Why Modern Convenience Feels So Inconvenient

The Art of Manliness

In this episode of the AOM Podcast, Brett McKay interviews Gabe Bullard, author of 'Against Convenience,' to explore why modern technologica

Key takeaways

• Self-checkout machines often fail to save time or money due to maintenance costs, theft, and user error.
• The Starbucks app erases the 'essential friction' of human interaction that can improve the customer experience.
• Smartphones have reached a design dead end where updates are incremental rather than revolutionary.
• Digital communication lacks non-verbal cues, which can lead to increased negativity and misunderstanding in relationships.
• Streaming services prioritize subscriber retention over artistic quality and consumer ownership of media.

Main topics

• The paradox of modern convenience
• Self-checkout and retail efficiency
• Mobile ordering and social friction

Notable quotes

I don't think that I have more time or energy than I did a few years ago, even though I've got... all this tech around me.

Conclusion

True progress requires evaluating whether a convenience actually solve

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) If you've ever bought anything from the AOM store, Shopify handled that transaction. We've used Shopify to run our store for years, and the reason is simple. It makes selling stuff online so dang easy. A lot of guys have a business idea that's been kicking around in their head for years. What often stops them from acting on it is the logistics. Setting up a website to sell your stuff seems complicated, so the idea just stays an idea. Shopify removes that excuse. It puts everything you need to run an online business in one platform. Their templates and AI tools will get a good looking site up and running fast, no coding needed. The checkout is smooth, so customers actually complete their purchases instead of abandoning their carts. And if you get stuck on something, Shopify has built an AI assistant called Sidekick that can help you troubleshoot and keep moving. Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide. It's worked for us for years, and I reckon it will work for you. If you're ready to hear the... of your first sale, head over to shopify.com slash manliness to start your free trial today. That's right. Start your free trial at shopify.com slash manliness. That's shopify.com slash manliness. Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AOM Podcast, which since 2008 has featured conversations with the world's best authors, thinkers, and leaders that glean their edifying, life-improving insights without the fluff and filler. The AOM Podcast is just one part of the McKay mission to help individuals practice timeless virtues through thought, word, and deed. Also, be sure to explore our articles on artofmanliness.com, read the deeper dives we do in our sub-stack newsletter at dyingbreed.net, and turn our content into real-world action by joining the Strenuous Life program at strenuouslife.com. Now on to the show. Modern life is filled with conveniences designed to make things easier. We can order dinner without leaving the couch, check ourselves out at the grocery store, communicate instantly with anyone, and stream nearly every movie and song ever made. So why do we often feel busier, more stressed, and more, well, inconvenienced than ever? My guest today argues that many supposed advancements don't actually save us time, money, or energy, and that even when they do, they can eliminate forms of friction that made life richer, more enjoyable, and more human. His name is Gabe Bullard, and he's the author of Against Convenience. Today on the show, Gabe and I discuss how self-checkout, mobile ordering, digital communication, streaming services, food delivery, and even smartphone cameras can paradoxically make life more annoying and less satisfying. Gabe also shares questions to ask yourself to decide which convenience is worth keeping and why deliberately adding a little friction back into your life can sometimes make it better. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash convenience. Speaker 2 (2:45) All right, Gabe Bullard, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So you got a new book out, Against Convenience. You're making a critique against many of the tech-driven conveniences of modern life. Why critique convenience? Aren't conveniences supposed to be good? Yeah, Speaker 3 (3:02) they should be. And when they work, they are, generally. So my critique comes from the fact that they're not working. I don't think that I have more time or energy than I did a few years ago, even though I've got... all this tech around me. And as I was thinking about this idea, talking to other people, it really seemed to be the case that people feel busier, more stressed, like they have less money than ever, even though we have all these things that should be saving us time, energy, or money. And that's how I came to define convenience as something that saves or purports to save time, money, or energy. And that purports to is key because, you know, it's one thing for a convenience just to cut out work that we don't want to do to be kind of a quick shortcut or something. It's another for it to just sort of offload that work or to replace one chore with another. So instead of, you know, doing a task, you're now using a machine that does the task and it's taking you just as much time. Speaker 2 (3:52) What are some examples of good conveniences? Like, okay, this thing actually saves us time, energy, or money. Speaker 3 (3:57) You know, so I think it varies sort of person to person and experience to experience. But I think certain things like being able to send an email instead of writing a letter, though I do like writing paper letters and getting paper letters and everything. It is clearly much faster and much easier to send an email. There's a lot of problems with email, too, that come along with it. And so, you know, there's always going to be tradeoffs. I think also I mentioned a few things in there that I use a lot. I mean. headphones, just being able to take music or podcasts on the go and listen and sort of have that control is great. But then problems can come about if you're overusing it, if you're just sort of mainlining podcasts that have really toxic conversations, or if you're using them to drown out time that. you could be spending with another person, that sort of thing. So it's all sort of a trade-off. And the problems come about either when they get overused or when they're really not providing the convenience they should provide, or sometimes if we just stack them up so much and have so many conveniences that we've sort of isolated ourselves from anything out in the world and all the other people and things that we might want to do or want to be around. Speaker 2 (5:05) You start off the book using two examples of modern tech-driven conveniences that when you look at them, you're like, yeah, this should make life more convenient. But then when you actually see how they played out, you're like, oh, geez, this actually made my life harder. It was self-checkout at grocery stores and then the Starbucks app. Yeah. Tell us about these. Walk us through. How are these conveniences, how do they end up not being convenient? Speaker 3 (5:30) Yeah, so I think those two and the reasons I chose them to start off the book is because I think they represent a lot of the different sides of convenience and sort of the way that modern technological convenience is working. With self-checkout, there's kind of a grim idea behind it if you dwell on it for a while. This idea that it's going to be saving you. time because you're going to be doing the checkout at this machine that it might save you energy, though it doesn't really because you're going to be doing the checkout, but maybe the energy is not having to talk to a clerk. And then there's also this idea that it might save you money because, well, there's not a person there anymore. You're doing the work. And it ends up not really doing any of those things. Like you are scanning your groceries. I'm not. good at scanning groceries. Somebody who is paid as a professional to scan groceries all day and trained to do that is going to do a faster job. They're going to do a better job than I'm going to. And I'm sure anyone listening who has used self-checkout enough has probably had some experiences where it doesn't work, the machine crashes, it scans something multiple times, all of that. So it doesn't really... do any of those things, but it seems like it should. And it sort of has this allure of technology of, well, this is the future. This is what is going to really save me, save me everything and usher me into this computer age. With the Starbucks app, it is really convenient. You do save time. You can get whatever you want, but it ends up erasing some frictions that were essential to getting coffee and having a pleasant experience with it. It was essential to Have a person to talk to, to maybe prevent you from just running wild with the customizations and getting some awful gloopy drink that's going to taste bad. You know, I talked to some baristas who said they get these orders coming in through the app that are so complicated and so strange and so precise. They just think, you know, this is not going to. taste good at all. And the person comes in and they taste it and they say, what's wrong with this? And the barista has to explain, you know, well, that's what you ordered. And, you know, had you been here in person, I might have tried to talk you out of something or, you know, asked you to confirm some of these ideas. The other part is that going and standing in line in the store was maybe a little bit boring, but it was essential to the way that the stores were set up. to function, that there was one line per register. You waited in that line. People went through the line. They ordered and people behind the counter made the drinks. With the app, it adds this additional line that leads to the workers sort of constantly making drinks because there are people ordering online and there's people in the store who are placing orders. it sort of throws everything into chaos. The baristas are working really hard, sort of constantly slammed. And then for the customer, you don't know when your drink's going to come out. You don't know which of the cups on the counter is going to be yours. And then there's just sort of always people coming in and out, names being shouted out constantly. And it stops being this sort of pleasant experience to be in. On sort of a different level, I think it's good to actually have that time away. and waiting in line to be a little bit bored to sort of zone out, let your mind wander, that sort of thing. I think that a lot of times, you know, this is the way when I was using the Starbucks app that I used it, I would be at the office and then I would just stay and work a little bit more. And I found I was feeling more stressed. I didn't have a coffee break. I was just using the app so that I could walk out the door, get the coffee, come right back and really have no other interactions with people and just Speaker 2 (8:57) keep Speaker 3 (8:57) working. And so it sort of ends up. backfiring on Starbucks to a degree. I had tried to get the company to comment, but you do see the CEO had put out an open letter saying he noticed that stores had changed. The former CEO had made some comments as well. You know, as to why we keep using them, I think this is the other thing that's inherent to a lot of conveniences that made me want to write the book. One is that the choice goes away. I was in the grocery store the other day and there were like a dozen self-checkout kiosks and only one or two lines with people working. And those had huge lines. And I thought, well, I really have no choice because I'm in a hurry. I have to catch a train. I have to use the self-checkout. And it was not a very good experience. It didn't scan right, all of that. But the human staffed line was becoming more inconvenient and just kind of fading away entirely in some places. And then with the Starbucks app, it's just kind of not nice being in the store. And so it makes sense to use the app then. Like it becomes unpleasant because of the app, but then you want to use the app so you minimize the amount of time that you have to be inside the store and ordering. And so the world just starts to kind of warp around these conveniences, not necessarily because they're better for us. They're good for business. And so the businesses kind of keep pushing them. And I think that's one of the big. problems with a lot of these conveniences is they're being pushed when they're not necessarily better. They seem welcoming and they also tend to erase the work of the other people who we rely on for this. Like you start to erase the baristas because you don't have to talk to somebody to place an order. You start to erase the grocery store employees because you don't have to see them to check out. And that's part of that isolation that convenience can lead to. Extremely complicated. Speaker 2 (10:39) Yeah. With the self-checkout, I've noticed myself in recent years, I use it less and less. I might use if I have like one or two items, but if I have more than five, I'm just going to a manned station or manned cash register because they just do a better job. They can get it done fast. Especially if I have produce, they can type it in really fast. Speaker 3 (10:57) They Speaker 2 (10:57) bag it better. I don't have to worry about me double scanning things or having to delete something or having to call a clerk to show my ID because I'm buying medication that requires an ID. So I've been using the self-checkout less and less. Speaker 3 (11:13) Yeah. And have you noticed, I see this all the time. If I'm in a self-checkout line, it seems like people are really mad at each other if they're going through the line together. Like, I feel like I see so many sort of like couples or families kind of, you know, not like fighting, fighting, but sort of, you know, bickering or snapping at each other. And it's like, yeah, it's a frustrating experience to have to do. Speaker 2 (11:32) Yeah. And also with the self-checkout, we think, okay, it'll save us money because the store has to pay fewer employees. But I think you talk about if you do the math, it hasn't really saved stores all that much money because the machines require maintenance. There's a lot more theft going on or people just forget to scan something and walk out. So they're losing product and that's a cost to the company that they have to pass on to the customer. So you think it'd save you money, but, you know, maybe not. Yeah, Speaker 3 (12:05) exactly. Because, yeah, these Speaker 2 (12:06) machines. cost Speaker 3 (12:07) a lot. They have to be maintained. They get replaced every so often. And, you know, a person drew a salary. But at the same time, you know, I haven't seen grocery prices go down really significantly for anything. You know, the story is always the groceries are getting more and more expensive. And so I think if these machines were, you know, really following through on that idea, I think a lot of things would probably be a lot cheaper. Speaker 2 (12:29) Something else you highlight, and I've noticed this too in my own life, is we do have all this great tech. because of our smartphone. We can do so much with our smartphone. We can summon a car with our smartphone. We can get food delivered. We can watch any movie, listen to any music that we want. We can get same day Amazon Prime delivery. And you think we have all this stuff. We should feel like we're living in the age of the Jetsons. Speaker 1 (12:52) And Speaker 2 (12:52) sometimes I do. There's moments where I'm like, wow, this is really cool that I can do this. But most times it's like, ah, I don't feel like that. I feel mostly just frustrated and blasé. and not awed by our technological progress. Why is that? Speaker 3 (13:05) So I think a lot of that is design. And I think we're in a place where we're just kind of stuck in sort of a dead end of design. I was watching earlier today some of the Apple Keynote, and I used to love to watch those. But this one was, it was kind of depressing to watch because it's like, wow, all these new products. Speaker 1 (13:24) you Speaker 3 (13:25) know, nothing that really is that exciting. So my general theory is that I think a lot of tech moves in these sort of giant leaps and then small steps. So like having a refrigerator, that's a giant leap. And then there's a bunch of small steps, like an automatic ice maker or whatever. These have a business case because if you're making appliances, it behooves you like with a car or something, you know, make the old model seem obsolete by offering sort of something new. And convenience is a great way to do that. But it's not really the same kind of giant leap forward. And now a lot of the small steps are just sort of all screen based. Like there's a screen on the fridge for weather or that tells you, you know, your shopping list or whatever, an app for the dishwasher, and then basically everything on your phone. And this, I think, is. the design dead end because the screen doesn't do something new all the time. It just sort of changes how you do something that you already did. And so, you know, there's the business model because it's really profitable to keep getting people to upgrade. If something is more computer based, the software can become out of date really quickly. And, you know, you might need to not really invent something so much. You just say, oh, well, you know, to run the new software, you have to buy the new phone or the new device, that sort of thing. The other Speaker 2 (14:35) is, Speaker 3 (14:36) I think, just Speaker 2 (14:37) a limitation. Speaker 3 (14:38) You know, we're reaching this point maybe where the screen has done everything it's going to do or done most of what it's going to do. There have been over 50 models of iPhones since the first one. And you look at what was announced at the Apple keynote. One was the Duo, which it folds, and that's cool. You know, the purpose of the fold seems kind of unclear. Folding phones have existed for a while. So I'll, you know, withhold judgment and see what happens there and what that use case might be. But then the other one was the 18 Pro. And I just think it's not a very inspiring design. You know, on the front of it, it's basically the same as the first phone. There's a little more screen. It takes up the entire device. There's not a button or anything, but it's a rectangle. It's a screen. On the back, it's got that bulky camera lump because the cameras