March 16, 2026
much of modern innovation is premised off the promise of convenience and acceleration thereof; in many industries, the locally-optimal, least-fragile designs exist and all that remains is mining out iotas of improvement to squeeze the profits out of the remainder. this in personal life as delivery and ai promise speedier access to goods with ease. whether these of are particularly high quality remains to be seen; regardless, many value this convenience first among their preferences.
why does this convenience come first? most favor the path of least resistance to conserve energy. though we now live in an era of relative abundance, our models of the world have not yet caught up. all that we have in dwindling supply is time.
these conveniences offer us more of our time back which we proceed to squander with apps and interjections in digital form. these moments build our lives.
that which matters most in my eyes is connection with others; while time is not explicitly required in transaction for this, it certainly does help. this abundance of time provided to us by the acceleration of convenience ought to orient us toward these ends but rarely seems to. not only does social media fill these scattered instances of freed time but also further threatens to utterly replace human connection with ai therapists and friends. these ersatz connections are not the real thing but fill the void. they will never really do so. life is a rich web of real connections which inform our reality. however, i do find difficulty in ascribing any greater meaning to authentic connection aside from “i personally like it,” which is frustrating. i’d like to be able to offer a stronger justification.
there are plenty of little frictions which get in the way of these connections: finding places to meet others, talking to them, maintaining these relationships, handling conflict, and so on. all of these make this slightly more difficult; we’ve reached a threshold at which minimum satisfaction may be achieved without these difficulties through a screen. there is no going back on this; rather, we must be able to tolerate a greater amount of discomfort, misunderstanding, and grace for a greater good. the same goes for cooking; restaurant food will likely taste better than most home cooks’, but we ought to tolerate a lower quality in the name of cost, health, etc. in other words, everyone must eat their vegetables again.
convenience is not the highest form of quality; some of my most exquisite experiences have been those which took great effort. the view from the top of a mountain can never match a digital facsimile, the experience of having worked toward something making its final realization all the more sweet. the process in itself is defeated in these expedited times. we ought to tolerate discomfort and spend our time rediscovering that which makes us ourselves.