Convenience Is Lonely by Julie Beck at The Atlantic

Commentary on journalist Gabe Bullard’s new book, Against Convenience, which I am tempted to pick up.

Once you open your eyes to the tradeoff between convenience and community, you start seeing it everywhere. It’s more convenient to ride a Peloton bike at home alone than to go to a spin class full of other sweaty bodies (whom you might end up chatting with). Zoom meetings make working with distant colleagues much easier, but aren’t very socially nourishing. The gig economy is rife with this bargain. Ubers and Lyfts replace rides given by friends and trips taken on public transit. Delivery replaces meals out at local restaurants and time spent in stores of all kinds. […]

Sometimes, the reason an innovation is even considered convenient at all is because it allows you to do something in isolation. Such is the case with self-checkout. American shoppers love it—self-checkout lines frequently thread through a store even when staffed checkouts have little to no wait. But as Bullard points out, self-checkout is more work for customers, who have to do the cashier’s job themselves. And the machines are often less efficient than human cashiers, freaking out and freezing up because you jostled an item in the bagging area. “The only effort saved,” Bullard writes, “is whatever would have gone into engaging in basic niceties with a cashier.” Similarly, recognizing an opportunity in consumers’ desire to escape the alleged inconvenience of small talk, in 2019 Uber introduced a setting to request a “quiet ride”—for an extra fee, of course.

I find that “community” is often presented undefined, and as an obvious desideratum. But I can understand why folks would choose to opt out of “community” that includes an open set of cashiers, Uber drivers, and gym-machine neighbors.

In the environments for which we are adapted, humans would have lived in bands of 25 to 50 people, and would have had contact with maybe two to three times that number in a lifetime. Daily face-to-face interaction was likely with a few dozen people at most, and usually the same familiar faces, day after day, for one’s entire life. Nearly all interactions were with people one knew well, was related to, or would see repeatedly. These would have been high-context, high-trust, high-accountability relationships. There’s a reason Dunbar’s number is 150.

Modernity inverts this. We come across hundreds of strangers in a day. Ancestral interactions were few, deep, and repeated, while modern interactions are many, shallow, and often one-off. The community we sense we’ve lost, it seems to me, is something other than the retail encounters we’re conveniencing away.