The inconvenience of convenience

As a marketer, I am guilty of having played a part in cultivating a generation hooked on to the promise of convenience

Regardless of where I was working, what I was building, and who I was building it for, it seemed to be of utmost importance to inject effortless, on-demand ease and convenience into it.

Every research and every survey informed us that our audience — across demographics was yearning for ease and convenience and was not going to buy anything that didn’t deliver it.

So our ultimate goal became to create addictively, easy-to-use products and services for busy, time-starved, always-on-the-go humans.

And we began pandering to these calls for convenience and weaving it in every aspect of the offering, the packaging, and the ad — building on the narrative that making the convenient choice makes you smart and modern. And doing anything else makes you a relic of the past.

This reminds of an eloquent quote from Don Draper in the series Mad Men where he says that the biggest idea ever to have been created in advertising was “New”.

Well yes, new. And ‘easy’.

A stroll down a supermarket or a Google search page will show you clearly how every single product and service in recent years is designed for ease. Ease of consumption, access, preparation, application, discovery, usage, and whatever else you can think of.

And so this is not just about me and my guilt, but the collective actions of brand and business owners across the world who were united in their efforts to create products and experiences that were fast to open, easy to use, and quick to dispose of. So that they could relieve masses of consumers from their ‘misery’ of cooking, looking good, staying healthy, finding things, and getting to places — so they could save time and effort and focus on their lives’ greater purpose.

These were designed to be instant, on-demand, and multi-platform/format, without compromising on the quality, and the emotions that one would expect from such experiences.

So ready to eat family meals came with the promise of less time spent cooking, more time on the dining table. 2-step beauty products came with the promise of less time fussing over yourself and more time making a great impression. And 3-click tech platforms came with the promise of faster processing and access so you could get on with your life without getting stuck in the weeds.

A new wave of advertising began to reject the “repair and reuse” ideology and starting adopting the vocabulary of “use and throw”. They chose to talk about the attractiveness of instant gratification and not the adventure of slow-cooked moments.

Brands took it upon themselves to solve problems for their consumers even before such problems were realized and sought to remove all possible friction from their path to living their best lives.

And this was done with such precision and perseverance that it soon formed habits and people began to expect this from all life experiences without considering the consequences.

Looking back, I wonder the price we’ve had to pay for this convenience.

The best memories from my life aren’t about times when I got things in an instant, they are about the journey it took to get the results.

Hours spent in the kitchen assisting mom with meals, art projects that would take weeks to finish before they were framed and hung in a corner of our childhood homes, endless debates on what to watch on TV and then watching something no one was really interested in, making and applying homemade face masks and waiting for hours as they dried up, getting clothes altered and repurposed into new avatars, constantly opening the freezer to see if the ice cream had set, and sending postcards to pen pals and waiting for a reply.

The wait, that tantalizing wait — not only allowed us to develop patience and social camaraderie but also an appreciation and understanding of the tedious processes that generated fantastic outcomes.

Sure, there is a tinge of nostalgia here, and isn’t that the filter that makes everything look better than it was! However, it is also undeniable that the convenience of today’s products has deprived us of these rich human experiences.

And then, there is the matter of the long-lasting repercussions that instant experiences have.

Use and throw packaging and single-use products burden our landfills, the instant recipes for health, nutrition, and beauty labour our bodies and the ultra-fast technology that gives us answers in less than a second slowly heat up our planet.

So what should we do?

Drop everything that’s convenient and head back to a made-from-scratch way of life? Probably not. We’re too used to this and it genuinely does unlock our potential to focus on better things.

But we do need to make a choice if we want ‘convenience’ to be woven into every aspect of our life and if it really is worth it to exchange ‘effort for time’ at every level.

The indoctrination of this at-your-fingertips lifestyle has framed our mindset to think short term and that is what we need to snap out of. It is time to think of what these choices mean — for our imagination, our ability to develop skills, our relationships, and this planet.

We may think that removing friction from our lives is but an obvious choice to make, however, it’s not a native one.

Take for instance the choices we’ve made in 2020.

During the pandemic, the world paused for a brief moment and we adjusted to being ourselves again. We were forced to engage with ourselves and that took us on a journey of self-exploration and expression. People across the world began cooking at home, baking sourdough bread, writing books, working out, shopping less, creating more, repairing and repurposing things, and reconnecting with loved ones.

Sure, we were forced into this life due to lockdowns but very quickly these shackles allowed us to unlock rich, human experiences — which are all about trying, failing, experimenting, learning, and building real social connections.

So here’s me wondering if we can indeed celebrate the inconvenience that being human brings to us and appreciate how it can sometimes really be the best choice for our current and future world.

It may be inconvenient to consider, but isn’t it worth it?