For most of us, time is precious. Most of us can agree that we don’t have enough time in a day. A vast majority of our waking hours are spent at school, at work, doing chores, or running errands. In order to maximize our time, we are presented with a myriad of options to make our life more convenient. But in compelling us into a myopic pursuit to save time and effort—when perhaps neither time nor effort are in need of saving—we neglect asking what it is that ultimately gives us meaning and purpose. Consider how our obsession with convenience, efficiency, and optimization has shifted our perspective in the following:
Social Interactions
There is no denying the fact that the advent of mail systems, the telegraph, the telephone, the internet, and the smartphone has profoundly impacted our means of communication, especially with those across long distances. But we must remain conscious of its potential to dehumanize our interactions, as they deprive them of essential qualities that are just as, if not more important than the content itself of our conversations. While these qualities—our tone of voice, our accent or dialect, the timing and pace of our speech, the pausing between and emphasis on certain words, body language, gestures, posture, facial expressions, proximity and personal space, physical touch, eye contact—have played a pivotal role within our social interactions for virtually the entirety of human history, we, for some reason, do not feel perturbed when these technological innovations have stripped us of them.
We thus have a variety of tools at our disposal, each, while gradually decreasing the time and effort invested into the interaction, simultaneously increases the level of dehumanizing abstraction: a face-to-face conversation can degrade into a Facetime or Zoom call, wherein our perceptions of body language begin to fall apart; we can then degrade into a phone call, wherein it completely falls apart; we can then degrade into direct messaging, wherein we can no longer even perceive the vital nuances within our spoken language; we can then degrade into an anonymous interaction—be it a Twitter exchange, the YouTube comments section, or a Twitch chat room—wherein we become so detached that we no longer know who we are even speaking to, denuding us of any semblance of humanity that had once remained. While each form of communication has its time and place, we cannot ignore the scale at which social media has proliferated—where the tail end of the spectrum of dehumanizing abstraction has gained prominence—and thus the degree to which it has wrought irreparable psychological damage on hundreds of millions of its users.
Education and Learning
From rudimentary methods such as flashcards or mnemonics, to the meticulously crafted study guides of Sparknotes and Cliffs Notes, to the more recent innovations like Anki, Quizlet, and other SRS (spaced repetition system) software, we have developed a plethora of tools to optimize studying and hone our memorization techniques. But far too many of us that utilize these tools begin with the premise that rote memorization is the primary pathway to knowledge. There are indeed some domains of knowledge such as law, medicine, music, or language that demand a significant degree of rote memorization, especially in the early phases wherein one develops foundational knowledge. However, beyond a certain point, forcing students en masse to memorize the absurd amounts of impractical information—the names of historical figures or the dates of historical events, hundreds of needlessly complex mathematical principles and formulas, all the names and atomic numbers of all the elements of the periodic table, the capitals of all the countries in Europe—is not a strategy conducive to cultivating inspiration, critical thinking, and problem solving skills within our next generation.
Not only do our education systems hopelessly fail in teaching us anything in a remotely meaningful or inspiring way, the sole reason these tools even exist in the first place is because the same education systems that coerced us to memorize this information to begin with are also incapable of providing us with any useful tools to aid us in achieving this senseless goal. There is no doubt that using these tools will save us time, but in our mindless quest to game the system—to spend as little time as possible for the maximum grade—do none of us actually care about what we’re learning, how we’re learning it, and why we’re learning it? Do none of us stop ourselves for just a moment to realize just how counterproductive this learning process is, how backwards our logic is within our pedagogy, and how this all inevitably contributes to the continual degradation of our intellectual consciousness as a society?
Romance
The past decade has seen the rise to prominence of dating apps such as Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, romance is far from being free of the trap of convenience. These apps operate under the presumption that romance constitutes entirely on if people match—the estimated degree of compatibility based on personal attributes—but I argue that how those matches occur can be just as important, if not more important, depending on the circumstances. The paradox of online dating is that in a relentless pursuit of convenience, we strive to reduce the time and effort invested, when time and effort are precisely the two conditions that are required for meaningful and lasting relationships.
Gastronomy
If our only concern is the reduction of time and effort, there is absolutely no reason to cook in this day and age for those that can afford not to. The proliferation of fast food, restaurant delivery services, and meal kits trivialize our need for sustenance. Why spend all that effort and all those hours meticulously crafting a unique homemade meal when we can feed ourselves within minutes by ordering in, and use the rest of that time on leisure? But this inevitably falls into the same trap of convenience as romance; we cannot operate under the presumption that our enjoyment of food is solely based on the quality of the food itself or the degree of sustenance it provides, but just as important is the story of the food—who made it, how they made it, why they made it, and who is eating with us. For the entirety of human history, food has been an integral part of our sense of commensality; it is not merely as a means of sustenance, but as an indispensable medium by which we can share our culture, forging meaningful relationships with other human beings. The food that we make—for ourselves and one another alike—is an indelible expression of our identity and our values. We need food to satisfy our hunger just as much as we need it to satisfy our desire for meaning, purpose, and belonging.
The Car
But perhaps there is no greater symbol of convenience than the automobile. Yes—we’ve optimized it so we can spend a fraction of the time we did previously running errands, shopping for groceries, and commuting to work or school; it added flexibility to our schedules, to do what we want when we want, but ultimately, we must ask ourselves—were we inherently unhappy living our unoptimized lives before merely because we were “wasting time”? Are we truly more happy sitting miserably in traffic attempting to drive to the nearest Walmart versus a leisurely stroll to our local grocer? Did we balk and groan more when we had to ride a bike or take the train to get to where we needed, or is it that the greater stress comes when we’re endlessly scouring streets for a mere parking spot, when our car suddenly breaks down. when we’re helplessly stranded in a sea of traffic, or when we get into an accident? And even if it does make us ever slightly more happy, do we have the gall to honestly justify this shameless and profligate waste of energy and resources? When we perpetuate car-dependent societies and encourage abhorrent city design with countless roads and parking lots that require endless maintenance, incur massive debt, and degrade the beauty of the places we live in? When we put a significant risk to the environment and the lives of other human beings, including our own? It seems as if the car extends convenience only to those that are privileged to own one, inconvenience to those without, and misery to both.
We often forget that we are human. We often overlook the fact that nothing about our psychology as human beings inherently demand efficiency and convenience as we have arbitrarily defined it. If anything, our innate predisposition leans far more heavily on the narratives that give us meaning and purpose, not merely what something is on an arbitrarily defined objective scale, but how those things make us feel and the types of stories we build around these elements of our lives. We must remain mindfully vigilant when seeking to optimize anything; it is not to eliminate, but to preserve the inefficiencies that exist to tell us stories, enriching our culture and our perception of happiness. It is an inherently dehumanizing act to calculate our actions through an industrialist conception of the world, wherein the sole purpose of any activity is to maximize productivity and minimize time and effort spent. But time is not our enemy, and certainly neither is effort. Our greatest enemies are but the toxic narratives that embed within us a deep sense of discontentment, dissatisfaction, and unhappiness—these oppressive and cruel preconceptions of “wasting time,” of “missing out,” of “not enough.” We can choose to extricate these industrialist presuppositions from our beliefs about the purpose of optimization, and in doing so we can optimize our lives through a humanist perspective; instead of centralizing our focus around how to maximize not how much can be done, but rather—to maximize the sense of fulfillment and joy we derive from all that we do in this fleeting life—we should ask ourselves what we should do in the first place.