I went wild camping in the Dartmoor national park last week. It was not convenient and objectively not enjoyable. I was wearing a big backpack that carried water and food for two days: my tent, a sleeping pack and a mattress. The heavy backpack’s straps cut into my skin. Before I can decide where to put up my tent, the rain starts. First, it is a light drizzle, actually refreshing, but then it slowly accelerates and turns into a downpour. Desperate for a dry spot, I unpacked my gear under a tree and set up the tent. The sun had set by now. Laying in the dark tent, I could get a brief glimpse of my surroundings illuminated by lightning every minute - followed by a deep thunder.
I woke up early the next morning. The rain had stopped, and a dim ray of sunshine peeked out of the clouds. I boil some hot water and pour myself a hot, steaming french press coffee. The smell of ground beans reaches my nostrils. I felt good.
Convenience has taken over almost every part of our middle-class life. We order an uber to bring us to the next pub, order toilet paper via delivery, an armada of trucks circles around the neighbourhood every day to drop off groceries, and a cleaner shows up to tidy up after our mess. We spend our holidays tucked away in our Airbnb bubbles, protected from the scary inconveniences of the outside world. But does it make us happier? Or does outsourcing every friction point of your life to an app leave us with a feeling of hollowness?
A delivered meal might taste good, but it will never award you the feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction a home-cooked meal does. Researching a recipe, learning about the ingredients and where to get them in your neighbourhood, standing in the kitchen and seeing these flavours mingle.
Sharing your struggles to prepare the dish with your friends while they comment on the taste profile. These experiences get erased by a purely transactional delivery order. No sweat is involved, and no connection or relationship is formed. The cook who prepared the meal and the delivery driver racing through the city to bring it to you are invisible, impersonal cogs in the machine. The final result of this process will be a lukewarm burrito thrown at your doorstep. It is convenient but will lack every other desirable quality.
Subconsciously we attribute less value to things which come to us easily. The burrito ordered with a swift brush of our finger falls into this category. In contrast, a burrito for which we ground away in the kitchen, heating the tortilla in the oven and dicing tomatoes will taste delicious to our friends and us. This reaction is known as the IKEA effect.
We find it hard to appreciate convenient purchases the same way we appreciate things we have expended our own effort to create. Coined after the observed psychological effect that IKEA furniture buyers display. They tend to value self-assembled furniture disproportionately higher.
Convenience cheats us out of this these small satisfactions. It saves us time but sucks the joy and the feeling of accomplishment out of simple tasks. It prevents us from picking up new skills which make us independent and self-sufficient.
Similar to camping, where we voluntarily choose to leave all the amenities of modern society behind just to be able again to enjoy the simple pleasures, we can actively choose to keep inconvenient tasks in our life and learn to value the stories and lessons that come with them.