A good life is inconvenient.
When we look to the market to solve all our needs, it leaves us feeling empty. Professor Tim Wu made this point in a widely read essay titled “The Tyranny of Convenience,” where he argues that convenience, “with its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency…threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life.”16
Paul Millerd • The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life
Professor Tim Wu made this point in a widely read essay titled “The Tyranny of Convenience,” where he argues that convenience, “with its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency…threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life.”
Paul Millerd • The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life
If you think seriously about the good life and pursue it, you will probably fail in ways large and small. But an imperfect struggle to live well and love a world badly in need of repair is better than staying still because things are terrible, because you might look like a loser in the meritocratic game, because it’s easier.
Gawker • Failure to Cope "Under Capitalism"
Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.
Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Speed and efficiency are the promise of modernity. But speed and efficiency are all destination and no journey. And it is journey that gives life meaning.
Sari Azout • Things I'm thinking about
As convenience colonises everyday life, activities gradually sort themselves into two types: the kind that are now far more convenient, but that feel empty or out of sync with our true preferences; and the kind that now seem intensely annoying, because of how inconvenient they remain.