. Every company has 3-4 store brands these days so malls have 4-5 stores that look different, but aren't.

So ... what a difference that makes?

(I mean, I get that it does make a difference. Carrefour clearly takes some pride in their chocolate selection and aldi ... well it's an insult to any product to be sold at aldi. But culture in shopping in the EU? Where do you find that?)

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PeterStuer | parent | next
I think a significant contributer to franchize style commoditized homogenization is modern anxiety. Millenials especially seem near exclusively drawn to the 'predictable' and curated 'peer approved' nature of recognizable 'safe' brand signals.
sph | root | parent | next
You are seeing the effect for the cause. Humans (life in general) are effort minimizer machines, it doesn’t mean that maximum optimization is the ideal environment for a human to thrive.

Any caveman would have loved to have to choose between favourite junk food franchises instead of risking his life chasing woolly mammoths not to starve.

vladms | root | parent | next
From what I see, there are many people that don't want to be "bored" more than the people that don't want to be "tired". Of course there are many that want to be neither (so we get social media that gives you "not bored" and "not tired"), but I don't think we can generalize for 100% for neither category.
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goodpoint | root | parent | next
By this logic travel and tourism would not exist.
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keybored | root | parent | next
It was at this supposed peak of Dopamine Fracking that intellectual conversation found a renaissance. Anthropology in particular reached its pinnacle in a unifying theory of everything: it’s just human nature.
ErroneousBosh | root | parent
> Humans (life in general) are effort minimizer machines, it doesn’t mean that maximum optimization is the ideal environment for a human to thrive.

My 5-and-a-half-year-old son would recommend this book to you:

https://www.booksfortopics.com/book/the-couch-potato/

It covers this quite succinctly.

veunes | root | parent | next
When housing, healthcare, work, social life all feel unstable, the predictable option starts looking less like boring conformity and more like one less decision that can go wrong
sleepycat801 | root | parent | next
It's more a side effect of decision fatigue. Millennials are at a stage of life where they face a very high cognitive burden. They're not thinking deeply about it. which is great for advertisers.
zuzululu | root | parent | next
Perhaps but I also think this is just personal preferences across age groups.

For instance contrarians who avoid those attributes

| root | parent | next
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basisword | root | parent | next
I don't think that's a millennial thing. If you think back to the whole 'hipster' era, yes peer approval was a big part of it but so was local/artisan/unique stuff. Franchises were the things that were completely avoided. That predictability is much more of a modern requirement.
raverbashing | root | parent
Not sure it's a millenial thing, but yes

And to be honest choice fatigue also plays a part.

(Also millenials seem to sell some places as "gritty and authentic" when in reality a lot of them just suck)

I'm all for trying new things, but in the end you realize that a lot of those are just not for you and you go for the bland and tested thing

zimpenfish | root | parent
For me (considerably older than millenials) it's not choice fatigue or "default to bland and tested", it's "if I'm paying a small fortune for coffee / food[0], I do not want a crappy serving just because the barista/cook stubbed their toe / broke up / got bad news / etc. this morning and they're wildly off their game."

Starbucks, McDonalds, Papa Johns, etc. do not make "great" refreshments but they make them of a consistently sufficient level of quality that you can be sure you're not wasting your small fortune when you buy from them wherever you are.

[0] As, sadly, we are all forced to these days.

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canpan | parent | next
All cities have the exact same shopping street somewhere.

Tokyo (Ginza), NYC (5th), Paris, London, Berlin, Sao Paulo..: Starbucks, Gucci, Addidas, Louis Vuitton, Levis, Ferragamo, Apple Store, a little further from there a McDonald's..

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zuzululu | parent | next
> Starbucks / Chipotle / Orange Theory / Target / Generic Brewery / Lime Scooter / Waymo / Subscribe N Save

I've never been to any one of these except Starbucks but only like a six times and Chitpole ONCE.

I've also never been to Taco Bell. McDonalds I've been to thirty times.

I don't think I'm alone? These places don't have that exaggerated pull that is often discussed in alarmist articles.

I guess I just don't eat outside at all so I could be the minority.

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iceman28 | parent | next
I don’t know if I’d club fast food restaurants into the dopamine factory category. I see it as more of a necessity as I don’t think I can go hunt or gather food during my lunch break at the office.
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praptak | parent | next
This is alienation as described by Marx. If you optimize a thing, at some point it becomes separated from its nature.
veunes | parent | next
Yeah, I think cities are probably the clearest physical-world version of this
underdeserver | parent | next
Eh, I don't use Lime Scooters or Waymo for the dopamine, I use them to get to where I need to go.
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epolanski | parent | next
On the contrary I think they converge for what's inline with the average user, a sort of neutral and familiar "taste" of everything from operations to design.
te_chris | parent
To nit pick: Micromobility is the opposite of this.