“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.” – Beverly Sills
We live in a society predicated on convenience. Whether it is the “5 Easy Steps to 100,000 Followers” or “Done for you book writing (advance your career with a bestseller, only $3,999)!” or the proliferation of dating apps where you can use filters to alter your appearance and sit at home swiping until someone wants to hook up, our economy is driven by paying others to do hard things.
200 years ago 90% of Americans worked the land for food. 50 years ago it was over 6%. Today under 4% of the population actually farms, fishes, or raises animals as their primary occupation. Having been raised on a farm, working for your supper gives an appreciation of food others don’t have, and the cheapness of calories (both in real dollars and physical effort) has lead to an explosion in obesity (over 40% of the adult population today versus 14.5% in 1974). And it is easier to sit on our butt, entertained by a screen than it is to workout or pick up a book, so our bodies and minds are flabby because of the constant ease built into our economy.
Making things easy means we don’t develop the strength needed, whether it is to shovel a driveway or solve math problems in our heads or do the work to keep the relationship alive instead of just pulling the plug and moving on to the next one. Instead of making things easier so that we could shift resources into higher and better uses (less time farming used to mean more time for learning or serving the community), we are consuming them in an endless stream of short term gluttonous unearned rewards.
There are black belt factories everywhere so that in two years and a cost of a few thousand dollars you too can impress others by buying a black belt instead of earning it with a decade of sweat and sacrifice.
Unsure of what to write for that report? Instead of struggling and playing with the style and words and developing a real facility with language, just plug it into AI and get all your heavy lifting done. And watch your mental muscles atrophy, but that’s ok because it’s not like any of your peers are working too hard either.
MMmmmmm, prepackaged heavily processed brownies that can sit on a shelf for a decade! Just the reward after not working hard because you outsourced all of your thinking to machines or foreign countries and you spent ten minutes to drive your kid to practice instead of having them bike there as a warmup because you had your groceries delivered for a fee instead of shopping yourself and getting the healthy food that you then prepare.
I’m not saying let’s be Luddites. I love the convenience of pulling up an audiobook on my phone while I mow the lawn. I am saying we should consider insourcing more work so that our kids see us (and help us) clean the bathrooms instead of using a cleaning service because it develops a work ethic that gives a competitive advantage long term. I am saying that we should learn to fix things instead of fully embracing the disposable culture of easily replaceable objects and people. That learning to work hard and power through obstacles even when tired or frustrated is a mindset that bears rewards from lower body fat to greater productivity in the office to an independence that is all too uncommon these days.
Use tools to make your life easier, but stop cutting the corners to save a few seconds because the harder way gives strengths and perspectives others will never understand nor be able to draw from in the inevitable inconvenient hard times.