On Conveniences

Part of my methodically planned sleeping routine involves a sleeping mask. The kind that makes everything pitch black, total light block, complete darkness. Yes, I am that person now, don’t ask me what else. During a trip in which I was staying in a new hotel every night, I realized I had left mine at the previous hotel. Emergency declared. But before I went full panic mode, I found immediate relief: just order a replacement online to be waiting at home upon my return. Just as I hit “order now” a thought crossed my mind: that is so convenient!

But as I lay in the unevenly dark hotel room, a question kept me awake. What am I supposed to do with all this ease?

Somewhere between the washing machine, the remote control, and same-day delivery, convenience stopped being a luxury and became the collective baseline. All of them in the same business: the elimination of friction, in time or in effort or in both. We began by outsourcing our physical errands, first with home appliances, then to Amazon and UberEats. Now, through AI platforms, more than physical, we are outsourcing our cognitive friction. The trend is accelerating fast. Tech keeps advancing and our own insatiable demand for ever more convenience does not seem to have a limit either.

There are ecological costs, labor costs, costs to small businesses and to the texture of neighborhood life. I do not dismiss these, and that is not even the full picture. But that is not what kept me awake that night. The harder question is what we are actually doing with the time and effort we have supposedly gained. And underneath that, the harder question still: are we any happier for it, are we any calmer, emotionally or mentally better?

Ask grandma whether she would prefer to wash clothes by hand again. Ask me whether I would prefer driving to ten stores in search of a sleeping mask, or opening a physical map to find my way. Of course not. This is not a lament for the friction we eliminated. The friction was real and removing it was real progress. The problem is different: we have optimized the input without preparing ourselves for the output. We have gained enormous amounts of time and reduced effort, and we seem genuinely lost about what to do with what we gained.

All this “saved time” is actually weaponized against our peace of mind. The irony of saving ten minutes on an app just to spend those ten minutes screen scrolling, waiting for the next hit of convenience. We feel more stimulated than ever, but also less satisfied. More fragmented, more agitated, and certainly lonelier.

Against that drift, I have been trying to do this differently, not because I have figured anything out, but because I had to actively engineer the conditions for the freed time to be well used. I have taken ceramics and woodworking classes. I am using AI to build small apps, I am documenting my reflections, curating this site you are reading. I’ve been spending more time in nature. I meal-prep on weekends so the weekday meals are healthy. I go to the gym consistently. I try to be more present to the people who matter to me. I keep a list of things I have always wanted to do, and I work through it deliberately. I try to honor the time that was given back to me through all those conveniences.

And I have limited the channels through which the time can leak away. I have no Instagram, no Facebook, no TikTok. YouTube shorts are capped at fifteen minutes a day, a limit available in the app’s own settings that almost no one turns on. None of these are achievements. They are guardrails. I built them because I know that without them I would also default to scrolling.

The discipline to use convenience well is harder to obtain than the convenience itself. This is the part I have come to believe is the real observation underneath everything else.

Convenience is a test of self-knowledge that most of us are failing. The frictionless life requires more inner work, not less. The hours we save from hand-washing and store-searching go somewhere. For me, doing the work to know what I actually want from my life saves me from those hours being quietly absorbed by whatever is most stimulating and least satisfying within reach. That is not a moral failure. It is a structural consequence of gaining freedom I was not prepared to use.

The gift of convenience is harder to use than the friction it replaced. I am still learning what to do with mine.