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Ie we’ve designed the world to be way more frustrating than it needs to be. It can be much less frustrating if we choose instead to be less deterministic in outlook (go left when going right is too hard etc). Healthy quitterism is really comfort with many ways things could be.
While there is a risk to becoming low-energy/path of least resistance, I think the industrial world trained humans too far in the direction of thinking quitting is a vice, and perseverance a virtue. Because industrial logic is deterministic.
In a way perseverance as a virtue is the flip side of bureaucracy as the primary machine of civilization. The pre-moderns had the fatalist-faith/religion as their primary virtue/mechanism pair, while ours has flexibility/computation as the primary pair.
The thing about bureaucracies is that they are just smart enough to be the preferred problem-solving mechanism where available, by covering a few default cases well, but not smart enough to run the world without human intelligence working relentlessly as a backstop.
Here I mean bureaucracy generally, as in open-loop, formulaic, procedural decision-making and problem-solving that is basically primitive algorithms running on bad computers with humans-as-robots parts. Covers both public and private, market and planned institutions.
Even the dad in the OP clearly has a bureaucratic conception of the intelligence required to “learn” a can opener that he’s trying to inculcate. He’s not wrong. The skill in question is essentially internalizing the logic of a bureaucratic machine (clamp-puncture-rotate-cut). https://twitter.com/johnroderick/status/1345508389690884096 …
It’s not a bad or worthless way of looking at the world. Nature is full of machines (DNA transcription is clearly related to TPS report filing). But it’s not the *only* way.
“Perseverance” is basically “getting this dumb machine to do what I want done is frustrating but the least-bad option.” As a mode of being civilized perseverance+bureaucracy (Ie a Kafkaesque unopened-can world of Trials) only looks good relative to outrunning lions in the wild.
This is why “software eating the world” is such a powerful thing. Imagine a can opener that is just slightly smarter. A Young Lady’s Can-Opening Primer. Enough silicon to make it smart-tinkerable.
It’s easy to make fun of internet-of-crap things, but when making something smart works, it *really* works. I make both pourover coffee and use a Nespresso vertuo machine. They have different frustration profiles, but both make good coffee.
Pourover is pre-modern, Vertuo is postmodern. In between you have bureaucratic coffee machines that just make bad coffee. Pourover has the natural frustrations: percolation physics, temperature, wetting, diffusion. The Vertuo has digital frustrations: googling for instructions.
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