The Siren Call of Convenience


We Americans are proudly and hugely into our conveniences. We buy pre-washed lettuce and pre-cut chicken pieces because it's more convenient than washing our own vegetables or slicing up our own birds. We use our remotes because it's more convenient than getting up to change the channel. We navigate the drive-thru at Starbucks because it's more convenient than actually walking into a coffee shop. And we email the person in the cubicle next to us because who has the time for a conversation these days?

Entire technologies are built around the idea of convenience. Since our GIs returned from the rather massive inconvenience of fighting World War Two, we've been obsessed in sparing ourselves extra toil wherever possible. Remember TV dinners? In minutes, you could enjoy nicely diced chicken parts with presorted peas and carrots and a little peach cobbler on the side. Usually at least one of those things was still crunchy with ice on the inside, but who could complain? It seemed a small price to pay.

So why do we demand this unending cascade of convenience? The cynics might argue we're inherently lazy, propping ourselves up in our Barcaloungers like a generation of Jabba the Huts, waiting for life to be spoon fed to us (preferably pre-chewed). The more thoughtful might frame it differently. Convenience begets time saving.

Time, as famed psychologist Daniel Kahneman points out, is one of our most precious commodities. We can't renew it or restore it; we can only watch as it continually leaks away with the slow and steady drip of a desert canteen.

But do the cynics have a point? Even though I've stolen a few seconds by not traversing the living room floor to change the channel, or not getting out of the car to buy my coffee, what I am doing with my newfound bounty?

I—drum roll—am surfing the web. I've managed to scrimp and save my minutes only to blow my hard-won currency on a little Facebook, a little YouTube, chasing some bit of trivia or checking the latest poll data on "The Donald" and pondering the big questions. If, as The Donald has posited, 'Heidi Klum is no longer a ten,' then what number is she? (And what number does he think he is?)

Without vigilance and careful stewardship of my time (no small task given the strum and drang of daily life), I wouldn't be able to keep track of the important things. Where would we be without convenience?

Check out Robb’s new book and more 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a
Read more

The Best Painkiller Isn't What You Think It Is

Image
When we say that listening to the right song makes us feel better, usually we mean it in terms of emotions. However, a new study from the University of Utah Health suggests that combining certain painkillers with certain music boosts the pain-fighting effect of the medication a measurable amount. This recent bit of research was conducted specifically on models recreating two types of pain: inflammatory and post-surgical. (Nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, was not addressed.) Low doses of four medications were explored: ibuprofen, cannabidiol, levetiracetam, and NAX 5055. As for music, the researchers went with one artist only, while the control groups were given one of the four drugs and subjected to white noise. What music would you choose for optimal painkilling effect? The experimenters went with Mozart. (Interestingly, the phrase “Mozart therapy” already exists, referring to the beneficial effect ol’ Amadeus can have on patients with epilepsy. For instance, a 2018 st
Read more