Convenience is killing us
Let me be the first to say I like my little conveniences. I enjoy it when my web browser memorizes my passwords and saves me six seconds, sometimes I get food delivered to my house, and I take a Lyft to the airport when I can’t get a cab and public transit would take an hour and a half. Like everyone else I know, I want life to be easier and simpler, and there’s a whole lot of tasks I would like taken care of. We’re all busy, and we all crave ease.
Seeking convenience in this hectic life couldn’t make more sense, it feels as natural as wanting a comfy couch in the living room. There is, of course, just one slight hiccup. Under capitalism the convenient options are, increasingly, false solutions which reinforce the broader system that steals our time and drains our wallets. So the very pursuit of convenience ends up bolstering the structures that pump our lives full of urgency and deprive us of the time and peace we crave, leading us to chase the consolation prize of convenience with even more desperation.
The system of exploitation that drives us to seek solace in convenience can be seen most clearly in the corporations gig-afying our economy. Amazon, DoorDash, GrubHub, Uber, Lyft and more sell us convenience, and not much else. There’s nothing new about what they have to offer, we just like the package coming faster or the car being hailed from our phone or the discounts on the food-ordering website. But what’s deliberately obscured are the consequences.
New York cab drivers, for instance, are unionized. The system isn’t perfect, but when a company like Uber comes in people go from stable, long-term jobs to precarity. Now these workers live in uncertainty, at the mercy of an opaque algorithm that doesn’t even let them know the vast difference between what you’re paying and what they earn. Sometimes, Uber and Lyft take over half of what the customer pays.
So what happens when an economy gets gig-afied? What happens when Walmarts and Amazons offer us convenience but wipe out thousands and thousands of local businesses in the process? Life gets harder. Workers have to pick up multiple jobs because the income they lost can’t be fully replaced by warehouse pay or gig work. People are pushed into more difficult lives and a position where we crave moments of convenience, moments that feel like even the briefest break from it all.
But the truth is we need comprehensively easier lives. We need systemic change, not just gimmicks that save us a few minutes in our hectic, difficult days. We need to change the structure of society so that life doesn’t exact such a toll, so that we can live with greater ease instead of craving fleeting moments of respite in a sea of stress and toil. What we certainly do not need is a fetishization of convenience when the price we pay for it is the gradual decay of a good life for us all.
Unlearning the worship of convenience begins by examining what we might think is an innate desire. The corporate world, especially Silicon Valley, has been remarkably successful in elevating what should be a minor sidebar to a fundamental axiom of life. We’re told and expected to believe that the desire for convenience inherently ranks up there with our desires for safety or connection or our basic needs. Not only is this false, it’s been deliberately manufactured to reorient our priorities.
There have been countless advertising campaigns, product roll-outs, and CEO shticks trying to get us to believe that we should be overawed and grateful every time five seconds are shaved off our daily routine. In 2020, business publication Forbes came out with a piece entitled “Why Convenience is Essential.” The article is full of insightful gems like, “Convenience can actually help increase your profit margin, allowing you to charge more than your competitors..” and other tips for making the customer experience easier (so that they’ll spend more money with you).
The idea that convenience is essential neatly sidesteps how a relatively unimportant virtue reached this status. We’ve been encouraged to elevate convenience to a top priority over years and years, both through marketing campaigns and by a capitalist system that squeezes our time and energy, building our urge for respite and ease. A 2022 article by market research company Mintel makes things clear. The piece is called “The evolving concept of convenience,” but the subsection encouraging companies to “Elevate convenience to a lifestyle” really makes it plain. The author lays it out, saying, “To further harness evolved convenience, brands should think about making it part of a consumer’s lifestyle instead of making individual products and services convenient to use.”
And a few short years later there’s no denying how effective this push has been. It’s been decades in the making, and the results are evident. Convenience is now an idea whose invocation holds power; we’re expected to be drawn to a product if it provides any modicum of convenience, we’re expected to orient our lives and routine around this pseudo-virtue, and corporations wield the word to draw us in with alarming effectiveness.
No marketing campaign would be able to make convenience such a priority for so many of us if society was structured differently. If the profit motive wasn’t ransacking our existence, convenience would be just icing on the cake, our lives would be stable and livable without the urge to carve out ten seconds here and two minutes there. We wouldn’t crave ease, because we’d have it. Corporations wouldn’t prioritize gimmicks that cut five seconds from your “workflow” because we’d have healthy relationships with work. But that’s not the world we live in, and in this reality convenience is immensely appealing.
Convenience is so appealing, and we’ve organized ourselves and our thinking around it so thoroughly, that even politics and resistance bend to accommodate it. The history of the online petition shows just how severely misplaced the prioritization of convenience can become. For years links to Change.org petitions were circulated with the greatest urgency, and while some did some good, they never came close to replacing the need for sustained power-building. Except, for a little while there, quite a few people thought they did. A few too many of us gave in to the tempting idea that change could really be that convenient. A link, a click, a transformation. Even now, while the proliferation of viral petitions has faded, the allure of convenience remains. It’s tempting to think that the right protest, the right boycott, the right election would cement the change we need.
One of the difficulties here is that convenient actions aren’t necessarily bad. A boycott, a protest that’s easy for people to attend, handing folks tools that are easy to use, none of it’s bad. But if we don’t escape from the shackles of convenience we’ll never go far enough, we’ll never go from the good to the necessary. The life we need to live right now is often inconvenient, the organizing we need to do right now is often inconvenient. We’re going to need to sit in meetings, canvas our neighbors, and organize our coworkers. There is no shortcut for the deliberate, time-consuming work needed to defeat fascism.
A society with real democracy has countless people sorting through problems, coming to decisions, and tackling tasks together. Real democracy is not convenient, it takes time and effort. Radically transforming society isn’t convenient, it takes hard work and sacrifice. I think of the parents who bring their kids to the organizing meetings I go to, I think of the people who drive or take the subway an hour to come to meetings and actions, I think of the people who take time out of their workdays to organize. None of it’s easy, none of it’s convenient, but all of it’s necessary.
Don’t get me wrong, we should make the work of transforming society accessible to as many people as we can. We should hold our meetings at times and places that are accessible to as many people as possible, we should have hybrid options, and we should make it possible for parents and older folks and people who work multiple jobs to join in our fights. The fact that the tasks ahead of us will not conform to the capitalist love of convenience doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to include as many people as possible — we should and we must. But, at the same time, more of us should think about what we can sacrifice, more of us should think about how much inconvenience we can tolerate. Right now is the time to up the ante, the time to de-prioritize what’s easiest and think about what this moment demands.
One day, if we get to work now, we won’t crave convenience. One day our lives won’t feel so stressful that a few minutes of ease excites us. When that time comes the days will stretch out in front of us, no longer compressed under the weight of stress. It’ll take long hours to get there, it’ll take wading through inconvenience and sacrifice, it’ll take defeating fascism and toppling the reign of the profit motive, but all of our efforts will be worthwhile for a world where we feel no need to seek escape from the pressure of urgency and the crush of time.
When we put aside the worship of convenience and think beyond brief moments of respite we can set our eyes on the horizon of a comprehensively better world. When we remove convenience from the pedestal it's been placed on we can begin the work of building a world we don’t seek escape from, a world and a life where we don’t crave moments of ease so desperately because stress and urgency no longer hang over us. That victory won’t come easily, but when we get there the fleeting relief of a few saved seconds here and a few saved dollars there will seem like a speck of dust in light of the life we’ve won.
Poet and essayist Ross Gay said during a lecture I attended: “Isn’t efficiency almost always at the cost of care?”
I think of this often.
I understand where you're coming from, but for some of us, your 'convenience', is our accessible (delivery of food, medication, and masks are examples for me personally). When people look at the 1955-1956 bus boycott, they forget that it was possible because they worked together to provide each other with transport to work, groceries collection, etc. They didn't leave anyone vulnerable to having to need the harmful option of using the bus. If we are ever to transition from capitalism, we have to ensure the most vulnerable have access for their needs, without having to rely on the current systems of exploitation.