https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opin ... ience.html
Try that in a new context:Tim Wu on Convenience wrote:But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.
Going on, how do you relate to this...eldavo on Convenience wrote:But we err in presuming driving is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, driving has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.
With a personal flavour:Tim Wu wrote:To resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.
The general attitude I find is people can't compute why you would choose their perception of inconvenience by not using a motor vehicle.eldavo wrote:To resist driving — not to own a car, not to use Uber — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.
(I didn't have to, I even had a working Saab, eccentric whichever way you slice it!)a former short contract employer wrote:"...but you wouldn't cycle, if you didn't have to!"
Reading further:
The view of cycling as a child's activity, that you grow out of after the adult initiation of getting a driving licence:Tim Wu on Convenience wrote: Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.
Nice conclusion:Tim Wu on Convenience wrote: Embracing inconvenience may sound odd, but we already do it without thinking of it as such. As if to mask the issue, we give other names to our inconvenient choices: We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions. These are the noninstrumental activities that help to define us. They reward us with character because they involve an encounter with meaningful resistance — with nature’s laws, with the limits of our own bodies — as in carving wood, melding raw ingredients, fixing a broken appliance, writing code, timing waves or facing the point when the runner’s legs and lungs begin to rebel against him.
Tim Wu on Convenience wrote: Such activities take time, but they also give us time back. They expose us to the risk of frustration and failure, but they also can teach us something about the world and our place in it.
So let’s reflect on the tyranny of convenience, try more often to resist its stupefying power, and see what happens. We must never forget the joy of doing something slow and something difficult, the satisfaction of not doing what is easiest. The constellation of inconvenient choices may be all that stands between us and a life of total, efficient conformity.