“But my visceral response to this kind of thinking – and even aside from ordinal lists of importance, the smartphone-supremacy attitude is very common – is to say, wow, these people must really enjoy shitting in the yard.
Plumbing – bringing fresh water from one place to another and disposing of human waste via engineering – goes back to antiquity, and you occasionally find claims of affordances like flush toilets in ancient times. Today, modern people in most developed parts of the world have constant access to free-running clean water and toilets that can remove physical waste to a secure processing facility or holding unit, with heated water on demand a very nice extra. That’s largely a 20th-century and forward phenomenon”
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-shitting-in-the-yard-test