Last Tuesday, I spent twenty minutes trying to remember my wife’s phone number. I was at the grocery store, my phone was dead, and I needed to find out what I forgot (which I remembered later was the single thing I went to the store for in the first place #ADHD). I stood there in the cereal aisle, staring at the Cheerios, my mind a complete blank. I know my own number from childhood. I know my daughter’s by heart. But the number of the person I talk to more than anyone else on the planet? Gone. Vanished, outsourced to the contacts list in a device that had, at that moment, become a very sleek paperweight.
I finally gave up and bought everything I didnt go to the store for, only to remember on the way to the car. Driving home, the irony hit me. I have access to more information, more computational power, more sheer convenience in my pocket than the scientists who put a man on the moon. Yet, that convenience had quietly atrophied a basic, human skill: remembering a loved one’s number. It got me thinking—what else are we trading away? When does the relentless pursuit of an easier life start to sand down the very edges that make us human?
This isn’t a rant against progress. I love my smart lights. I’m grateful for grocery delivery when I’m sick. But I think we’ve stopped asking the price tag. We’re so focused on the transaction—click here for faster service—that we’re missing the subtler, cumulative bill that’s coming due. It’s a bill paid not in dollars, but in patience, in presence, in small competencies, and in quiet moments of un-optimized human connection.
The Frictionless Life: A Dream That Sandpapers the Soul
Convenience promises a frictionless existence. No waiting, no struggling, no uncertainty. One-click buying. Algorithmic playlists that know what we want before we do. GPS that navigates not just around traffic, but around left turns it deems “too difficult.”
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: friction is where growth happens. It’s in the struggle to read a map that we develop spatial awareness and problem-solving. It’s in the awkward silence of not knowing what song to play next that we might actually talk to the person in the car with us. It’s in the mild frustration of fixing a wobbly table leg ourselves that we feel the surge of agency and capability.
I think of my daughter learning to draw. She started on a tablet, with an app that had “undo” and “perfect circle” tools. Her lines were clean, her colors perfect. But she grew frustrated. “It feels soulless,” she said. She switched to paper and charcoal—messy, smudgy, permanent. No undo button. That’s when her art came alive. The friction of the medium, the irreversibility of each mark, forced a deeper engagement. It required intention. The convenience of the digital tool had, paradoxically, made the act of creation shallower.
The Outsourcing of Memory (And Meaning)
My phone-number amnesia is a tiny symptom of a massive shift: the outsourcing of our cognitive load. We don’t remember facts, we remember how to Google them. We don’t navigate cities, we follow a blue line. We don’t memorize recipes, we pull them up on a screen.
There’s a efficiency argument here, and it’s valid. Why clutter your brain with trivia when you can access the sum of human knowledge? But memory isn’t just a hard drive for facts. Memory is the raw material of identity. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are are built from memories—not just of events, but of skills mastered, problems solved, and numbers lovingly committed to heart.
When we outsource memory, we risk outsourcing pieces of our own narrative. The mental map of your childhood neighborhood, the feel of your grandmother’s recipe card in your hand, the pride in knowing how to get somewhere “the back way”—these aren’t just data points. They’re threads in the tapestry of a self. A GPS can’t tell you about the ice cream shop that used to be on that corner, or the tree you climbed in that park. Convenience gives us the destination, but often strips out the journey—and the journey is where we live.
The Erosion of Patience and the Cult of Now
Convenience is fundamentally impatient. Its entire value proposition is the elimination of wait time. Two-day shipping becomes one-day, becomes two-hour. A buffering video is an outrage. A slow website is abandoned.
We’ve trained our brains to expect immediacy, and in doing so, we’ve crippled our capacity for patience. Patience isn’t just a virtue; it’s a foundational human skill for dealing with an unpredictable world, for building relationships, for creating anything of lasting value. Nothing profound is built in two hours. Love, trust, mastery, wisdom—these are slow-cooked.
I learned this the hard way, in a place where all convenience was stripped away: jail. Time there isn’t optimized. It’s endured. At first, the lack of stimulation, the endless, unfilled hours, was a form of torture. But slowly, something shifted. Without the constant drip-feed of digital convenience and distraction, my mind, forced to be patient, began to do its deepest work. It processed. It healed. It created. I wrote entire books in my head. I rebuilt my philosophy of life. I found a stillness I never knew I had. It was the most inconvenient period of my life, and it was the most transformative.
The “convenience” of our normal lives, with its endless distractions, can be a prison of a different kind—one that prevents us from ever sitting quietly with our own thoughts long enough to hear what they’re really saying.
The Disappearing Act of “Useless” Rituals
Convenience often targets rituals. Grinding coffee beans becomes a noisy chore eliminated by a pod. Handwriting a letter is an absurd inefficiency next to email. Wandering a bookstore is a waste of time when Amazon can deliver the book tomorrow.
But what are rituals? They’re deliberate inefficiencies. They’re time and attention made tangible. The smell of the beans, the sound of the grinder, the slow pour of the water—this ritual prepares the mind as much as it prepares the drink. It’s a transition from sleep to wakefulness, a moment of presence. The pod gives you caffeine. The ritual gives you a morning.
I write first drafts longhand, in cheap notebooks. It’s inconvenient. It’s slow. My hand cramps. But the physical connection between thought, hand, and page creates a different quality of thinking than typing ever does. It’s less fluent, more deliberate. The friction forces me to weigh each word. The “convenient” method (typing) would be faster, but it would produce a different, likely shallower, result.
When we optimize all our rituals for speed, we remove the pauses, the textures, the sensory anchors that root us in our days and in our humanity. We create a life that is faster, but thinner.
Connection vs. Contact: The Social Transaction
This is perhaps the most painful trade-off. Social convenience promises connection without the hassle. A like instead of a visit. A text instead of a call. A comment emoji instead of a conversation.
We are more “connected” than any generation in history, yet the surgeon general has declared an epidemic of loneliness. Why? Because contact is not connection. Connection requires vulnerability, time, shared context, and the willingness to be inconvenienced—to listen when you’re tired, to show up when it’s not easy, to sit through an awkward silence.
I think of my wife’s family. Her brothers, in their 30s, still live at home. From the outside, some might see a lack of progress. But what I see is a family that never outsourced the inconvenience of caring for one another. Their lives are deeply, messily, inconveniently intertwined. And because of that, their bond is unbreakable. It’s real. It’s not a series of optimized social transactions.
The convenient alternative—the isolated nuclear family, the friendship maintained solely through curated social media updates—is cleaner. It’s less messy. But it can leave us feeling profoundly alone in a crowd of digital contacts.
So, Where’s the Line? Some Honest Takeaways
I’m not suggesting we throw our smartphones into the sea and churn our own butter. That’s not the answer. The answer, like most things worth knowing, is in the balance. It’s in conscious choice.
After my grocery store meltdown, I didn’t swear off technology. I did two things:
- I made a point to memorize my wife’s number again. It took a couple of days of effort.
- I started asking myself a simple question before opting for the most convenient path: “What am I trading away?”
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- Sometimes, trade efficiency for experience. I’ll use GPS in a new city, but I’ll try to find my way back to the hotel without it. I’ll order groceries online when we’re swamped, but I’ll take my daughter to the farmer’s market on Saturday, even though it takes three times as long. The market isn’t about efficiency; it’s about smells, samples, talking to the person who grew the food.
- Protect the “useless” rituals. I still grind my coffee. I still write longhand. I still sometimes call instead of text, even though it’s disruptive. These are my bulwarks against a completely frictionless life.
- Embrace meaningful inconvenience. Saying “yes” to helping a friend move. Cooking a big meal from scratch. Turning off the algorithm and digging through a record crate. These acts are hard. They’re “inefficient.” They are also the stuff of which memories and meaning are made.
- Remember that convenience is a tool, not a value. A washing machine is a miraculous convenience that frees us from a brutal chore. A robot that folds our socks for us might be a step into a world where we’ve forgotten how to care for our own basic needs. We have to discern the difference.
The goal isn’t to make life hard for its own sake. The goal is to ensure that in our quest for an easier life, we don’t accidentally engineer out the very things that make that life worth living: the struggle that leads to pride, the patience that leads to depth, the inefficient ritual that anchors us, and the messy, inconvenient, glorious reality of being with other people.
We are not just consumers optimizing for comfort. We are human beings, and our humanity is often forged in the inconvenient, un-optimized, beautifully friction-filled spaces between the clicks. Let’s not pave over all of them.