On Convenience: Why We Need Less

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I’m moving to a U.S. community where there’s no home mail delivery service. This scares me. I’ve already started thinking about how inconvenient it will be to go to the post office and collect my mail. How will I ever find the time?

“Can I get someone else to do this mail retrieval process for me?” flashed through my mind. So did, “Wonder when drones will be available to deliver it to my door?”

Eric Weiner stopped me in my presumed inconvenience tracks through his LA Times op-ed: Convenience has costs—to our health, our wallets and our quality of life. “We live in the Age of Convenience,” Weiner writes, “That concept lies at the heart of what Silicon Valley is selling and we are so eagerly buying.” He makes a thought-provoking case about how convenience is negatively impacting our hearts, minds and bodies, as well as our ability to communicate and compromise with others.

Think about the conveniences we rely upon and how inconvenient the results of that reliance have become. Quick examples:

• Processed foods that are inconveniently causing obesity and other (expensive, incapacitating) health issues.
• Email, texting, and posting that keep us hopping 24/7 and stop us from actually talking with one another.
• Home delivery of everything from books to fresh produce, reducing the number of places where we interact with one another and form community.
• Environmentally inconvenient “stuff,” like plastic water bottles, and even trickier waste produced by our endless technological upgrades.

I’m certain you can think of dozens more.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no desire to return to the dark ages (aka before the internet and internet shopping). Neither does Weiner.

But my anticipated move and P.O. pick-up inconvenience is causing me to hold a mirror to my convenience-filled life. In truth, I’m feeling darned dissatisfied. For instance, I’ve noticed how frequently conversations that used to be a communal racking of brains to recall what we’d heard/learned/read in the past, a joint “let’s figure it out,” are typically (quickly) reduced to all-heads-down, looking at our devices to find the answer. I miss those “does anyone know” conversations a lot.

Weiner explains that less convenience, an embracing of obstacles, is incredibly important–and good—for us, “We’d be a lot wiser if we were to embrace difficulty rather than run from it.” Studies on resilience, persistence, learning, and our capacity for compromise bear this out.

If you’re anxious to get your hands on the latest app that promises to make your life more convenient, stop. Reflect upon whether convenience is coming with a price tag you may not want to pay: costs to your relationships and costs to your quality of life–and maybe ours too.

I plan to think more about this while walking to the P.O.

Article originally published on August 18, 2015, LinkedIn Pulse. Featured image via www.apprenticeinstitute.com.

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