The Myth of Convenience
thefrailestthing.com
thefrailestthing.com
This puts convenience directly at odds with meaningfulness. Ironically, this pursuit of convenience is what gives meaning to a lot of people, especially in Silicon Valley. :-)
As an elderly Uber driver once commented to me... "What do we gain by connecting a smart watch to an internet-enabled coffee maker so I can avoid getting up to press a switch in the morning? Stay in bed and scroll Twitter?"
Or read a book. Or play with your kids. Or your pets. Or talk to your spouse/significant other/friends. Or write code. Or post on your blog. Or...
The value of "time-saving" is that it lets you choose what you will spend the saved time on, instead of being forced to spend it on routine tasks that might not give you any real satisfaction even though they need to be done. But you do have to choose. Being able to do that is of value to many people. But perhaps it isn't of value to everyone; and to someone for whom that opportunity to choose is not of value, perhaps they would indeed be better off making their coffee and doing other necessary life chores by hand.
But that is precisely the point! Suppose, (as Barry Schwartz says) constraints are what drive choices we consider meaningful. Then, the greater the convenience, the harder it becomes to make meaningful choices!
Would spending time with family feel as meaningful as it does now if you were living inside the loop of "Groundhog day" and recreating the same evening over and over again? That is essentially immortality, as experienced in an unchanging world.
> Or read a book. Or play with your kids...
I don't know about the people you meet, but most people I meet seem to lament that it feels like they're getting less and less time for these things :-)
Who said that was the choice being offered?
> That is essentially immortality, as experienced in an unchanging world.
But we don't live in an unchanging world, so I don't see how any of this is relevant.
> most people I meet seem to lament that it feels like they're getting less and less time for these things
Is that because they're refusing to use automatic coffee makers and doing all their chores by hand? Or is it because they're using all the time freed up by automation on Facebook and Twitter instead of using it reading or playing with their kids?
Also, "spending time with family" isn't meaningful per se. The meaning is in the details the phrase doesn't convey - the things you do together, the things you talk about, the emotions you feel.
> most people I meet seem to lament that it feels like they're getting less and less time for these things :-)
That's because we live in a competitive environment; the work really does expand to encompass all the time labour-saving inventions liberate - simply because some people choose to go "the extra mile" and everyone else suddenly has to follow suit, or risk being left behind.
Yes, convenience frees you up to pursue something else, but I've felt that it takes so much willpower to pick an activity you know to be of value to you (like exercise, or reading a book) over something immediately gratifying. Another thing I've been thinking about, related to this is that our value systems and/or attention span have been weakened severely by the torrent of information and immediate connectivity these days have.
I remember this quote attributed to G. Michael Hopf: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." What if this pursuit of convenience is making us weaker, and in the long run, blind to what should be pursued with the time we free up?
Yes, it does. Anything worthwhile requires effort. But most such things can also benefit greatly from practice--the more you are able to choose to do them, the easier it gets to choose to do them.
Whereas before you didn't have to choose and never got an opportunity to use your willpower to pick an activity of value. What's to say that people weren't made weak and compliant by a lack of opportunity to make their own choices?
> What if this pursuit of convenience is making us weaker, and in the long run, blind to what should be pursued with the time we free up?
What if it isn't? What if this is little more than another moral panic, such as a decade ago how sexting was going to ruin everyone forever and was a threat to all children?
It seems to me that there are few answers here, but an awful lot of moralizing about shockingly little. Re-frame much of it as the quest for self-mastery, and now generations of philosophers approve.
Is the lack of choices and opportunity absolutely less preferable than wasting collective human time and energy in the deceptive pursuit of convenience? Also, aren't we converging to a future where we are in less control of important things, like privacy, human rights and environmental health, because we have traded them away to entities who were willing to take these from us in the pretext of convenience?
What if it isn't? What if this is little more than another moral panic? Aren't we better off treating matters like these with care rather than abandon regardless? I think it's weak to dismiss this as a moral panic simply because an unrelated concept came and proved to be one.
Back then, you knew the bad people simply wanted to take your freedom and use it to empower their choices. Now, they feed off our compliance and mindless consumption with a smile on their face and we seek them out actively. I or you may benefit individually, but atrophy is a real thing, tedium and hardship serves its own purpose. Would you make the case that we do not weaken mankind as a whole, or in the long run?
For instance, we are in a context where we are less in control of important things, like privacy, human rights, and environmental health than we would like. We are not in a context where we previously had full individual control of these things. We in aggregate, human socities, have always traded these away for one reason or another. What clear rubric makes one reason better or worse?
Whether this is a moral panic is an interesting question. It gets to the core of the issue. Specifically, is there any good evidence to believe that convenience is making humanity weaker? Perhaps it is true. Perhaps it is the opposite of true. Perhaps the truth is a mixed bag. Perhaps it's unmeasurable, making the whole subject one purely of personal opinion. Do we even have a clear definition of "strong" or "weak"?
I'm making the case that you have a wonderful opportunity to convincingly make yours ahead of you yet.
This, exactly. Unless we're talking about how much weight a person can lift, there's no objective definition of "strong" or "weak" person. "Strength" in this context isn't a property of a person at all, in my opinion, but of how other people perceive that person behavior - and that perception is so dependent on observers' life experiences, culture, religion, education and many other factors that it's practically meaningless. As such, the very notion of "strong person" is exploited in all kind of propaganda - with a concept this fuzzy it's easy to bend it to mean whatever you want it to mean.
"Convenience is making us weak" or "hardships make people strong" are examples of such propaganda in action. There's no meaning to them other than what the person talking wants them to mean (and, possibly, what the audience wants to hear). You could reformulate the statements to be easier to prove or falsify, but then the entirety of modern psychology and cognitive science would be against you, which is why nobody attempts to do this.
Well, that's how thought-terminating cliches generally are, so no surprise here. What's amazing to me, though, is that we're this deep into the thread and we still talk about them...
We also should also not forget the extreme sacrifice in quality that comes “quick and easy” coffee.
The thing for me is: it feels good to start the day by doing something yourself and the time you spend in morning rituals can be valuable for the whole day.
Although I automate a lot on computers, I belive in the value of manually making things happen, instead of having a environment that caters to you.
Every now and then I break my ritual and don’t drink coffee, which is something I don’t want to have to schedule with my smart watch.
Environmentally wise, they are much saner. And from a sedentary standpoint too.
All in all, one can get some firewood, start the stove/fireplace, grind coffee, and have a cup within 30 minutes or so.
Still more than waiting 2-3 minutes for the machine to poor it, but not really impossible. On the plus side, the whole procedure assumes that you live in the countryside, and don't have some office job to feel stressed to go early to.
A friend of mine starts work very early, so he has a different routine. He takes his dog out, gets dressed, then drinks his coffee on the commute. His coffee maker isn't especially smart, but it automatically heats water at the same time every morning. For him, taking the dog out is his manual "slow time", and automating coffee gained him a little bit more of it.
I don't think it's coincidental that artisanal products and "Pintrest-style" homemade crafts are in vogue at the moment. Doing something manually is fulfilling, and often produces much better results than automation. But not everyone gets that fulfillment from the same tasks, so automation helps free time for the ones we value. It's probably telling that neither my friend nor I has a drip coffee maker; we each went to a pole of manual or automated production.
Here's how I'd parse it - Automation does indeed free up time for by choice activities, but it also removes motivation to do things that are both hard to do and good to do. Obvious example: cars have made tons of things possible that weren't possible before, but if I didn't have a car or live in a society built around them I'd probably get a lot more exercise.
The more automation we have the fewer things we're forced to do and there are drawbacks that come with that. Others have brought up that the experience of having done any hard thing may have intrinsic benefits, but fewer of us have had that experience. Not an argument against automation, just acknowledging the cons.
Or nothing of the short -- just go and produce more useless innovations (IoT crap, and so on), and then spend 3+ hours on social media, and so on.
The important real time saving low hanging fruits inventions (washing machine, fridge, etc) are already done (some are pending still, but they aren't those peddled by modern companies).
All those modern "innovations" are meant for you to be a good consumer -- and to be such, you need to constantly buy the next, and work in the rat race to afford them.
You could read the book and play with your kids without an "internet-enabled coffee maker"...
In fact even agrarian medieval societies had more holidays (almost half the year) and far more leisure time than we do -- and that's with all the farm and household chores...
Who are these people without constraints? Without constraints there are at least two friends with different startups that I’d work at. Without constraints, I’d spend twice as much time in the gym. I’d cook meals with prep times thrice as long.
The point is to have useful constraints. Being constrained by having to do laundry is a low quality life. Being constrained by having to drive an hour a day to work is low quality. Being constrained by having to grow my own food or starve is low quality.
Convenience powers climbing Maslow’s pyramid. Being a slave to tedium, never again. Life is too short.
I don't really care for that. They're going to die same as me, and they're as unlikely (maybe less likely) to contribute anything lasting.
That’s the true beauty of convenience. Would they be as fulfilled if they were unable to share? Probably not. They reached greater heights of self-actualization because of this. And what made that possible? Digital video recording, not flipbooks. An internet connection. Not carrier pigeons.
Well I'm not normally one to invoke religion, but I think the Buddha discovered this line of thinking a long time ago.
He didn't have technology like we do, but as a prince he certainly had every convenience imaginable.
IIRC he ended up becoming an ascetic, part of a timeless tradition across the globe of finding meaning through simple living.
I'm not sure it works, but it's certainly a rich tradition.
Huh. I use an internet-enabled coffee maker to make me coffee at the same time every morning, thereby giving me extra sleep. Extra sleep every morning is glorious and definitely worthwhile to me.
Where's the internet part? It just needs a timer.
Thanks for sharing that!
Natural Selection > Women selecting who reproduces and who doesn't > Hypergamy driving women's desires > Men performing to be selected > Obsession for performance > Natural Selection Filtering next generation > and so on.
What do we gain by using a machine to quickly and easily create coffee? Why don't we start from the individual beans, grind them, fetch water from a manual well outside, and use our wooden stoves to heat water to a boil for our cup of joe? Convenience.
To give an example - I can take a cable car to almost every second mountain in the alps to reach the top. Or I can hike/climb/skitour it.
Although the result is the same (me on the top), the feelings of accomplishment, self-worth etc. are incomparable. Route is really often more important than destination.
Back to coffee example, each of us needs to strike a balance that fits us, there is no one-fits-all. I know damn well what fits me for happy life.
This recalls Hegel's theme of "second nature":
[ The synthesis of ethical life means that individuals not only act in conformity with the ethical good but that they recognize the authority of ethical laws. This authority is not something alien to individuals since they are linked to the ethical order through a strong identification which Hegel says "is more like an identity than even the relation of faith or trust" (¶ 147). The knowledge of how the laws and institutions of society are binding on the will of individuals entails a "doctrine of duties." In duty the individual finds liberation both from dependence on mere natural impulse, which may or may not motivate ethical actions, and from indeterminate subjectivity which cannot produce a clear view of proper action. "In duty the individual acquires his substantive freedom" (¶ 149). In the performance of duty the individual exhibits virtue when the ethical order is reflected in his or her character, and when this is done by simple conformity with one's duties it is rectitude. ]
The author starts with the unqualified assertion that convenience is bad. I'd expect they'd continue by providing evidence or an argument to support this statement.
Instead they throw in a lot of philosophical passages and quotes and it feels like they're talking around the concept instead of addressing it directly.
I get the impression it is aimed at people who already agree with the core thesis.
Consider the concept of tying in commerce:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
For example you can buy a specific cell phone (the tying good) on the condition of also buying a contract with a certain telecom operator.
If freedom is a virtue, then considering just the 2 products of this specific cell phone and this specific operator contract there should be 2 binary degrees of freedom, resulting in 4 options:
1. buy nothing
2. buy cellphone but no contract
3. buy contract, but no cell phone
4. buying both.
Then the act of only offering the following choices:
1. buy nothing
2. buy both
would be nothing more than false dilemma foisted off as "convenience", literally "coming together".
It's nothing but connotation games.
To counteract your argument, a popular sentiment seems to be that many JavaScript programmers spend too much time writing original software rather than trying to understand and configure the existing ones... because it's too inconvenient.
As a full time JavaScript developer for the past 11 years I completely disagree. JavaScript developers tend to be absolutely mortified to write any amount of original code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here
It is so bad that I just keep my open source contributions to myself and was even berated by a peer once for not using an specific code editor that featured use of my software.