
The Myth of Convenience - bradstreet
https://thefrailestthing.com/2019/05/06/the-myth-of-convenience/
======
ssivark
Barry Schwartz, in his provocative essay "Self determination: The tyranny of
freedom" [1] argues that it is constrains that give meaning to our actions by
shaping our choices. Without constraints, on what basis would one choose?

This puts convenience directly at odds with meaningfulness. Ironically, this
pursuit of convenience is what gives meaning to a lot of people, especially in
Silicon Valley. :-)

As an elderly Uber driver once commented to me... "What do we gain by
connecting a smart watch to an internet-enabled coffee maker so I can avoid
getting up to press a switch in the morning? Stay in bed and scroll Twitter?"

~~~
pdonis
_> "What do we gain by connecting a smart watch to an internet-enabled coffee
maker so I can avoid getting up to press a switch in the morning? Stay in bed
and scroll Twitter?" _

Or read a book. Or play with your kids. Or your pets. Or talk to your
spouse/significant other/friends. Or write code. Or post on your blog. Or...

The value of "time-saving" is that it lets you _choose_ what you will spend
the saved time on, instead of being forced to spend it on routine tasks that
might not give you any real satisfaction even though they need to be done. But
you do have to choose. Being able to do that is of value to many people. But
perhaps it isn't of value to everyone; and to someone for whom that
opportunity to choose is not of value, perhaps they would indeed be better off
making their coffee and doing other necessary life chores by hand.

~~~
ralphstodomingo
> Or read a book. Or play with your kids. Or your pets. Or talk to your
> spouse/significant other/friends. Or write code. Or post on your blog. > you
> do have to choose.

Yes, convenience frees you up to pursue something else, but I've felt that it
takes so much willpower to pick an activity you know to be of value to you
(like exercise, or reading a book) over something immediately gratifying.
Another thing I've been thinking about, related to this is that our value
systems and/or attention span have been weakened severely by the torrent of
information and immediate connectivity these days have.

I remember this quote attributed to G. Michael Hopf: "Hard times create strong
men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men
create hard times." What if this pursuit of convenience is making us weaker,
and in the long run, blind to what should be pursued with the time we free up?

~~~
Kalium
> Yes, convenience frees you up to pursue something else, but I've felt that
> it takes so much willpower to pick an activity you know to be of value to
> you (like exercise, or reading a book) over something immediately
> gratifying.

Whereas before you didn't have to choose and never got an opportunity to use
your willpower to pick an activity of value. What's to say that people weren't
made weak and compliant by a lack of opportunity to make their own choices?

> What if this pursuit of convenience is making us weaker, and in the long
> run, blind to what should be pursued with the time we free up?

What if it isn't? What if this is little more than another moral panic, such
as a decade ago how sexting was going to ruin everyone forever and was a
threat to all children?

It seems to me that there are few answers here, but an awful lot of moralizing
about shockingly little. Re-frame much of it as the quest for self-mastery,
and now generations of philosophers approve.

~~~
ralphstodomingo
_> Whereas before you didn't have to choose and never got an opportunity to
use your willpower to pick an activity of value. What's to say that people
weren't made weak and compliant by a lack of opportunity to make their own
choices?_

Is the lack of choices and opportunity absolutely less preferable than wasting
collective human time and energy in the deceptive pursuit of convenience?
Also, aren't we converging to a future where we are in less control of
important things, like privacy, human rights and environmental health, because
we have traded them away to entities who were willing to take these from us in
the pretext of convenience?

 _What if it isn 't? What if this is little more than another moral panic?_
Aren't we better off treating matters like these with care rather than abandon
regardless? I think it's weak to dismiss this as a moral panic simply because
an unrelated concept came and proved to be one.

Back then, you knew the bad people simply wanted to take your freedom and use
it to empower their choices. Now, they feed off our compliance and mindless
consumption with a smile on their face and we seek them out actively. I or you
may benefit individually, but atrophy is a real thing, tedium and hardship
serves its own purpose. Would you make the case that we do not weaken mankind
as a whole, or in the long run?

~~~
Kalium
I'm saying the premises as presented don't hold water, and therefore the
arguments rooted in them do not function as intended.

For instance, we are in a context where we are less in control of important
things, like privacy, human rights, and environmental health than we would
like. We are not in a context where we previously had full individual control
of these things. We in aggregate, human socities, have always traded these
away for one reason or another. What clear rubric makes one reason better or
worse?

Whether this is a moral panic is an interesting question. It gets to the core
of the issue. Specifically, is there any good evidence to believe that
convenience is making humanity weaker? Perhaps it is true. Perhaps it is the
opposite of true. Perhaps the truth is a mixed bag. Perhaps it's unmeasurable,
making the whole subject one purely of personal opinion. Do we even have a
clear definition of "strong" or "weak"?

I'm making the case that you have a wonderful opportunity to convincingly make
yours ahead of you yet.

~~~
klibertp
> Specifically, is there any good evidence to believe that convenience is
> making humanity weaker? [...] Do we even have a clear definition of "strong"
> or "weak"?

This, exactly. Unless we're talking about how much weight a person can lift,
there's no objective definition of "strong" or "weak" person. "Strength" in
this context isn't a property of a person at all, in my opinion, but of how
other people perceive that person behavior - and that perception is so
dependent on observers' life experiences, culture, religion, education and
many other factors that it's practically meaningless. As such, the very notion
of "strong person" is exploited in all kind of propaganda - with a concept
this fuzzy it's easy to bend it to mean whatever you want it to mean.

"Convenience is making us weak" or "hardships make people strong" are examples
of such propaganda in action. There's no meaning to them other than what the
person talking wants them to mean (and, possibly, what the audience wants to
hear). You could reformulate the statements to be easier to prove or falsify,
but then the entirety of modern psychology and cognitive science would be
against you, which is why nobody attempts to do this.

Well, that's how thought-terminating cliches generally are, so no surprise
here. What's amazing to me, though, is that we're this deep into the thread
and we still talk about them...

------
Illniyar
This seems interesting but is extremely long and protracted. I would like the
_convenience_ of having a summary.

~~~
pure-awesome
Agreed. I think it's not the length, directly, but the lack of substance.

The author starts with the unqualified assertion that convenience is bad. I'd
expect they'd continue by providing evidence or an argument to support this
statement.

Instead they throw in a lot of philosophical passages and quotes and it feels
like they're talking around the concept instead of addressing it directly.

I get the impression it is aimed at people who already agree with the core
thesis.

------
_bxg1
> “The ‘end’ or ‘goal’ is to keep going. Americans, as F. Scott Fitzgerald
> concluded, believe in the green light.” The green light, constant motion in
> whatever direction, acceleration—these are, of course, no ‘ends’ at all.
> They are what you have left when you have lost sight of any true ends. It is
> fruitless to save time if you don’t know why exactly your are saving it for.

~~~
firethief
"It is fruitless to save money if you don’t know why exactly your are saving
it for."

~~~
erichocean
Time, unlike money, can't be meaningfully saved and then used later. You have
to use it immediately.

~~~
bloak
"I ask you, what does a day saved matter to him or to you? A day saved from
what? for what? Instead of spending the day travelling, you will see your
friend a day earlier, but you cannot stay indefinitely, you will travel home
twenty-four hours sooner, that is all. But you will fly home and again save a
day? Save it from what, for what? You will begin work a day earlier, but you
cannot work on indefinitely. It only means that you will cease work a day
earlier. And then, what? You cannot die a day earlier. So you will realize
perhaps how rash it was of you to save a day, when you discover how you cannot
escape those twenty-four hours you have so carefully preserved; you may push
them forward and push them forward, but some time they must be spent, and then
you may wish you had spent them as innocently as in the train from Ostend."

------
DoctorOetker
A better title would be "The Propaganda of Convenience":

Consider the concept of tying in commerce:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_\(commerce\))

For example you can buy a specific cell phone (the tying good) on the
condition of also buying a contract with a certain telecom operator.

If freedom is a virtue, then considering just the 2 products of this specific
cell phone and this specific operator contract there should be 2 binary
degrees of freedom, resulting in 4 options:

1\. buy nothing

2\. buy cellphone but no contract

3\. buy contract, but no cell phone

4\. buying both.

Then the act of only offering the following choices:

1\. buy nothing

2\. buy both

would be nothing more than false dilemma foisted off as "convenience",
literally "coming together".

It's nothing but connotation games.

------
austincheney
Convenience is the mother of most bad decisions. Sometimes convenience is a
protective blanket masking gross incompetence. Many programmers perceive
programming as plugging lego blocks together because dicking around with
tooling and configurations because writing original software is a great
inconvenience, even when it takes dramatically less time.

~~~
yoz-y
Without focus on convenience a lot of people would be simply singled out from
using tools many take for granted.

To counteract your argument, a popular sentiment seems to be that many
JavaScript programmers spend too much time writing original software rather
than trying to understand and configure the existing ones... because it's too
inconvenient.

~~~
austincheney
> many JavaScript programmers spend too much time writing original software

As a full time JavaScript developer for the past 11 years I completely
disagree. JavaScript developers tend to be absolutely mortified to write any
amount of original code.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here)

It is so bad that I just keep my open source contributions to myself and was
even berated by a peer once for not using an specific code editor that
featured use of my software.

