The Tyranny of Convenience
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There is no shortage of hard problems left to solve. If everything in your life looks uneasily easy, raise your eyes to something harder before gamifying your routine with deliberate refusal to use a microwave oven.
Before big government-funded science programs started in the 20th century, people born into affluent families were greatly over-represented in the sciences, because you can't theorize or research if all day is spent on routine chores. The same goes for composers, mathematicians, and authors.
I find it kind of sad if people liberated from routine chores choose to use their new leisure time exclusively on TV and Facebook. But I'm certainly not going to tell them that they should wash clothes by hand to break out of the entertainment rut. That's a waste of a life too, admittedly one with a lengthier historical pedigree than binge-watching.
Even if you lack the inclination or the skills to advance the frontiers of art, mathematics, or science, there are plenty of rewarding activities that are orthogonal to convenience technologies. Hiking, biking, fishing, birdwatching, learning to sing or play an instrument, woodworking, cooking food that a microwave simply can't make, playing sports, gardening... I do think that people suffer physically and mentally if the only parts of their bodies they use are their fingers and their eyes. A sedentary life spent entirely looking at electronic displays isn't good. (Even reading paper books all the time without using the rest of your body isn't great, and I say that as a serious bookworm.) The best way to fill excessive time freed by convenience technologies is to take up leisure activities that use the rest of yourself, not throw away labor saving machines and start beating rugs like your ancestors (or ancestors' servants).
And +1 for pointing out that drudgery-for-the-sake-of-drudgery is hardly the solution.
Did travel-by-horse, any time in human history contribute to GLOBAL climate change, rising sea levels, unpredictable weather patterns, etc, etc, that the rise of greenhouse gases like CO2 from the combustion fossil fuels seems to be doing? I'm guessing not.
Conveniences have created a population explosion, and we're slowly snuffing out our existence because of it. Convenience is just another pattern of the Luxury Trap that authors like Yuval Noah Harari talk about. We have more of things at lower qualities, which allow us to spread more suffering around.
My officemate and fellow grad student had car payments and paid for a gym membership to offset his similarly sedentary day. I used to laugh at that. I laugh a little less now, knowing how much risk cyclists are exposed to from cars, but that problem itself is a symptom of American cities that are built in an excessively car-dependent, car-first way.
Horses also regularly killed people.
> “In vacant lots, horse manure was piled as high as sixty feet. It lined city streets like banks of snow. In the summer time, it stank to the heavens; when the rains came, a soupy stream of horse manure flooded the crosswalks and seeped into people’s basements. Today, when you admire old New York brownstones and their elegant stoops, rising from street level to the second-storey parlour, keep in mind that this was a design necessity, allowing a homeowner to rise above the sea of horse manure."
I don't think the Mongols or Comanche had "massive environmental problems". Steppe nomads don't need any more infrastructure than the steppe. They also manage to kick the asses of any "civilization" that hasn't managed to invent machine guns yet.
Tearing down the city and rebuilding it for the car, which happened in the majority of American cities 40s-70s was an ideological program, and part of what drove it was a collective obsession for utility, or convenience. This was the era of unbridled optimism when there were technological solutions to all societal challenges. This article refers to that same postwar mindset with regards to food preparation and other household chores.
It is also not romanticizing the past because we can tell the difference today. You can, right now, live in a walkable city or town, and compare it to a life where you have to drive everywhere. For many, the inconvenience of having to walk everywhere is minor given everything else you get in return. In fact, so much so that invariably these places are more expensive to live in.
But I'm guessing the answer is "probably not, and if so, probably for exceedingly few people. If something like that was a good idea, washing clothes probably wouldn't be the ideal form of it."
By all means though, gardening, cooking food, human-powered travel, repairing & making things of all kinds, etc I do believe can have great value.
Traditionally, during the many "out of season" months a large part of your diet would involve pickled, cured, salted, smoked, etc products, in quantities much larger than nowadays. These preservation methods are quite carcinogenic - over last hundred or so years we've achieved something like 80% reduction in stomach and colon cancer simply by mass use of refrigeration causing people to eat less of those highly processed foods than they did. Those types of cancer used to be very "popular", but the lifestyle change caused by refrigeration has made them quite rare - and intentionally returning to traditional methods of food preservation is likely to be bad for your health (in the long run) and should be done with deliberation.
Full disclosure: founder of Infinite Food - http://infinite-food.com/ :)
I want the answer to be yes, but it's like my favorite quote says, "as soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up."
A better question might be why we're okay with this state of people being largely anesthetized once they get home. But the same thing has been said about television and movies, and pulp fiction before them; maybe the problems are built-in and we just don't have it in us to meaningfully improve.
I think that when you're deeply cynical about people and are never given any reasons to think otherwise, it's easy to start acting like a jerk and generally lose sight of the fact that other people still share the same foibles and flaws and fears and insecurities as yourself.
Terry Pratchett writes the sort of books which remind you that even though you might completely despair of them, there is still something in everyone that is inherently worthy of compassion.
Too bad that human compassion and judgement tend to be the first casualties of all this convenience, huh?
They are tired and stressed when they come home and need something easy to unwind. I am not even sure why fishing or birdwatching would be superior to watching a movie on TV.
I've seen quite a few studies that indicate exposure to nature is beneficial in reducing stress. So is physical exercise, even non-strenuous, which you'll get more of by fishing or birdwatching than by sitting on the couch. Maybe these studies are just more non-replicable junk; I don't have time to do a deep dive to check right now. They do line up with my personal experiences and anecdotal observations of others. (Which means I should probably be extra-skeptical, since it's easiest to fool yourself when a result aligns with your prior intuitions.) But that's how I developed my list of examples, with a lot of outdoor activities and activities that will use different parts of your body.
The gulf of understanding that many tend to forget or perhaps deliberately dismiss: The vast majority of real people out there would understand nothing or very little of the quoted sentence.
Yes, and there never will be. The problem of life is which one to choose. This problem is getting harder in the sense that there's more choice now. (In the old days if peasants didn't labour as their fellows did then they mostly died. Simple choice.) But even though we have choices now this doesn't imply it's possible to live a life of distraction and convenience. The illusion that this is possible leads to nihilism, despair and mental disorder. Which are themselves hard problems.
In my opinion most of the nihilism and despair stems from the fact that distraction and convenience, for all their superficial attractiveness, are the happiness equivalent of a Big Mac. It's a quick fix, but it does not last...
Exactly. It ends with addiction, bad health, senility, crippling alimony or something else nasty. Thus hard problems are inevitable. Better to choose something meaningful ASAP.
Isn't this what managers do? And large company execs? The bigger the team you lead, the less you do and the more you arrange others to do.
So perhaps instead of saying our lives are becoming flimsy, we could say we're all turning into managers.
My point is that substantial achievements happen even when the privileged people are largely lazy, spoiled and delegate tasks. It's different kind of achievements than in a more egalitarian society (like a republic), perhaps scientific progress is the biggest casualty.
Through, medieval sculptures and paintings are quite odd choice of profound achievement. They are just sculptures and paintings and buildings, really. There is nothing profound or moving about them.
We are generating a lot of art, philosophy and what not right now, more then they ever did. Same for science, it is moving much faster now then it moved under feudalism or slavery.
It's a good dystopian trope, and one of the more uncomfortably plausible ones. A streamlined pipeline from cradle to creche to college to a cycle of job->transit->housing->transit until you're too expensive to keep around anymore.
It's probably where we'll end up. The constant message in society today is, "you're on your own," and the constant message from other people is, "go away." It hurts, but that's dystopia for you.
Society has become a dystopia with a hall of mirrors and flashing lights for many kids. They feel more alone then ever, even with all the social media. I have a strong suspicion though social media is making it worse, since you are constantly bombarded with beautiful and successful people (or people faking it).
The many conveniences I enjoy in my life allow me to circumvent rote tasks that offer no enrichment and no sense of accomplishment. What do I do with my free time? Difficult activities that give me a sense of accomplishment and enrichment.
To tack on the concern that people are falling back to "screen time" to fill the time left by convenience is a problem more to do with people not led to explore other facets of the world they're not familiar with, or a sense of inability from being coddled while raised.
A better argument would be not that "it makes us less human" etc, but that it teaches people to be lazy and avoid problem solving. It's the "there's an app for that" attitude. The calculator attitude, the GPS attitude. You're trained to avoid any difficulty, and I can imagine a person trained to only use ready solutions will just give up if he can't buy/download/solve it in browser. It's not just about being washed away on a remote island or emergency events like wars. It's also loss of resourcefulness.
Take everything from McDonalds's fast food, to Facebook's engagement optimization, to overprescribing of antibiotics and painkillers. The products that sell the most, are the ones that cripple the users ability to independently operate, and keep them coming back for more.
I've begun to think that's intrinsic, not anything nefarious.
We long for convenience, laziness, sugar, etc. We're meant to want them, but never get much of them. As far as we can tell, our minds & bodies run best on a diet of exertion, activity, and whole foods, which are the very opposites of the things we crave.
I keep thinking about TDR's Strenuous Life.
I'm convinced that people derive meaning from restrictions they have to overcome. In the land of perfect convenience, everything would be instantly possible, and nothing would be valuable, so nothing would be worth doing. What would make people tick?
In this vision, convenience merges with powerlessness, leaving no options. At some point, we could observe that making things easier doesn't benefit society by freeing up time, but harms it by removing meaning.
As a believer in a transhumanist future, this possibility concerns me.
Looking at Wikipedia's list, I'd put it behind 9. The colonization explosion. As long as there is something to do - discover, colonize, compute - there will be a part of humanity that finds outside challenges.
Colonization is the raison d'etre of Culture in Iain Banks' series, as described in this article: http://sciphijournal.org/why-the-culture-wins-an-appreciatio...
People grind for something as inconsequential as Steam achievements.
Maybe walking to the well to get water is an inefficient, time consuming task when you could just use plumbing. But maybe the ones performing this routine throughout their entire life would have healthier blood pressure, or less risk for osteoporosis, because of more frequent physical activity.
Incidentally there is a famous Chinese morality animation about three monks fetching water https://youtu.be/Z802JqJ2A7A?t=30s
Does the author talk to his students? "Getting music free" is more prevalent than ever. Many just go to YouTube to get their music.
It seems that if you want to be successful in today's market you have to prioritise convenience. Just consider how many startups are based on the idea of making something 'easier' as opposed to 'possible'.
Unfortunately, convenience is killing us.
First, how do I, an individual, use convenience in my life, without getting drawn down bad paths? I commute by a McDonalds on the way home, when I'm hungry and exhausted. Perhaps I make alternatives easy (yummy leftovers I can pop in the microwave), perhaps I fortify myself to resist temptation (eat an apple at my desk so that cheeseburger doesn't seem as tempting), perhaps I remind myself that cooking with my spouse is part of the fun and imagine her smiling as I wield that frying pan.
Second, and different, how do I as a benevolent dictator manage convenience for those I'm responsible for? For instance, as a teacher, I want to make certain things easy (access to the right texts and helpful videos) and other things (problem sets) just the right amount of "difficult" to keep students engaged, learning, and successful.
We actually know how to do this, in general. Intensive care units are there to make everything "easy" for really sick people, but few people get trapped forever in the ICU.
The "tyranny of convenience" is a sexy title, but people always are drawn to what's easier, even before the washing machine arrived. There's probably a general cycle - we go nuts on the easy alternative, and then discover that there's more to life. E.g. "slow food", custom-configured PCs, "back to the land", etc.
Not saying Marx's solutions are best. But he certainly was relevant in describing the problems.
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In Terminology of the Imperium, the glossary of 1965's Dune, Frank Herbert provides the following definition:
Jihad, Butlerian: (see also Great Revolt) — the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
Herbert refers to the Jihad many times in the entire Dune series, but did not give much detail on how he imagined the actual conflict.[4] In God Emperor of Dune (1981), Leto II Atreides indicates that the Jihad had been a semi-religious social upheaval initiated by humans who felt repulsed by how guided and controlled they had become by machines:
"The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed."[5]
In the series, Herbert illustrates how the Jihad leads to many profound and long-lasting effects on the socio-political and technological development of humanity. The known universe is purged of all forms of thinking machines, resulting in not only a ban on the re-creation of similar devices (which remains in effect throughout the periods described in the original six Dune novels), but also a great technological reversal for humanity. The chief commandment from the Orange Catholic Bible, "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind", holds sway, as do the anti-artificial intelligence laws in which the penalty for owning an AI device or developing technology resembling the human mind is immediate death. This leads to the rise of a new feudalistic galactic empire which lasts for over ten thousand years, until the rise of the God Emperor Leto II in 10,217 A.G.[6]
To replace the analytical powers of computers without violating the commandment of the O.C. Bible, "human computers" known as Mentats are developed and perfected, their mental abilities ultimately honed to the point where they become superior to those of the ancient thinking machines. Similarly specialized groups of humans which arise after the Jihad include the Bene Gesserit, a matriarchal order with advanced mental and physical abilities, and the Spacing Guild, whose prescience makes safe and instantaneous space travel possible. Fringe societies such as the Ixians and Bene Tleilax eventually begin to develop mechanical and biological technology that, if not actually transgressing the commandments of the Jihad, at least come extremely close. Prohibitions spawned by the Jihad also include artificial insemination, as explained in Dune Messiah (1969) when Paul Atreides negotiates with the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, who is appalled by Paul's suggestion that he impregnate his consort Princess Irulan in this manner.[7]
Herbert's death in 1986[8] left his vision of the actual events of the Butlerian Jihad unexplored and open to speculation.[4]
Once Tim Wu goes out cuts papyrus, pounds the papyrus into paper. Gets a feather from a bird and fashions a quill with that, then makes ink, and rewrites his column until he gets it perfect, then hand copies his column and walks to my house and delivers it to me, then I will take him seriously.
Until then, by response is "bug off hypocrite!"