The Inconvenience In Convenience

By Les Mottosky

Life is overflowing with options for convenience. It's becoming the religion of modernity. Smartphones have enabled ever-at-our-thumbs "lifestyle prosperity" and we're deluded by this one-click life of royal luxury. Creature comforts like online banking, Tinder, Amazon, and Skip-the-dishes beckon from our phone's home-screens. (And before we can even download their first updates, here comes AI...)

Seems harmless enough, right? Who doesn’t want things to be a little easier? But convenience is a sedative. It numbs friction, dulls effort, and erodes resilience. Shortcuts quickly become defaults; until we don’t just like convenience, we require it. And that’s where the swiping of our thumbs becomes a slide into weakness. Of body, mind and spirit, the three human traits that require constant challenge to remain effective.

Convenience breeds comfort. And comfort, while sometimes necessary, is addictive. Extended coziness turns to dependence. We start organizing our lives not around growth, challenge or accomplishment, but minimized effort. That desire for ease morphs into an aversion to strain. We avoid the very discomforts that strengthen us.

Ease quietly slips into laziness. Not the obvious kind, the refined version: strategic avoidance, rationalized procrastination, clever resistance to anything demanding too much of us. This innocent laziness is a gateway. It invites weakness. Not because we’re incapable, but because we’ve stopped training ourselves to endure.

Weakness left unchallenged, matures into fragility. It overreacts to stress, breaks under pressure, and requires the world to bubble-wrap its lessons. But here’s the cruel twist: fragility doesn’t protect us from harm. It prevents our fulfillment. Because fulfillment requires friction. It comes from pushing, struggling, lifting weight that almost crushes us. Fulfillment’s built on doing hard things.

If you want fulfillment, avoid convenience and chase-down challenge. Embrace discomfort. Get under load and stay there until something shifts.

A delusion of modernity is that ease is tech's replacement for human effort.

The off-setting inconvenient truth is that fulfillment isn’t found in an app.

It’s constructed. Over time. Under pressure.

And that will never be convenient.

TAGS: #Adaptation As Innovation #Audacious Strategies #Wisdom Of Irreverence #Creativity As Context #Human Performance

Les Mottosky

Adaptation Strategist // I help organizations turn creativity into their competitive advantage by aligning leadership, culture and strategy to unlock adaptive innovations.

Ask me about the Clarity Engine Process.

lesmottosky@mac.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/les-mottosky-9b94527/