I'm Carla Lally, cookbook author and snack enthusiast. Do you have a sweet tooth? Check out

Sweets Unwrapped, a podcast from Ferreiro and Atlantic Rethink, the Atlantic's Creative Marketing Studio.

Together, we're celebrating the traditions that make life sweet. Tune in now.

So think about this in like really simple terms. Your cooking dinner. Your goal is to produce a

dinner. But the experience of cooking, of hearing the sizzling onions in the pan or of chopping up

the vegetables or of opening and closing the refrigerator and feeling the gasket as you do so,

all of that stuff, which is really gratifying, that's the experience of cooking.

And it doesn't make sense to think about it in terms of goals and outcomes that you can optimize.

I'm Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we're going to sweat the small stuff.

There's this line from the author Kurt Vonnegut that I love.

It's from a 1995 interview in Inc. magazine where Vonnegut recounts just as personal computing

is really taking off his love for doing things in a more analog way.

There's this one trip to the post office that he talks about, heading to the newsstand,

waiting in line, making small talk with the shopkeeper, the satisfaction of sealing the envelope

and bringing it to the woman he has a crush on behind the counter. He ends the anecdote with

the following. I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office,

and I go home. And I've had a hell of a good time. And I tell you,

we are here on earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different. That quote

has been banging around in my head over the last few years as the world continues to embrace

the kind of technological progress that sands down the edges of our lives and keeps our faces

and our screens.

There's Amazon, DoorDash, Parking Lot Pickup, which can be genuine godsense.

...