If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

What’s so great about convenience?

Convenience (n): the state of being able to proceed with something with little effort or difficulty.

Doesn’t that sound fantastic? Effort and difficulty are, prima facie, annoying things that we all want to avoid, so the less of them, the better.

But then what? Nature abhors a vacuum, so less of something always means more of something else.

In a work context, you almost always free up that time to… fill it with more work.

AI/Slack/Zoom might make some of your tasks faster, easier and more convenient (or not, as the case may be), but that doesn’t mean you get a four-day week.

It means the time saved by those conveniences will then be used up by the kind of deck-generating busywork that we never used to think of as necessary.

No labour gets saved because it’s like a mountain with no top, or a leaky cup, into which you endlessly pour more water.

This is because we measure work in the amount of time it takes to do it, and that means you will always be required to produce 40+ hours of labour, no matter how much of that time is replaced by the wonders of AI.

So where’s the benefit to the worker? 

You might say that getting more done allows you to get ahead, but if everyone is in the same boat, no one is getting ahead of anyone else.

You might also say that you could produce things to a standard that was formerly impossible. But that’s a quality measurement, which means it’s subjective, and again, if everyone gets better, no one does.

The other loss hidden beneath the word ‘convenience’, is bound up in the Aerosmith lyric, ‘Life’s a journey, not a destination’.

When I write a column, I usually find that the process of thinking and tapping the keyboard sends me off somewhere I wasn’t quite expecting. The effort itself becomes a necessary part of process. If I want the result, I have to do the work, and that can’t happen if I just type ‘Give me 1000 words of the downside of convenience’ into Chat GPT.

The points you are reading actually developed during a half-hour conversation with my wife, and are now being honed and explored further as I write. I then leave it for a couple of days before returning to reread it all again and make further changes.

That process is enjoyable because it provides little hits of dopamine as I come to new conclusions, which expand my outlook and exercise my brain.

But that always takes time, as does kerning type perfectly, planning a new kitchen, or reading a book; all processes which offer inconvenient pleasure.

And what would I do if I could get AI etc. to complete all my work in a split second? Aside from the above point that any boss would then give me more work, I’d probably get bored.

There’s a writing truism that Fiction is Friction: every good story requires torturing the main character with increasingly difficult situations. 

Smooth sailing is dull to watch, but it’s also dull to experience. Human beings need inconvenience to pass the time. Whether it’s betting on a horse, moving house or writing ten social media headlines for 20% off a car, we need to add difficulty to our lives. It’s how we make progress, but it’s also how we stop getting bored. 

Many of us go on holidays during which we could just sit around reading, or scrolling through TikTok, but there’s only so much of that you can take before you wonder if there might be an interesting castle nearby, or decide to do a bit of scuba diving.

It’s also worth remembering that ‘convenience’ things (convenience foods, convenience stores, marriages of convenience) are never about how good something is. They express a trade-off where you get what you want quickly and easily, but that extra speed and reduced effort means there will be a compromise in quality.

If I were a more cynical person, I might think that convenience is just another capitalist hoodwink (often glorified through advertising) that seems great, but has actually made modern life worse.

It really feels like someone really put the ‘con’ into convenience, and that is the kind of thought that only appears after I do a bit of delightfully inconvenient work.