the tyranny of convenience
Two things have been rotating around each other in my brain for several weeks:
The first is a lively, sometimes challenging conversation I had with my grandmother a few months ago. We got to talking about people’s relationships to food and health, and I mentioned how hard it can be to find time to cook dinner these days, given how much we all work. She tilted her head and said, “I don’t buy that. I worked full-time and cooked dinner every night. It wasn’t always fancy but it took time, and I managed to find the time.”
Reflexively, I wanted to argue with her, to point out that people are working more hours in general than they used to, and that, thanks to the internet, work has escaped the boundaries of the workplace and now oozes into our places of rest. But I shut up, because I quickly remembered the many other things that now take up our time that have nothing to do with work, also courtesy of the internet. She was right: For someone like me, with a cozy emails job and few other demands on my time, nothing’s stopping me from rolling up my sleeves and making my own damn food more often than the four-out-of-seven days a week I typically cook these days.
The second thing, helically intertwined with that conversation, is a screenshot of a Tweet that I saw on Instagram and which I could not hope to find again. It said something like, “I cannot possibly bring myself to go grocery shopping, the easiest way there has ever been to get food in the history of mankind, one more time this month.”
I’ve thought about that joke every time I’ve heaved a great sigh of profound weariness and gone to the store, which does seem to happen quite a lot but which is also, undeniably, easier than growing or hunting for the food myself. Imagine working with oats that haven’t been milked already. Imagine!
Americans are addicted to convenience, probably more than people from the other wealthy countries although I’m not going to quantify or fact-check that statement. You can tell from our car-centric culture, from people lining up in their SUVs to get coffee handed to them through a window rather than walking into the store. You can see it in our insistence that shops be open seven days a week, because God forbid we plan ahead for one day. You can hear it when your neighbors dump all of their recycling into one bin instead of sorting glass from paper from plastic, which would result in way more stuff getting recycled but at the cost of us spending a few more cumulative minutes a week on a task, which as we all know is unacceptable.
In America, consumerism is king, and I think convenience is probably his queen. She is unimposing and alluring, subtle and sinister. Sometimes you don’t even notice she’s there. But when you know what to look for, you see her everywhere.
It is easy to recognize the environmental damage that convenience inflicts: globally, the amount of stuff we consume is increasing even faster than the population is growing, which results in resources being depleted, ecosystems being damaged, eternal waste piling up in landfills and floating around in the ocean, microplastics hanging out in our blood, all the fun things you already know about but try not to look at directly lest you go insane. At the root of all this is capitalism getting better and better at its game, making it easier and easier for us to buy cheaper and flimsier goods that distract us from the aforementioned insanity.
But I think it may be more productive—by which I mean more likely to provoke action—if we think about how convenience affects us. You and me. Our fragile little hearts and our meme-sickened brains.
Let’s imagine there’s a woman named Ava. She’s 29 and has a white collar job in the city. She’s tried taking the bus into the office before, but it’s much more convenient to drive—it cuts her commute time in half and she can park in the garage directly under her building. She gains 20 minutes back each way, but she doesn’t get to hear the birds sing on the walk to the bus stop, nor does she have brief but pleasant interactions with the bus driver, her fellow passengers, strangers on the sidewalk.
Ava often thinks about asking a friend to meet her for lunch out, but it’s more convenient to order a salad and eat it at her desk while she scrolls through Instagram, where that same friend has conveniently shared a story, a small window into her life through which Ava can peer without leaving her chair.
When she gets home, Ava, who lives alone, might prepare dinner or she might order something, but she won’t go to a restaurant—it’s a hassle to plan dinners with friends, and it’s frankly demoralizing to eat alone. If she does splurge to order something, that order is facilitated through third-party delivery apps, which bring food quickly and cheaply to her door at the expense of literally everyone else involved in the process.
Ava used to go to the grocery store every weekend and walk the aisles herself, but once she started ordering online for a quick pickup in the parking lot, she found the convenience of that expedited process hard to give up. It means her groceries come in single-use plastic bags now instead of the tote she liked to carry, but oh well.
In all areas of her life, Ava finds that she can, if she chooses, take a process that used to involve physical travel or interpersonal communication and translate it directly into a few taps on her phone. Sometimes she resists this translation, but mostly she welcomes it, because isn’t it so much easier, so much faster and simpler?
She understands, vaguely, that this ease costs other people: Amazon delivery drivers drop packages at her door at all hours of the day, often after dark, sometimes on holidays, and those are only the workers whose labor she can see—she knows there are warehouse employees and factory workers in conditions she objects to on principle, but which slide easily to the back of her mind when the next notification on her phone says she has an unread work email, a Bumble match, a new episode to watch.
And so it could be very easy for Ava to go on like this for days, even weeks at a time, without noticing that she hasn’t talked to a single person face-to-face outside of work. Her life is full of activity—she’s buying things and completing tasks and sending Reels to friends—but that activity increasingly takes place in isolation. When she eats a meal, she’s alone. When she watches a movie, she’s alone. When she gets angry at a news headline and wonders what she can do about the ever-sorrier state of the world, she’s alone. And, alone, she is powerless.
I don’t think convenience on its own is intrinsically bad. My body is healthy and strong, for example, in large part because of the ease with which I can access nutritious foods and safe places to walk. But I do think companies make sickening profits off of our desire for convenience, so they work hard to turn that desire to addiction.
When we’re hooked, we can retreat passively into the comfortable isolation chambers convenience builds for us. There’s so much we can do now without extending ourselves—physically or otherwise—into the public sphere. Click this, tap that. Conveniences replace our connections to each other with flimsy, digital networks linked by commercial machinery.
This is not a world I’m particularly interested in living in. I want to ride the bus and travel alongside people (who are my allies), rather than sitting in a car and traveling alongside other cars (which are my enemies). I want to wait in a restaurant vestibule for a table. I want to chat idly with the checkout worker at the grocery store. I want to practice, every day, maintaining those loose but essential connections with the people around me so that when I see a neighbor who needs help, I remember how. So that I can look my waiter in the eye and thank him for bringing my food. So that when a local group organizes a protest, I know about it and I can join them, habituated to being one body in a crowd. So that my voice adds to a chorus rather than echoing off my own walls.
Recommended:
If this rant was your vibe, you may also enjoy:
The World Is Not Ending — a feature-length video essay ultimately about how networks of care, not capitalist innovations, will save us
Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism by Kate Soper — an excellent and engaging read that offers “a new vision of the good life”
Taking the bus