A strange mix of loneliness, connection, and love come together in All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami.

Fuyuko is a reclusive proofreader at a publishing house. She has virtually no social life.

One day, Fuyuko comes into contact with Hijiri, who persuades her to go freelance. Fuyuko more or less befriends Hijiri and is somewhat taken out of her isolation by this friendship. Fuyuko learns to drink alcohol, but without any measure.

She meets Mr. Mitsutsuka, an older man, when she attempts to enroll them in a course. She starts meeting him more frequently after an initial reluctance. They have special and increasingly intimate conversations. A strange, affectionate relationship develops.

Not saying a word, just standing there, Mitsutsuka looked like he was waiting patiently for my tears to settle. I heard a car go by, not very far away from us. Using my palm, I wiped the tears dripping down my chin, then rubbed my eyes, covered my face, and started crying again. Mitsutsuka lifted his free hand and rested it on the crown of my head. I thought I could feel the heat of his hand entering my skin. With his palm still on my head, I asked Mitsutsuka if he would spend my birthday with me, in a voice that was almost all sob. Will you walk through the night with me? And will you listen to that song with me, just the two of us?

The character Fuyuko bears resemblance to the strangely named Natsuke in Earthlings by Sayaka Murata. Women who cannot ground themselves in this world, or at least in Japanese society, and live socially isolated lives. Where in Earthlings an unbearable burden develops in the protagonist Natsuke, Kawakami’s story is more loving, and Fuyuko manages to maintain a certain lightness and optimism.

Douglas Coupland predicted that the crafted object might become the emerging “technology” of modern art. Analog experiences are where art is enjoyed.

In Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb explores technology and art from the perspective of fragility. Technology is designed to replace older, inferior technology.

Technology is at its best when it is invisible. I am convinced that technology is of greatest benefit when it displaces the deleterious, unnatural, alienating, and, most of all, inherently fragile preceding technology.
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So it may be a natural property of technology to only want to be displaced by itself.

But not all technology disappears. The Lindy effect applies to technology.

For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy. So the longer a technology lives, the longer it can be expected to live.
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But in general, the older the technology, not only the longer it is expected to last, but the more certainty I can attach to such a statement.

People experience new technology like a treadmill effect.

People acquire a new item, feel more satisfied after an initial boost, then rapidly revert to their baseline of well-being. So, when you “upgrade,” you feel a boost of satisfaction with changes in technology. But then you get used to it and start hunting for the new new thing.

Taleb states that this effect does not apply to classical art, as well as to analog and physical experiences. These experiences appear to be exempt from men’s hedonic decline in satisfaction.

But it looks as though we don’t incur the same treadmilling techno-dissatisfaction with classical art, older furniture—whatever we do not put in the category of the technological.
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I have never heard anyone address the large differences between e-readers and physical books, like smell, texture, dimension (books are in three dimensions), color, ability to change pages, physicality of an object compared to a computer screen, and hidden properties causing unexplained differences in enjoyment.

The big differentiator, according to Taleb, is the infusion of the maker’s love in the created art object.

But consider the difference between the artisanal—the other category—and the industrial. What is artisanal has the love of the maker infused in it, and tends to satisfy—we don’t have this nagging impression of incompleteness we encounter with electronics. It also so happens that whatever is technological happens to be fragile. Articles made by an artisan cause fewer treadmill effects. And they tend to have some antifragility—recall how my artisanal shoes take months before becoming comfortable.

The medicine against our technology addiction is not the upgrade to the latest. The medicine is the downgrade to the analog, real-life experience, and the physical object.