Convenience
The machines of modern times have made life easier. Most people in the so-called First World no longer have to draw and carry water. No longer do they have to gather fuel for cooking and heating. No longer do they have to raise animals for their food and use the animals’ manure to grow crops. No longer do they have to spin and sew. And not only have such people been freed from many basic chores, but they can go hither and yon in ways that previously people could barely imagine. They can entertain themselves in ways that, prior to the twentieth century, did not exist. They can accumulate vast amounts of goods and consume manufactured foods that did not exist before. The phrase “convenience food” says it all.
What has convenience done to people? The matter is not one of humankind being better off or worse off, of nostalgia or progress. The difference lies in the way they conduct their affairs on earth, how they spend their time and what they are aware of. If the water comes out of a faucet at the touch of a hand rather than coming from a well into a bucket a person must carry, the water is not the same water and the person who uses that water is not the same person as the person who once carried the water, bucket by laborious bucket. I speak as someone who lived off the grid for many years and carried many buckets.
If a human being is raised to take something for granted, then the person is going to take whatever it is—water coming out of a faucet—for granted. We are born into the world and take it as it is presented to us. In one way, this speaks to the marvel of adaptability. In another way, this speaks to heedlessness, the habit of not thinking twice, of accepting whatever comes our way as a given, even as a God-given.
Convenience is not an emotion like being glad or sad. Convenience enables people to assume the basics of life will be there for them. A person may not know where the water comes from or where the food was grown or how the petroleum was refined but that is beside the point. Convenience is a sort of padding, a batting that swathes people and makes them feel day-to-day comfortable. The essentials are taken care of and a person can turn his or her attention to other matters. Work and entertainment can both be magnified, as can comfort. Meanwhile, convenience lulls, croons, soothes. As a material object, convenience feels like the selvage of endless abundance: one amiably arranged day will follow another. Time will never fray.
To be lulled is to lose attentiveness. What is there is not really there because I did not have to make it be there. It appears through a sort of laborious magic that many other hands made possible. I do not salute those hands because I do not know whose hands they were. When I turn up the thermostat, I have no sense whatsoever of other hands. All I have is a little manual action on the part of one of my hands. The earth that gives the heat in one fashion or another is absent. I may feel no connection at all between the heat and the earth. I have other things to feel. I need more money. I want to take a vacation. I have troubles and would like some happiness to ventilate that trouble.
People do not lack for feelings in modern times, but for many people who each day employ conveniences some part of them is, so to speak, like mush or slush. Some part of them has gotten lost in a very large shuffle—in exchange for convenience you forfeit a degree of your awareness of how you sustain your daily life. You seem to know a lot and be in control of a lot but you aren’t. You have been abstracted from the rudiments of life. This forfeit, however, does not feel like a forfeit. Far from it, since people can go about their business without the putative drudgery of milking the cows twice a day or hauling the water or churning the butter or working the loom to make the cloth. People can go forth and have millions of jobs that did not even exist a few hundred years ago. Modern times represent a vast explosion of invented necessity.
What gnaws at some people is the sense that despite the claims—more comfortable, quicker, easier—something enormous has been sacrificed, though it is hard to express what that is, hard to convert absence into presence. It may be, however, that human beings need each day to spend a goodly amount of time taking care of themselves in basic ways. It may be that people lose track of what it is to be human if they don’t spend that time. It may be that people become idle in the sense of not knowing what to do with themselves. There is no reason why people are on this earth and that lack of a reason can make it easy to exaggerate the shifts of human purpose: we are here to do this or that. Convenience lubricates the engines of purpose because convenience lowers the barriers between what is basic and what is a figment of purpose. Convenience throws off the balance of being human. For the Nazis, Zyklon B was a convenience.
Since the earth is not an infinite resource, it seems inevitable that people in the First World will have to give up a degree of convenience that they now assume as something like a right. If we value life as something that is good in its own right and the earth as a partner rather than a house to be ransacked, there is—at face value—no problem with giving that up. If we insist that convenience, under the guise of necessity, comes before the balance of the earth’s life-sustaining being and diversity, if we scorn simplicity, if we insist on making a virtue of our profiteering thoughtlessness, disasters seem unavoidable.
And, as a note to my ongoing writing, my new book of poetry, The History Hotel, is coming out in early March from CavanKerry Press.
"To be lulled is to lose attentiveness." And isn't attentiveness the greatest gift to offer to anyone, anything?
Fabulous reminder to be attentive to even the smallest or seemingly dullest parts of life. Thanks for this reminder!
Convenience = Neglect.
Convenience allows us to go unconscious.
Another astute essay that makes the reader look at themselves, deeper and honestly. Raw wisdom.
Thank you.