Ease of Abuse

I cat remember the last time I write an article on my phone was, but I am attempting to do it now. I dislike writing at any length on my phone for a couple reasons.

Firstly, my fingers don't work as well anymore, and combined with my head not working well either, it makes for a huge amount of typing errors.

Secondly, writing on a phone makes me "lazy" in the sense that I will look for shortcuts rather than explaining myself as I would on a keyboard, or spoken. And part of this laziness affects the quality of sentence structure, formatting and my willingness to go back and rewrite poorly formed sentences.

Overall, writing on a phone sucks ass and is a hindrance to quality communication. It is convenient at times like now, where I have time to kill as I wait in a café while my daughter and wife watch a movie together, but convenience rarely provides the best.

Convenience is a tradeoff with quality, where for example, a microwave dinner is convenient, but doesn't provide the quality bit likely the level of nutrition of a home-cooked meal. It saves time, but over time, it is likely to have negative effects on outcomes.

Of course, using this example isn't completely suitable as is, as it also depends on other factors. For instance, it is possible to have convenient meals that are also healthy, but generally,they are going to come at a higher price. It would also be convenient to have an in-house chef prepare all the meals, but it is going to be expensive.

Convenience seems to be like the pick any two of the "cheap, fast, quality" selection. We can have cheap and fast, but it will be trash. We can have fast and quality, but it will be expensive. We can have cheap and quality, but it will be slow. That last one in terms of a meal, is likely home-cooked, with "slow" also meaning effort required, not just the speed.

There is always a cost to convenience, but with a lot of things, the cost is spread out over time, so we don't necessarily feel that immediacy of the price. Even though eating fast-food is convenient, the immediate cost is low, as it can taste good enough. A few hours later, we can feel a bit ill, but that passes quickly, and since it has some distance to the meal itself, it often isn't bad enough to stop us eating it again.

Eat it daily however, and in the longer term, we are likely to feel it in multiple ways, whether in our weight, our skin, our joints, our energy levels, and psychology. We can feel terrible due to our consistent behavior, but each individual meal isn't "so bad" and the convenience of it in the moment, is more attractive than the long-term effects down the track.

The short gains are worth more than the long costs.

Until the bills arrive.

_{Another reason writing on the phone sucks is that the flow is harder to keep, as it requires more scrolling to see what has come before.}

We don't often consider our behaviors, let alone reflect on the cost of our behavior. I think that this is because while we are doing what we are doing, it feels like the right thing to do. And when it doesn't, we can justify why it is the right thing to do under the current conditions, making it the right thing to do right now.

It has been a long day and I am too tired to cook. Let's get takeout.

But, the more we do this, the threshold of what constitutes a "long day" and what is "too tired" lowers, and the attraction of convenience increases. It is like stretching a muscle to become more flexible, except rather than being able to touch our toes, we are making it harder to touch our toes. The stretching is of our habits so that they are convenient, but not built for improvement or maintenance, only degradation.

I believe that we live in a world that has severely overvalued convenience, and facilitated it through social structures that have made us overvalue our feelings too. We are lazy by nature, which is why we can be so creative as we fill needs with ease if use. But, this also means that our economy becomes driven by ease of use, rather than result of use.

If we favor easy over best, we are going to constantly degrade out results. This will create more needs, which creates more demand for ease of use solutions, and more products that will make it even harder for us to be better, as each of them focuses on a narrow problem, that makes it more difficult through increasing complexity to handle the growing number of other issues.

See how the consumer economy works?

There is always a cost to convenience, and even if we find the perfect solution to one issue, we have limited time, money and resources to buy and do all the things required to deal with increasingly complex lives.

The most convenient thing to do is to simplify our lives so that we are able to manage it ourselves without having to rely on products of convenience. But if we do this, we are going to miss out, because there is far too much to consume, than we can fit into a lifetime.

We all suffer in some way from FOMO.

What are we willing to go without?

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]