The Cost of Convenience
Healings with Linda
Convenience does not free you, it conditions you to expect everything.
In modern society, the widespread influence of convenience is underestimated.
While convenience lacks the allure of subconscious desires and economic common sense, convenience wields unparalleled power in shaping individual lives and economies.
Convenience as a Supreme Value
Particularly in America, convenience appears as a supreme value, driving decisions and overshadowing personal preferences. It not only steers individual choices but also shapes the larger economy, especially technology. While convenience enhances life’s ease, it conflicts with cherished ideals. It promises to ease struggles that interfere with life’s meaning but ultimately makes us slaves to pursue even more conveniences.
The Emergence of Convenience
The concept of convenience emerged in the late 19th and 20th centuries, introducing labor-saving devices and heralding an era of liberation from drudgery. It promised to grant leisure and freedom for self-cultivation, once only the domain of the elite, to the general populace. However, the downside was becoming conditioned to expect that these conveniences would always be there. Initially perceived as a utopian ideal, convenience evolved alongside technological advancements.
The Waves of Convenience
The first wave of convenience focused on easing physical labor, while the second wave epitomized individuality and self-expression. This shift towards personalization shaped technologies like playlists, social media, and one-click solutions, minimizing mental effort in decision-making. The willingness to pay for convenience led to a societal expectation of everything being easy. Paradoxically, individualization technologies like Facebook homogenized expressions of individuality, depriving us of the challenges essential to the human experience.
Convenience vs. Meaningful Pursuits
A life devoid of obstacles and risks strips away experiences of depth and meaning. Allowing expectations to dominate our lives compromises our freedoms, as we trade one for the other. When life becomes too easy, the tyranny of small, effortless tasks consumes our time, replacing meaningful pursuits with redundancy. Embracing inconvenience consciously becomes crucial. It’s in the pursuit of hobbies, self-expression, and challenges where true individuality resides, fostering character and teaching valuable lessons about the world and ourselves.
Resisting the Stupefying Power of Convenience
The call to resist the stupefying power of convenience is a reminder to find joy in slow, difficult tasks. The willingness to choose inconvenience is a shield against total conformity, preserving the essence of true individuality and the richness of human experiences, returning us to freedom from the constraints that convenience imposes. We must retool ourselves for the inconveniences that are building in the world and reclaim our personal power.
Consequences of Convenience
The world that we live in now will restrict many conveniences, mainly due to the cost of having them. It will be essential to start preparing for these inconveniences by thinking for ourselves and taking back our personal power. By doing so, we can reclaim our freedom from standardizations that limit our choices in exchange for convenience. Breaking free from the consequences associated with conveniences will give our lives an entirely new meaning.
The cost of convenience is not just monetary but also intangible. Convenience conditions us to expect everything easily, compromising our freedoms and robbing our lives of spontaneity and excitement. Embracing inconvenience consciously and finding joy in slow, difficult tasks restores the essence of true individuality and preserves the richness of human experiences. Let us resist the allure of convenience and reclaim our freedom to live a life of depth, meaning, and personal power. ~ Linda Deir