Life is not “easy”. Bumps, bruises and breaks are universal in every society, social class and era.
Life is also not naturally convenient. We can pretend it is only due to massive technological overhauls and global outsourcing.
Over the last 100 years, technology has been refined to a point where we solved most of the major problems. In the US, outside of DMV or the Post Office, inconvenience is as good as gone. Solved. Next!
Since then, we’ve been working on hyper-convenience. If you look at many startups, they’re not solving major problems. The problem they solve is shaving seconds off tasks that only take minutes.
Convenience gave us full access to our desired food and entertainment, so with hyper-convenience the goalposts shifted to on-demand access and endless variety of things to access.
It’s the same pencil, but each year the sharpener makes it 0.01% sharper. How many times can you sharpen a pencil? How high can video resolution get before it’s real?
On-demand is based on our constitutional right to never have to wait for things. Our forefathers didn’t build this country for us to live life in the slow lane with the other “shitholes”.
I remember being a kid in the 90’s, popping in an install CD for a game, with the little hourglass cursor turning round and round.
No frustration. Just anticipation. It was almost… meditative. At risk of sounding like your grandpa, there is a satisfaction that comes with waiting for something, even a little.
Today I catch myself grumbling at any loading time longer than 20 seconds. It feels like being stuck in traffic. The more free time convenience grants us, the more precious it becomes. Isn’t that something?
So many shortcuts now, yet there never enough time to do it all. What’s free time anyway?
Yet we speed down the highway of convenience laid for us, and rarely give it a second thought. We breathe molecules of convenience oxygen, and never wonder where it comes from.
You can reach this company at midnight because the company has people working all night. These people (often on the other side of the earth) kill what we like to call “life-work balance” so we can have service on demand.
You have a choice of 53 hot sauces at the supermarket because 53 brands clamored to be noticed and stay profitable in a very crowded market space.
You don’t have to see your trash because someone shows up, carries it away and sifts through it. Your bodily waste is flushed to a treatment plant far away.
Disneyland can make kids feel like they’re walking through a real life cartoon because of late night staff and an intricate underground network of maintenance tunnels. You never see most of the moving parts or people.
At the end of the day, even most simple things are time and labor intensive (Don’t believe me? Watch a video of how rubber bands are made) and the time and labor is simply outsourced to someone or something else.
When we see life as clean and seamless, and take it for granted, we devote our energy to optimizing our personal lives- which usually involves consuming, consuming and consuming more.
Yes, consuming, and being served like royalty is fun. It puts us in a trance of sorts. It’s just active enough, while not active enough to be inconvenient.
We take a lot of stuff for granted, and probably by design. If everyone stopped to consider the long term effects of things, their behavior would change.
Understanding what’s behind our convenience is a buzzkill. If people had to think too hard it’d break the trance, and they would consume less. We might even start relying on each other more, making us more collectivist than individualist.
I’m not anti-capitalist. And it’s hard to argue with the technical efficiency of it all.
Yet, I can’t help but wonder if the convenience obsession that seems part and parcel of capitalism has hidden consequences.
Such as: detachment from the many moving human pieces making it work (loss of empathy and self-sufficiency) and removing activities that are more meaningful than the ones replacing them.
Both can exact a high price from our relationships, with ourselves and surroundings.
Are we slowly becoming the irritable restaurant patron, expecting invisible forces to coddle our every need?
Convenience puts the world at our beck and call in a way the ancient pharaohs would have given half their fortune for.
But at what cost?