The Illusion of Convenience

📅 10 Dec 2021

My last post was about how I’m making serious changes to what I use for a phone on a daily basis. Part of that change will be “inconvenient”. Unless I have wifi I won’t have a maps app on my phone or be able to check my email or receive group messages through any number of apps (signal, element, telegram, etc.). But is convenience just an illusion? What are we really chasing when we talk about how things make our lives more and more convenient?

A lot of this post will probably be disagreed with or pretty easily refuted. I reserve the right to change my mind. Some of these thoughts I’m putting into words for the first time. Other parts I’ve thought about for over 10 years. Not to say those can’t change as well but on a philosophical level, I’m not going to budge much.

Last time I checked there are still just 24 hours in a day. We also still need a certain amount of sleep to live long, healthy, productive lives. On the sleep issue, there are short-term hacks that can get you through a period of time (think Wall Street bankers) but all of those things tend to catch up with us later. So with 6-8 hours of sleep that leaves us with just 16-18 hours every day to work with.

I bring up the time limits first because that’s what this whole convenience talk really boils down to: how much stuff can we jam into one day?

If Alexa wakes me up, starts some music, and brews my coffee, how much time did I really save? Thirty seconds? Two minutes, if we are being generous? Wow, what do I do with those extra two minutes?! Probably watch two more minutes of a Netflix show or scroll through social media.

How about when I use a maps app to get directions to work. How much time does that save me? Well, an argument can be made here that if traffic advice is given, it could save you a ton of time. That’s a fair point. But seriously, you’re going to work. Number one, you should know your way to your job and number two, if you drive it every day you should have some sense of what traffic is like. An accident can’t be avoided anyway (often when I get traffic alerts the main route is still the fastest anyway. If it’s not, it’s often a one or two turn correction, something I could figure out on my own). I’m not going to pick this one to pieces. The point is it probably doesn’t save you a ton of time. Plus, if someone gives you an address and you have to look it up, you are actually wasting time because if it is anywhere around where you live, you should probably have a general idea of how to get there anyway…

Or how about ordering things from an e-commerce website. That’s so convenient, right?! Plus, they save my orders and can even deliver the same items on a set schedule. That’s so nice! Except when they are more expensive or your local stores go out of business and then there happens to be delays on the e-commerce website. That’s not convenient at all!

The three above examples also completely miss how much information you are giving up for the sake of convenience. It’s not very convenient to have all of your information out there if one of those services all of the sudden gets hacked and a bad actor knows everything about you.

I’m not opposed to a little life-hacking. I have so many hobbies I have to carefully create a schedule that allows me to optimize my enjoyment of each of them. This also means that I have to monitor my mental health - it’s really easy for me to get overwhelmed and frustrated if I miss one too many days of a particular hobby. What I won’t do though is rush something or bow to convenience so that I can squeeze another 5 minutes out of a day. Because you know what would be really easy? Pop-tarts for breakfast every morning. But that would catch up with me eventually. Trust me - I ate garbage for just one year and I was miserable.

We live in a world where a handful of companies have amassed billions of dollars by simply selling convenience. Now, this has almost always been the case. Products and services are by their very nature convenient. Sure you could cut your own hair (and I often have) but why not just pay someone a little bit to have it done? The difference now is how much we have given up for the sake of that convenience. We have come about as close to giving up our lives as you can get without actually doing so. For what? Five extra minutes a day? Thirty minutes to an hour, if we are being generous? What are we doing with that time? If you are some god and you meditate or teach your kids how to play piano, more power to you. But as a wild shot in the dark, I would say we aren’t actually becoming better human beings with that extra time. My inkling is we are getting worse at the basics (driving, eating, learning) and most importantly, I think we are becoming terrible at interpersonal relationships. I would challenge you to just talk to a stranger in the grocery store or say more than five words to your favorite barista. See what happens. And then tell me those interactions haven’t gotten noticeably worse in recent history (not that this is all that matters, just an interesting metric).

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