Every Convenience is a Small Step Towards Self Destruction
The hidden cost of every shortcut: our attention, our imagination, our connection
I’m sitting in my car outside the grocery store, staring at my phone while someone else walks the aisles picking my groceries. I told myself this would save time—I'm always busy—but here I am, scrolling through nothing while they select my produce.
Instead of being inspired by fresh asparagus or stumbling on something new, I’m letting an algorithm feed me content while someone else makes my food choices.
I didn’t decide to surrender control of my attention. No one does. It doesn’t happen through some dramatic gesture—it happens through a thousand tiny trades we barely notice.
We don’t surrender our attention all at once—it slips away through a thousand tiny trades we barely notice.
The Micro-Trades of Attention
I saw it play out as I wrote this very post. I paused, searching for the next sentence, and the compulsion crept in:
Better check my texts. Oh, my son’s swim lesson was rescheduled, better respond. Since I’m here, might as well check email. A discount on belts? Should I buy one? How are the markets doing? Bitcoin’s down—panic? Twitter must know.
All of that in under ninety seconds. And still no sentence written.
I tell myself I check my phone for emergencies, but the truth is simpler: I’m terrified of boredom. My brain no longer knows how to sit still. How to daydream.
Boredom used to be fertile ground. As kids, it was the spark for building forts out of couch cushions, inventing new games, or staring at clouds until they turned into stories. Now, the moment boredom arrives, we smother it with a screen. The cost isn’t just wasted time—it’s the erosion of imagination, patience, and the quiet reflection that used to give our minds room to breathe.
If you haven't read my post on boredom and the DMN, please go back and take a look.
The Junk-Food Connection
Even without social media, I feel pressure to share every experience in real time. A funny bumper sticker? Snap it to Jeff. An interesting person at the coffee shop? Text Essie.
As if an experience doesn’t count unless it’s documented and distributed.
But each time I do, I’m not just feeding my own dopamine loop—I’m pulling them into theirs too. It’s a junk-food version of connection: quick, salty, unsatisfying. Presence traded for pings.
The Three Hooks
I’ve started to see our dependence in three overlapping categories: convenience, distraction, and necessity. They blur together, engineered to collapse any meaningful boundary between them.
Convenience becomes habit, habit becomes necessity, and before long, choice disappears.
Convenience becomes habit becomes necessity. Grocery pickup, food delivery, mobile banking. At first optional, then standard, then the only way. Parking meters that once took coins now demand apps. Restaurants nudge you toward QR codes instead of menus. What feels like choice quickly becomes mandate. And when whole industries shift around that mandate, opting out becomes nearly impossible. Try paying cash for parking at an airport today—you’ll discover “convenience” has rewritten the rules of participation.
Distraction fills every gap. Streaming media, endless feeds, news alerts. Even “practical” apps—weather, traffic, package tracking—masquerade as useful while training us to check constantly. They soothe anxiety while amplifying it.
Necessity is often manufactured. Yes, some things matter—emergency calls, on-call obligations. But most “necessities” are just conveniences dressed in higher stakes. We’re told we need the app, the notification, the upgrade—or risk being unsafe, uninformed, or left out. Rarely do we test the claim.
What We Lose
The grocery pickup isn’t saving me time—it’s costing me presence. The “efficiency” app isn’t making life simpler—it’s fragmenting it.
Every ‘efficiency’ trades a moment of stillness for another tether to the device.
Each convenience trades a moment of potential stillness for another tether to the device. Each “upgrade” ties us tighter to a system designed to monetize our attention.
The danger is that the trade is never neutral. It always tilts toward less autonomy, less patience, less capacity to be here, now. Every new shortcut reshapes our habits just enough that the old, slower ways start to feel impossible.
Choosing Presence
Over the coming months, I’ll share practices for pushing back against this manufactured reliance. But for now, just pause long enough to notice the trades you’re making.
Do you really want soggy, lukewarm Pad Thai delivered to your door—or would you rather sit in the restaurant, present with the people you love?
That’s the real choice in front of us: convenience or connection. One offers speed; the other offers presence.
On this blog, I’ll keep sharing the practices I’m experimenting with as I try to break the cycle. I’m far from perfect—right now, even as I write this, I’ve noticed my phone time ticking back up again in recent weeks. But I’m still trying, and I’m not giving up on my brain. Don’t give up on yours.