Convenience Is Lonely
· The Atlantic
When showing up for others feels hard, some strugglers have lately steeled themselves with a version of this maxim: “Inconvenience is the cost of community.” It’s a reminder, oft-repeated on social media these days, that if you don’t want to be lonely—if you want to have robust relationships—you should occasionally do things that are effortful or even irritating, like cat sitting for a neighbor (or even just conversing with one!). You must give up on always pursuing maximum ease.
The inverse of this adage is also true: Community is, all too often, the cost of convenience.
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In the journalist Gabe Bullard’s new book, Against Convenience, he argues that society’s relentless pursuit of faster and more frictionless experiences carries invisible costs, and he pushes back against how unthinkingly people often accept those costs as inevitable. Some of those costs are paid in dollars, as with monthly subscription fees to Netflix rather than the onetime cost of buying a DVD. Some are paid in lowered standards: more easily accessible entertainment that’s of poorer quality (YouTube shorts, anyone?), “smart” products that become obsolete faster than their analog forebears. But in reading the book, I noticed just how many of those costs are social.
Take the portability of music, which started, long before smartphones or iPods, with the introduction of the Sony Walkman, in 1979—and the headphones that came with it (which have themselves become even more portable in the decades since). It is undeniably delightful to soundtrack your walks and bus rides with your favorite tunes, but, as Bullard writes, “isolation from others was a side effect (or a benefit, depending on your mood).” The convenience of the Walkman paved the way for a lifestyle in which Bullard can’t even hear his neighbors if they say hi, because the sound is now “among the noises canceled by my noise-canceling headphones.”
Once you open your eyes to the tradeoff between convenience and community, you start seeing it everywhere. It’s more convenient to ride a Peloton bike at home alone than to go to a spin class full of other sweaty bodies (whom you might end up chatting with). Zoom meetings make working with distant colleagues much easier, but aren’t very socially nourishing. The gig economy is rife with this bargain. Ubers and Lyfts replace rides given by friends and trips taken on public transit. Delivery replaces meals out at local restaurants and time spent in stores of all kinds.
[Read: The one line Americans (weirdly) choose to wait in]
Sometimes, the reason an innovation is even considered convenient at all is because it allows you to do something in isolation. Such is the case with self-checkout. American shoppers love it—self-checkout lines frequently thread through a store even when staffed checkouts have little to no wait. But as Bullard points out, self-checkout is more work for customers, who have to do the cashier’s job themselves. And the machines are often less efficient than human cashiers, freaking out and freezing up because you jostled an item in the bagging area. “The only effort saved,” Bullard writes, “is whatever would have gone into engaging in basic niceties with a cashier.” Similarly, recognizing an opportunity in consumers’ desire to escape the alleged inconvenience of small talk, in 2019 Uber introduced a setting to request a “quiet ride”—for an extra fee, of course.
Bullard is not the first to notice the isolating effect of many innovations, nor is it just modern conveniences that take us away from other people. Against Convenience references a famous Kurt Vonnegut anecdote in which the author ignores his wife’s advice to keep a box of envelopes at home and goes out shopping every time he needs a single one. On the way, he meets people, he enjoys the scenery of the neighborhood, and he has “one hell of a good time.” “We are dancing animals,” Vonnegut wrote. “How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something.” But sacrifices are inevitable when we pursue convenience. Many of these exchanges are clearly worth it—I keep a box of envelopes at home—but Bullard convincingly argues that the costs of convenience, social and otherwise, have crossed a worrisome threshold in the 21st century.
But what does it matter if you don’t want to talk with a cashier? If you’d rather stream a movie than sit in a room full of other people? You’re only avoiding strangers, after all.
For one thing, talking with strangers brings a lot of benefits. Research has found that it’s mood boosting, and often more informative than people expect. One study, called “Mistakenly Seeking Solitude,” found that people regularly and incorrectly assume that being alone will make them feel better than interacting with another person.
Avoiding these kinds of interactions is a detriment not only to yourself but also to the society you’re part of. It is often the so-called weak ties in someone’s network—the neighbor down the block you know only casually, the barista you order a latte from once a week—who are the most important in creating a rich sense of community. Because your networks overlap only a little, your weak ties can be a bridge to new connections, or they may know about job openings and social events that you and your close ties wouldn’t have come across on your own. Without weak ties, we wouldn’t have communities, just insular cliques.
In some cases, choosing a seemingly innocent convenience for yourself can create inconvenience for others. Bullard gives the example of the Starbucks app—a “smooth and inviting” interface that lets you order your drink ahead of time, with whatever customizations you want, and simply walk into a store, pick it up, and leave. Undeniably convenient. But as a result, baristas’ jobs have gotten harder, due to the popularity of hypercustomized drinks that have gone viral on social media, facilitated by the ease of using the app.
People would probably be less likely to order a sugar cookie iced matcha (Grande Iced Matcha Latte with oat milk, minus classic syrup, plus two pumps of sugar-cookie syrup, one pump of white mocha, vanilla-cream cold foam, and red and green sprinkles) if they had to say all of that to a person’s face and then actually watch them make it. And the proliferation of app orders means that the experience of walking into a Starbucks, and ordering and drinking your coffee there, is way more chaotic than it once was. The store is no longer a relaxing space in which to socialize, but rather “a place for fast, solitary transactions,” Bullard writes. A similar thing has happened at the many restaurants that have filled up with drivers waiting for delivery orders, crowding the diners who are there to share a meal in person. Individual conveniences add up to a deterioration of the public sphere.
And it isn’t just strangers whom people avoid. The preference for convenience over connection bleeds into our more intimate relationships too. Frictionless food deliveries and infinite online entertainment make it tempting to stay home alone rather than socialize—and many Americans are indeed becoming homebodies. People prefer to text, even though research shows that phone calls and in-person conversations make people feel more connected to one another. A main selling point of the AI companions that threaten to replace real ones is that they’re convenient. They’re always available, and always happy to talk about whatever you want, as long as you want, while real people have packed schedules and a desire for reciprocity. This is the environment in which “inconvenience is the cost of community” becomes a necessary reminder.
Fittingly, if frustratingly, Against Convenience offers no convenient takeaway. That would be too easy! Bullard gestures at more collective, political solutions to some of the costs of convenience—unionization could create better conditions for workers caught up in the gig economy, legislation can address overuse of environment-destroying plastics (another of Bullard’s many examples of modern convenience). But ultimately, he writes, “every option has inescapable costs and change will take years.” Mostly, he recommends that individuals opt out of isolating temptations when they can for the sake of improving their quality of life. But he laments the limits of these personal decisions. “These individual actions bring individual comforts,” he writes.
I think he’s being a little too pessimistic. Sure, one person canceling Amazon Prime may not register with Jeff Bezos. But when it comes to the social costs of convenience, individual actions can easily bring collective comforts. Taking out your headphones to say hello to a neighbor, scheduling dinner with friends instead of ordering delivery again—these choices pay immediate dividends in the form of connection, while also being a deposit in the shared, slower-yield investment account of building lasting community.
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