Everything works but nothing feels good anymore
The other day I tried to do something small. Cancel a service I no longer use. It took longer than expected. Because every step felt slightly padded, like walking through a hallway where the walls had been quietly moved closer together.
Nothing dramatic happened. I finished the task. I just felt tired afterward, and vaguely annoyed, and not quite sure why.
That feeling shows up everywhere now. Ordering food. Updating software. Watching a movie.
Talking to customer support that sounds friendly but never actually listens. They work in a way that seems indifferent to how it feels to be on the other side of them. The result is a low-grade friction that accumulates. A sense that everyday life has acquired unnecessary resistance.
It is tempting to blame nostalgia, declining standards, or laziness. But the pattern feels more deliberate than that.
Many systems today are not built to be good so much as to be measurable.
Success is defined by metrics that are easy to count and easy to defend, even when they no longer line up with human experience.
Time spent. Clicks. Engagement. Retention. These numbers become the thing itself, and the actual quality of the product becomes secondary, or worse, a risk. Anything that might slow the numbers down, even if it makes the experience better, gets smoothed out.
This is the quiet contradiction at the center of modern life. We have more convenience than ever, and yet using it often feels strangely hostile.
The systems insist they are serving us, but they behave as if our comfort is incidental. You are allowed through, but you are not invited. You are processed, not welcomed. Over time, that erodes something subtle but paramount. The feeling that the world is made with you in mind.
Once you start noticing this, it becomes easier to name.
The problem is not that everything is terrible. It is that too many things are made without affection. They function, but they do not care how they feel when using. And when care disappears from the making of things, the result is not catastrophe. It is something quieter.
A world that works, technically, but feels worse to live in.