When showing up for others feels hard, some strugglers have lately steeled themselves with a version of this maxim: “Inconvenience is the cost of community.” It’s a reminder, oft-repeated on social media these days, that if you don’t want to be lonely—if you want to have robust relationships—you should occasionally do things that are effortful or even irritating, like cat sitting for a neighbor (or even just conversing with one!). You must give up on always pursuing maximum ease.

The inverse of this adage is also true: Community is, all too often, the cost of convenience.

In the journalist Gabe Bullard’s new book, Against Convenience, he argues that society’s relentless pursuit of faster and more frictionless experiences carries invisible costs, and he pushes back against how unthinkingly people often accept those costs as inevitable. Some of those costs are paid in dollars, as with monthly subscription fees to Netflix rather than the onetime cost of buying a DVD. Some are paid in lowered standards: more easily accessible entertainment that’s of poorer quality (YouTube shorts, anyone?), “smart” products that become obsolete faster than their analog forebears. But in reading the book, I noticed just how many of those costs are social.

https://archive.ph/3oOBu