From TV commercials to our social media feeds, we’re being bombarded with new things to consume, from a new phone to new clothes, even a viral croissant at a new bakery.
Author Eric Athas wants to help us be more mindful of our purchases so they align with our personal values.
He’s written “Saying No to New: Why New Things are Stealing Your Time, Money, and Happiness – and How to Take Back Your Life.” Athas is an editor at The New York Times and has also worked for NPR and the Washington Post. He speaks with Here & Now‘s Claudia Grisales.
Book excerpt: ‘Saying No to New’
By Eric Athas
You’ve arrived home after a long day of work. The touch screen on your Wi-Fi-connected fridge lights up, alerting you to a list of recommended recipes. Your Amazon Echo asks you to vote on a poll about whether you prefer running or walking. Your smartwatch says you’ve reached a fitness goal. The chorus of beeps and pings continues through the evening.
To some, this scene is a futuristic dream taking shape before our eyes. To Amber Case, it’s a nightmare.
“It’s like we have ten to twenty new roommates in our lives and they’re constantly bothering us,” said Case. “They even prevent us from going to sleep because they demand our attention.”
Case wants to teach these roommates some manners. The consultancy company she founded and runs, Calm Tech Institute, works with businesses to design products that “enhance human life without causing stress or distraction.”
“These technologies, by saying that they’re easy up front, actually hide the iceberg of time waste that we have to experience when we either relearn them again, their interface changes on us, or they don’t perform as behaved as promised,” Case told me.
Case has been thinking about this stuff since she was a kid. In the 1990s, her dad, a broadcast engineer, transformed her childhood house into a smart home long before that was a thing, rigging the place with voice-activated lights and automated sprinkler systems. Growing up in this setting gave Case the sensibility to discern between tech that was useful and informative, and tech that was annoying and disruptive. The voice-activated lights fell cleanly into the annoying-and-disruptive category. The sensors were, well, extra sensitive. A truck rumbling down the street could trigger them, flicking on the bulbs at three in the morning. Talk about annoying roommates. Case cited this as a prime example of overthinking technology—a plain old light switch works fine.
Case is out to make similar adjustments in today’s products. She said businesses have become obsessed with making products that look and sound futuristic but don’t agree with human nature. Among her pet peeves: overuse of touch screen interfaces, unnecessarily bright lights, and disembodied robotic voices. One example she brought up: the complexity of the modern-day TV. When you want to watch the game or check out a new show, you can get lost in the menus, apps, and streaming options. This shouldn’t be this hard, Case said.
“If you’re making a smart TV and you want it to be really smart, no one should have to be smart to use it,” Case told me.
To solve this problem, Case said designers should leverage familiar behaviors, and older products offer clues on how to do this.
“If we looked at a piano like we do most technology today, we would say that the piano is so outdated. It’s hideous. How could you even touch that thing? It’s like, no, the piano is designed in a way that it just works,” said Case.
The same goes for a bicycle, she added. The basic bike fundamentally works the same today as it did one hundred years ago. These things all work because they sync up with our senses and intuitions. When you’re driving a car, you’re informed by the rearview mirrors and the feel of the pedals. “You’re informed without being overburdened,” said Case.
Cars are an area of frustration for Case. At one big auto company, she was alarmed to learn that the team designing the dashboards didn’t own cars themselves. “That’s like saying we’re going to design a new soccer ball, but we’re going to have people who’ve never played soccer design it,” she said.
Having said that, Case conceded, there have been “calm” innovations in cars. She offered the backup camera as a relatively recent invention that works with human nature, not against it. There’s no thinking involved—kick the car into reverse and the camera informs your thinking and keeps you safer. She said the same about those indicator lights that flash on a rearview mirror, alerting you to a vehicle in the next lane over. It’s subtle and practical and doesn’t wrench on your attention.
Much of what Case views as calm tech can be traced back to the most familiar of familiar things—nature. Humans, she said, are designed to interact with the physical world around us—to feel the texture of an object, smell the scent of the air, and view a scene in four dimensions. The products and services that genuinely leverage these natural instincts are calmer, she said. This is why Case sets restrictions on her own use of technology. The screens we gaze at simulate this experience, but it’s not the real thing.
“The phone becomes more of a place than your physical environment,” she said. “I think it puts our minds at unease, and we’re more likely to be compulsive, like a lion pacing around a cage in which the Serengeti is painted behind him. It’s not the real Serengeti.”
Excerpted from “Saying No to New” by Eric Athas. Copyright © 2026 by Eric Athas. Used by arrangement with Balance, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing Group. All rights reserved.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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