Are you inconvenienced? - #90

The burden of ease.

How many times can you wash a towel before it falls apart? I’ve been asking the washing machine in the dark hallway of the basement. “Mr. Washing Machine, how many washes does it take to get to the threadbare bones of a towel?” like a candy commercial, amusing only myself in the quiet hours. 

With a sick dog, in-home laundry can only be lauded as a literal miracle. For me to be alive at a time when clothes can simply be shoved in one canister, then shoved in another, and be relatively new in the span of 2.5 hours — well it’s just a delight. 

The delight here is from convenience. In the worst of Cooper’s treatment, there were two days where his poor little tuckus was just meant to leak. That was the intention of the medicine! And leak he did. Every towel in our house was called into duty, begrudgingly giving up their posts as “guest towel” and “dish towel” to go to the poop war. No rag was spared. Innocent casualties fell left and right: t-shirts, pants, bathrobes, socks, as Cooper launched missiles wherever he went. 

Having a cloth calvary was important, but it was their miraculous recoveries in the washing machine infirmary that really saved us. 

A washer and dryer are conveniences. World-altering ones, but conveniences nonetheless. Without them, anytime I wasn’t washing Cooper’s hindquarters, I would have been elbow deep in soapy water, washing fecal residue off of beach towels.

But for as many conveniences as we take advantage of here, there are many we lost. Emergency services, oil changes, even grabbing a quick bite to eat. We have none of that here. It would take me over half an hour to go get a cup of coffee. Every morning I turn on the kettle, grind my beans, and stand there pouring a little bit of water, then a little bit more, and then a little bit more while my coffee slowly drips to life. This is clearly not the most convenient option. People have been conveniencing coffee for a very long time. At its worst, all you need now is hot water and a packet. At its best, I am standing in my bathrobe as the eastern sun emerges over the ridge, its pouring light dancing in the steam of the world’s only good decaf bean.

That said, I am currently staring at my empty coffee cup, debating if I want to go through the effort again. Occasionally I dream of a coffee-maker. Then I yell into the house to see what Ben is doing. Convenience, after all, should mean free-time, time to enjoy yourself, and if I enjoy slowly making coffee, then what purpose would fast coffee serve?

Tim Wu, a legal scholar who recently served as the Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in 2018 where he investigated the merits and downfalls of convenience, asking the question, “the dream of convenience is premised on the nightmare of physical work. But is physical work always a nightmare?” 

Of course it’s more convenient to turn the heat up than it is to order firewood, chop that wood, stack it, and build a fire ad nauseam, but when someone conjures an image of romance and retreat, they don’t picture a thermostat — they picture a fire. 

“However mundane it seems now, convenience, the great liberator of humankind from labor, was a utopian ideal. By saving time and eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us. Convenience would make available to the general population the kind of freedom for self-cultivation once available only to the aristocracy. In this way convenience would also be the great leveler.” - The Tyranny of Convenience, Tim Wu

I’ve been trying to suss out when convenience became something I resented, when making things easier went from time-freeing to self-isolating. Was it the proliferation of bottled water? Was it music-blaring-speakers in the depths of the wilderness? Was it the ability to be reached whenever, wherever, and the expectation that you would answer? Did my final straw, my last nail in the coffin of community come during the pandemic when the convenience of ordering in meant forcing someone else to endure whatever was out? That’s certainly convenient, but for who?

In last week’s paid edition, I sent around this short audio clip from Oliver Burkeman’s Inconvenient Truth series for the BBC. I’ve listened to it maybe five times now, mulling over certain threads as I drive all over the state to take care of my dog. Driving eight hours is a time burden, but is it an inconvenience? Cooper loves road trips. The times we’ve driven to and fro to both our local vet and all the way to the Front Range these past two weeks have been the highlight of Cooper’s days. In the car, he doesn’t tremble. In the car, he stands on the passenger door with his snout out the window breathing in the fresh air. It’s either that, or he’s passed out belly up. It’s stressful for me, but it’s a dream for him. In that context, is there any inconvenience at all?

Convenience, at its root, is about optimizing, trying to make things better than they were previously. But who decides what’s better? Is it us, or is it the market? 

“In this way, the quest for the best — or for the hack that will actually make some part of our life less cumbersome — throws a veil of dissatisfaction over our days. I look around the room and I see a laundry basket in need of optimization, an unsatisfactory rug, house plants that should be growing more. I need better tupperware, a kitchen remodel, some trick to clean my exterior windows that isn’t just me spending hours cleaning my exterior windows.

Instead of looking around my living space with gratitude for the soft comfort I’ve built for myself, inflected with my peculiar tastes and preferences, I see lack. And that dissatisfaction becomes a sort of lingering fog, dampening my experience of the world.” The Optimization Sinkhole,

Anne Helen Petersen

The easier it is to fix things, the faster it is, the more dissatisfied we become with not fixing, with merely enduring. Convenience is not dissimilar from the dopamine hit we get from our phones — a bright, shining moment of ease where there was previously only labor. And not just physical labor, but mental labor as well. Living somewhere “inconvenient” requires planning, lest you spend six hours driving simply to “pop” into the store three times. Here, there is a mapping, both to your routes and your weeks so you can get done what needs doing. It’s inconvenient, but it’s an exercise in knowing what you actually want.

This life, the one I’m describing, is one people fantasize about. Burkeman notes in the audiocast that we’ve “streamlined everything to the point where we fantasize about our lives without it.” Cabin porn, hygge, mountain retreats, boat-access only, “disappearing into the woods”, these are all now prized escapes, and in a world meant to be more comfortable for everyone, these escapes are often only available to the few, leaving everyone else to suffer in the land of ultimate convenience. 

No one says they dream of an 8-lane highway lined with windowless shipping factories full of workers peeing in old water bottles. But the choices we make often build this world for us. As Wu said in his piece, “Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience … The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes.”

I used Amazon earlier this month. Both our local pet supply stores were out of soft kitten food — of any kind. The next closest pet supply store is 90 minutes from here. So I ordered kitten food. It’s not that convenience isn’t worth it sometimes — it’s just about asking when it is, and what cost that convenience comes at.  

A few years ago, when Ben was going to be out of town for a few weeks, I ordered a box of Hello Fresh for the first time so I could attempt some kind of healthy cooking in his absence. On its face, Hello Fresh is convenient. On its back, it’s a landfill of waste and a symptom of a nation so sick with busyness that it feels easier to have someone send you a packet of 2 tablespoons of soy sauce rather than just checking if you have soy sauce in the fridge. The recipes aren’t any easier than just owning a cookbook called Simple Recipes, picking a few on a Saturday morning, writing a list of ingredients, and getting them — a scenario where you might actually be able to make these recipes over and over rather than accruing enough plastic to gag a horse. Plus, in the latter scenario, you might actually talk to someone, something known to be good for us.

But what is good for us does not always feel good to us. That convenience replaces labor is enough to lose most people in the fight against it. 

As we debate the merits locally of whether to have Zoom meetings for our town assembly or in-person only, there are valid arguments for the convenience of Zoom: it allows parents who can’t find babysitters to attend the meetings, neighbors stuck at work have an opportunity to dial in, and whether you’re on the road or wiping your dog’s butt, you can hear what’s happening. But when the debate comes up outside of the town hall, few people are citing these reasons. Instead, they say it saves them the discomfort of being in the room. Zoom makes it convenient for them to listen to the issues they care about and to leave when the meeting is no longer pertinent to them. 

I struggle with this line of thinking because everything should be pertinent to them, because everything that comes up in these Zoom meetings is about this town. Choosing the convenience of being faceless on Zoom over the discomfort of debate contributes to the dissolution of community, the guilt of which has forced me into future permanent attendance.

That is the danger — community is one of convenience’s clearest competitors. Press a few buttons and your order shows up at your door, nary a thank you in sight. No silly conversations with the sales person, no making calls and leaving messages, no asking your neighbors who they suggest. No discomfort, no labor. It would be different if all this ease was making us happier, but it’s often connected to making us more isolated and more fearful of our own boredom. 

I know there is a temptation here to fall into Luddism, but maybe that’s not the insult some would parade it as. Luddites were English textile workers protesting the use of cost-saving machines that were replacing skilled workers and driving down wages. Factory owners shot these protestors and their movement was suppressed with legal and military force. If the CEO of Netflix walked outside and shot into the WGA strike in defense of shows written by ChatGPT, I would call myself whatever the picketers asked. 

Like with most things, there is a The Good Place conundrum with convenience, as many of its world-improving upsides have inevitable downsides. The pile of towels at the ready comes at a cost: residential washing machines emit 179 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. From toasters to gas stations to sewing machines to elevators, convenience is everywhere. Even camping near a stream is a type of convenience. Is it really so bad to embrace, or is it that every generation on the brink of middle age looks to innovation in fear? Convenience is what enabled me to get a life-saving contraband drug through a Facebook group from China to the middle of nowhere to try to save my cat. But the convenience of being able to get a hamburger pretty much anytime you want is quite literally killing our planet.

Burkeman closes the audiocast by asking “how do we want to be as human beings?” How do we choose to engage with technologies that support us rather than separate us? How do we ensure that when convenience benefits one person, it doesn’t hinder another? How do we see past the gloss of what’s easy so we can more clearly see the path of what’s fulfilling, rewarding, and maybe not what we want in the moment, but what we want out of life? I’ve always incidentally craved inconvenience. It’s a byproduct of an old need to be perceived as tough, to need no one and no thing.

But of course I need things. I need people. Why else would I be here, writing to you, week on week?

Living here, in a town with no businesses, no cell service, no delivery, I’m forced into this kind of intellectual exercise. When I look closely, there are conveniences here lost elsewhere. Being in a fish bowl valley of challenges on old mining lots stacked on top of each other makes communing with your neighbors easy, intuitive, and dare I say, pretty convenient.

It’s when convenience supports community, then I think we’re truly onto something.