"We don't want to be Luddites --" brother, Luddites were opposed to bosses concentrating wealth by using technology to make inferior product with warehouses fulls of starving exploited child labor. You don't have to wear the team jersey but respect the game.

Like, all through school/college people were telling me "you gotta work hard and get good grades or you'll completely ruin your future!" And that was a huge amount of stress. I felt like if I got even one "bad" grade, I'd be destitute and worthless forever. And it doesn't need to be that stressful!

Oh, for sure! That choice/regret thing is part of the learning process, and essential for being able to make better choices in the future. It's just sometimes hard for humans to fight against their nature. And we live in a society that puts so much pressure on people to "get it right" the first time

Apparently I'm in a rambling mood tonight. Apologies if you're not looking for philosophical thoughts.

Offloading those choices to a machine is a way of avoiding the anxiety. Even if it's a "wrong" choice, it's not *your* wrong choice.

Similar to procrastinating when you're worried you won't do well on a project. It'll be terrible, but it's because you rushed, not because you aren't good enough.

Since there's no way to see *exactly* what would happen with other choices, it becomes easy to assume that *any* later regret could have been avoided with a different choice. This is likely not the case, but people still tend to believe it.

I think it relieves an anxiety humans often have about decisions/choice. Anytime you choose a "thing" (path, gift, idea, etc) you also choose *not* all the other options. And that choice might lead to regret down the road. Humans don't like regret, so the choice causes anxiety.

I tried to get some family on BlueSky back during the invite-only phase. It didn't work then either. 🤣

(I'm not a fan of finding social media friends via Phone Contacts. Those are separate bins that need to be kept separated!)