Repost: Inconvenience
Gruesome Details
This was first published on my Substack in August 2022. I am now vegan and am once again in God’s country (make a below-average salary). I treat convenience capitalism in this with less vitriol than I currently feel, which is why I thought reposting—rather than rewriting—was ideal.
I speak with the bold confidence of a woman who has never been right.
That being said, I am trying to engage in the very small action of making my life less convenient. It seems the only moral thing to do.
Convenience, a word once reserved for putting in front of “mart,” is intended to be our raison d’etre. Capitalism packaged convenience in bright colors and underlined it twice. Convenience is what we should strive for. Everything within a four-foot reach.
Convenience is the mirror image of bootstrap culture. As “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps” erases everyone who helped you get your shoes on, so convenience asks us to forget who is making the boots. It ignores the damage done, the lives affected by $4 shoes and 24-hour/365 Targets. Convenience promises frictionless action: “My package arrived before I even ordered it.” Convenience culture asks us to forget what we know to be true. Life is filled with friction.
And so I have decided to rub against the world a bit more. I must take all the unwarranted good fortune that I’ve been granted and use it to make less convenient decisions. The decisions are so small. They are not hard. They are only a bit more friction.
I will take longer to get somewhere, having boarded a bus instead of using my car. I will take full advantage of my city’s new compost bins. I will call a restaurant to order delivery rather than using a tech platform that skims money from the bottom line of a business not injected with venture capitalist money. I’ll eat less dairy and virtually no meat. Steps so small they feel like crawling.
I am a white woman in my thirties with, at the present moment, an above-average salary. My decisions are less convenient than capitalism wants for me. Capitalism needs convenience: a full 24 hours of spending for everyone.
And so many of us are taken in by the lie that convenience is best. Convenience has been sold to us so hard that when it takes the stage in online conversations (even those in so-called progressive circles), it is shielded. The siren song of Jeff Bezos rings in the street. People are so obsessed with 24-hour access that they try to shield convenience by smuggling it into actual issues like disability or class-based access.
But access isn’t convenience. Access is a necessity, an imperative. Is having an ASL translator for public meetings a convenience? Or is it a necessity? Is having multiple ways to access government services a convenience? Or is that something we need to reach people both online and not?
To equate convenience with access, one must contort oneself into the untenable position that capitalism offers solutions. The free market decided: 12-hour Amazon package delivery time is tantamount to care. Lyft has created accessible transit. DoorDash is solving world hunger.
We should all consider taking on a bit more friction, as we build community which sees the needs of others. Community, not capitalism, understands access as a necessity. It isn’t a bonus. Bringing a housebound neighbor medications and groceries can’t be considered convenience, it can’t be something we foist off to an underpaid delivery driver.
Convenience is facile. Convenience erases. Convenience will never encapsulate the breadth and depth of human interactions. Care, community, and service cannot be boiled down to a CVS open 24 hours.