Hi Everyone 👋🏽

If you're new here, welcome to Growth Imperatives, an ongoing curation of found ideas that deconstruct the current world and ask how to build a new one.

This week is about (one of) the elephant(s) in the room: Convenience. There's lots to love and, on the surface, little to hate—but maybe we've just been looking at the topic with uncritical eyes. Today, I want to put some weight on the other side of the balance.

This week

🏁 What's a destination without a journey?
🐌 Do we need to de-ease life?
⛓️ Who does my convenience affect?

🏁 What's a destination without a journey?

Hyperfocusing on convenience can make us assume ease is always the best option, but by taking the difficulty out of everything, we also remove the experience, reducing life to a series of transactions rather than stories, relationships, or memories.

Maybe we should think twice about the things we want to make efficient. It doesn’t make sense to hurriedly finish something that fulfills us; for these activities, it's better to choose the long path than the short one.

Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us. [...]

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides. [...]

Embracing inconvenience may sound odd, but we already do it without thinking of it as such. As if to mask the issue, we give other names to our inconvenient choices: We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions. These are the noninstrumental activities that help to define us. They reward us with character because they involve an encounter with meaningful resistance — with nature’s laws, with the limits of our own bodies — as in carving wood, melding raw ingredients, fixing a broken appliance, writing code, timing waves or facing the point when the runner’s legs and lungs begin to rebel against him.

Such activities take time, but they also give us time back. They expose us to the risk of frustration and failure, but they also can teach us something about the world and our place in it.

Read → The Tyranny of Convenience by Tim Wu

🐌 Do we need to de-ease life?

Although it's, at this point, cliché to mention we're all burnt out, this article does well to show that the burnout is coming from 'inside the house.' Well, inside our pockets at least.

The downside—whether intentional or not—of the 24-Hour On-Demand Ultra Convenient Lifestyle of the past 10-15 years has been an enclosure of the social commons. This enclosure acts like an antibiotic, wiping out both the bad and the good friction from relationships. This friction is seen by the tech and business community at large as a problem to solve rather than the normal functioning of human society.

So, to what extent can de-optimization be optimal for our mental health?

...as we all bumble along, burned out, isolated, and drowning in the demands of whatever life or career stage we’re at, we’re also expected to constantly consume and metabolize horrific world events in the background. This over-reliance on tech for every aspect of our lives “opens us up to new vectors of anxiety,” as this great post by Brett Scott put it, with “[our nervous systems] now plugged into a neurotic and hypersensitive globe-spanning information system that’s constantly pushing unnecessary things into your consciousness.”

So is it really any wonder that we might not be inclined to text our friend back about that plan four Thursdays from now, in between consuming images of genocide presented without any context or verifiable information, while trying to order dinner on our phone, and answer a Slack message after hours? [...]

I spent the first decade of my adulthood amassing a network of talented, connected friends all over the world, people who I could summon with a smartphone. Beyond that, I believed I needed to rely on no one but myself. So realizing all of this has been an identity-based shift for me, but it’s one I’m very grateful parenthood has given me. We’re in the process of figuring out how to re-orient our family’s life around this idea, and making those changes feels scary but good. As we do that, I’ve been comforted and energized by this idea — which I first heard in this interview with the novelist Zadie Smith — that caretaking is a kind of liberation.

It’s liberation from the idea that we can self-optimize ourselves to the point of not needing anyone else. That if we work hard enough to survive in a competitive economy, we’ll be able to buy, order, or summon anything we might need within 24 hours, and that is somehow progress. That instead of asking for help and support from the people and friends we know — they’re too burned out, don’t want to bother them, they live too far away — we should invest heavily in self care to inoculate ourselves from needing to ask anything of anyone.

These are all ideas that capitalism loves — more people living in their own atomized fiefdoms means selling more stuff and services and meal kits to keep up with the relentless pace of life — but are fundamentally antithetical to the ways that humans are designed to flourish.

Read → The friendship problem by Rosie Spinks

⛓️ Who does my convenience affect?

I thought this was a really interesting reflection on the effects of automation. Not the effects for the user, but the social effects: how does it change how we interact, what we believe, and ultimately what kind of work we do? In subtle ways, the convenience that comes with automation papers over its role as an aggravator of social division—a tool to dissipate social power.

Political scientist Robert D. Putnam, who has studied civic engagement since the 1960s, argues Americans are less engaged in politics than they used to be and are more isolated, spending less time with friends, family and neighbours.

Our social capital — which Putnam defines as the overarching belief about society that facilitates co-operation — diminishes when we lose opportunities to engage with people outside of our regular social networks.

This decline in social capital can be traced to changes in work and society more generally. Society, in other words, is becoming increasingly individualistic.

Public-facing automation may further diminish our social capital by decreasing our interactions with other people. As we pay for parking at parking machines, rent bowling shoes and lanes through an app, or order food from touchscreen kiosks, we interact less with the people who work these jobs.

Read → A rise in self-service technologies may cause a decline in our sense of community by Blake Lee-Whiting

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading.

To help these ideas spread, please consider sharing a link to this issue or the entire newsletter with your friends or on social media.