Fighting Inflation... Of Convenience

I think one of my biggest budget line items is paying more for extra convenience.

• Uber Eats? ✅

• Amazon Prime? ✅

• Pre-made anything? ✅

• Apple Ecosystem? ✅

And it would be bigger if I could justify it.

• Housekeeping

• In-Home Gym

• Smart Home Devices

• Meal Delivery or Private Chef

• Upgraded Travel Experiences

I’m the poster boy for this topic.

I started thinking about this idea 9 months ago during my conversation with Ed Latimore. We circled around the idea of what qualifies as a hard task today vs 20 years ago. Convenience inflation makes old routine tasks feel harder by reducing our tolerance for effort.

Just as monetary inflation devalues currency, convenience inflation devalues direct effort.

In an age of moving your thumb an inch to the right or left on Tinder, it now it feels like a monumental task for young guys to ask out a cute girl at work. 20 years ago, that was a mundane task by relative standards.

45% of men aged 18-25 have never approached a woman in person. 60-70% of men say that the number one reason they don’t approach women is fear of rejection.

Here’s the problem:

We live in convenience purgatory. Modern convenience has trivialized survival (Maslow’s base layer), but hasn’t become strong enough to overcome challenges in health, wealth and relationships (higher layers). This incentivizes us to focus on easier, less meaningful activities due to the reduced friction.

The result? A large contributing factor to our modern crisis of meaning.

Some people want to chalk this up to the world conspiring against them. But as Naval said, appropriating Hanlon’s Razor, “Never attribute to conspiracy what is more easily explained by incentives and incompetence.”

And, it’s not an exaggeration to state that increased convenience is killing you.

We’re eating more than ever thanks to calorie dense food, bigger portion sizes, cheap snacks and less whole foods.

We’re moving less than ever because of decreased manual labour, front door deliveries, population density and people moving devices.

We’re sleeping less than ever thanks to magical entertainment devices in our pockets. “Per day, according to DataReportal, the average American spends 5 hours and 30 minutes sleeping (an all-time low) and 7 hours and 11 minutes on screens (an all-time high).” H/T Chris Williamson

We’re more anxious than ever because of overcharged social comparison and less physical connection.

Our relationships are worse than ever because of decreased social skills, digital communication, increased individualism and dispersion of social circles.

We’re in more debt than ever thanks to one-click ordering, subscription services, invasive advertising and the instant gratification of get rich quick schemes. As evidenced by the fact that there is currently a cryptocurrency called Fartcoin that has a larger market cap than all but the 10 largest companies in the world.

All this to say, part your job in life is to maintain your ability to do hard things. It will even grow your brain.

By choosing to make your life harder in small, deliberate ways — like exercising regularly, walking instead of driving, sticking to a budget, or prioritizing real conversations — you’ll increase your health, fulfillment and mate value as those around you default to a life of maximum convenience.

Words I Wish I Wrote

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