Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AoM Podcast. Modern life is filled with conveniences designed to make things easier. We can order dinner without leaving the couch, check ourselves out at the grocery store, communicate instantly with anyone, and stream nearly every moving song ever made. So why do we often feel busier, more stressed, and more, well, inconvenienced than ever?
My guest today argues that many supposed advancements don’t actually save us time, money, or energy, and that even when they do, they can eliminate forms of friction that made life richer, more enjoyable, and more human. His name is Gabe Bullard, and he’s the author of Against Convenience. Today on the show, Gabe and I discuss how self-checkout, mobile ordering, digital communication, streaming services, food delivery, and even smartphone cameras can paradoxically make life more annoying and less satisfying. Gabe also shares questions to ask yourself to decide which convenience is worth keeping and why deliberately adding a little friction back into your life can sometimes make it better. After the show is over, check out our show notes at awim.is/convenience. All right, Gabe Bullard, welcome to the show.
Gabe Bullard:
Thanks for having me.
Brett McKay:
So you got a new book out, Against Convenience. You’re making a critique against many of the tech-driven conveniences of modern life. Why critique convenience? Aren’t conveniences supposed to be good?
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah, they should be. And when they work, they are generally. So my critique comes from the fact that they’re not working. I don’t think that I have more time or energy than I did a few years ago, even though I’ve got all this tech around me. And as I was thinking about this idea, talking to other people, it really seemed to be the case that people feel busier, more stressed, like they have less money than ever, even though we have all these things that should be saving us time, energy, or money. And that’s how I came to define convenience as something that saves or purports to save time, money, or energy. And that purports to is key because it’s one thing for a convenience just to cut out work that we don’t want to do to be kind of a quick shortcut or something. It’s another for it to just offload that work or to replace one chore with another.
So instead of doing a task, you’re now using a machine that does the task and it’s taking you just as much time.
Brett McKay:
What are some examples of good conveniences like, oh, okay, this thing actually saves us time, energy, or money?
Gabe Bullard:
So I think it varies sort of person to person and experience to experience, but I think certain things like being able to send an email instead of writing a letter, though I do like writing paper letters and getting paper letters and everything, it is clearly much faster and much easier to send an email. There’s a lot of problems with email too that come along with it. And so there’s always going to be trade-offs. I think also I mentioned a few things in there that I use a lot. I mean, headphones, just being able to take music or podcasts on the go and listen and have that control is great. But then problems can come about if you’re overusing it, if you’re just sort of mainlining podcasts that have really toxic conversations or if you’re using them to drown out time that you could be spending with another person, that sort of thing.
So it’s all sort of a trade off and the problems come about either when they get overused or when they’re really not providing the convenience they should provide or sometimes if we just stack them up so much and have so many conveniences that we’ve sort of isolated ourselves from anything out in the world and all the other people and things that we might want to do or want to be around.
Brett McKay:
You start off the book using two examples of modern tech driven conveniences that when you look at them, you’re like, “Yeah, this should make life more convenient.” But then when you actually see how they played out, you’re like, “Oh geez, this actually made my life harder.” It was self-checkout at grocery stores and then the Starbucks app. Tell us about these. Walk us through how were these conveniences, how did they end up not being convenient?
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah, so I think those two, and the reasons I chose them to start off the book is because I think they represent a lot of the different sides of convenience and the way that modern technological convenience is working. With self-checkout, there’s kind of a grim idea behind it if you dwell on it for a while. This idea that it’s going to be saving you time because you’re going to be doing the checkout at this machine, that it might save you energy, though it doesn’t really because you’re going to be doing the checkout, but maybe the energy is not having to talk to a clerk. And then there’s also this idea that it might save you money because, well, there’s not a person there anymore, you’re doing the work. And it ends up not really doing any of those things like you are scanning your groceries.
I’m not good at scanning groceries. Somebody who is paid as a professional to scan groceries all day and trained to do that is going to do a faster job. They’re going to do a better job than I’m going to. And I’m sure anyone listening who has used self-checkout enough has probably had some experiences where it doesn’t work, the machine crashes, it scans something multiple times, all of that. So it doesn’t really do any of those things, but it seems like it should. And it sort of has this allure of technology of, well, this is the future. This is what is going to really save me everything and usher me into this computer age.
With the Starbucks app, it is really convenient. You do save time, you can get whatever you want, but it ends up erasing some frictions that were essential to getting coffee and having a pleasant experience with it. It was essential to have a person to talk to, to maybe prevent you from just running wild with the customizations and getting some awful gloopy drink that’s going to taste bad. I talked to some baristas who said they get these orders coming in through the app that are so complicated and so strange and so precise, they just think this is not going to taste good at all. And the person comes in and they taste it and they say, “What’s wrong with this?” And the barista has to explain, “Well, that’s what you ordered. And had you been here in person, I might have tried to talk you out of something or asked you to confirm some of these ideas.” The other part is that going and standing in line in the store was maybe a little bit boring, but it was essential to the way that the stores were set up to function, that there was one line per register, you waited in that line, people went through the line, they ordered, and people behind the counter made the drinks.
With the app, it adds this additional line that leads to the workers constantly making drinks because there are people ordering online and there’s people in the store who are placing orders. So it sort of throws everything into chaos. The baristas are working really hard, constantly slammed. And then for the customer, you don’t know when your drink’s going to come out, you don’t know which of the cups on the counter is going to be yours. And then there’s just sort of always people coming in and out, names being shouted out constantly, and it stops being this sort of pleasant experience to be in. On sort of a different level, I think it’s good to actually have that time away and waiting in line to be a little bit bored, to sort of zone out, let your mind wander, that sort of thing. I think that a lot of times, this is the way when I was using the Starbucks app that I used it, I would be at the office and then I would just stay and work a little bit more.
And I found I was feeling more stressed. I didn’t have a coffee break. I was just using the app so that I could walk out the door, get the coffee, come right back and really have no other interactions with people and just keep working. And so it sort of ends up backfiring on Starbucks to a degree. I had tried to get the company to comment, but you do see the CEO had put out an open letter saying he noticed that stores had changed. The former CEO had made some comments as well. As to why we keep using them, I think this is the other thing that’s inherent to a lot of conveniences that made me want to write the book. One is that the choice goes away. I was in the grocery store the other day and there were a dozen self-checkout kiosks and only one or two lines with people working and those had huge lines.
And I though, well, I really have no choice because I’m in a hurry. I have to catch a train. I have to use the self-checkout. And it was not a very good experience. It didn’t scan right, all of that. But the human staffed line was becoming more inconvenient and just kind of fading away entirely in some places. And then with the Starbucks app, it’s just kind of not nice being in the store. And so it makes sense to use the app then. It becomes unpleasant because of the app, but then you want to use the app so you minimize the amount of time that you have to be inside the store and ordering. And so the world just starts to kind of warp around these conveniences, not necessarily because they’re better for us, they’re good for business. And so the businesses kind of keep pushing them.
And I think that’s one of the big problems with a lot of these conveniences is they’re being pushed when they’re not necessarily better, they seem welcoming, and they also tend to erase the work of the other people who we rely on for this. You start to erase the baristas because you don’t have to talk to somebody to place an order. You start to erase the grocery store employees because you don’t have to see them to check out. And that’s part of that isolation that convenience can lead to. Extremely complicated.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. With the self-checkout, I’ve noticed myself in recent years, I use it less and less. I might use if I have one or two items, but if I have more than five, I’m just going to a manned station or manned cash register because they just do a better job. They can get it done fast, especially if I have produce, they can type it in really fast, they bag it better. I don’t have to worry about me double scanning things or having to delete something or having to call a clerk to show my ID because I’m buying medication that requires an ID. So I’ve been using the self-checkout less and less.
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah. And have you noticed, I see this all the time, if I’m in a self-checkout line, it seems like people are really mad at each other if they’re going through the line together. I feel like I see so many couples or families kind of not like fighting fighting, but sort of bickering or snapping at each other. And it’s like, yeah, it’s a frustrating experience to have to do.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And also with the self-checkout, we think, okay, it’ll save us money because the store has to pay fewer employees. But I think you talk about, if you do the math, it hasn’t really saved stores all that much money because the machines require maintenance. There’s a lot more theft going on or people just forget to scan something and walk out. So they’re losing product and that’s a cost to the company that they have to pass on to the customer. So you think it’d save you money, but maybe not.
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah, exactly. Because these machines cost a lot. They have to be maintained. They get replaced every so often and a person drew a salary, but at the same time, I haven’t seen grocery prices go down really significantly for anything. The story is always the groceries are getting more and more expensive. And so I think if these machines were really following through on that idea, I think that a lot of things would probably be a lot cheaper.
Brett McKay:
Something else you highlight, and I’ve noticed this too in my own life, is we do have all this great tech because of our smartphone. We can do so much with our smartphone. We can summon a car with our smartphone. We can get food delivered. We can watch any movie, listen to any music that we want. We can get same day Amazon Prime delivery. And you think we have all this stuff. We should feel like we’re living in the age of the Jetsons. And sometimes I do. There’s moments where I’m like, wow, this is really cool that I can do this. But most times it’s like, oh, I don’t feel like that. I feel mostly just frustrated and blase and not odd by our technological progress. Why is that?
Gabe Bullard:
So I think a lot of that is design, and I think we’re in a place where we’re just kind of stuck in sort of a dead end of design. I was watching earlier today some of the Apple Keynote, and I used to love to watch those, but this one was, it was kind of depressing to watch because it’s like, wow, all these new products and nothing that really is that exciting. So my general theory is that I think a lot of tech moves in these sort of giant leaps and then small steps. So having a refrigerator, that’s a giant leap. And then there’s a bunch of small steps like an automatic ice maker or whatever. And these have a business case because if you’re making appliances, it behooves you like with a car or something, make the old model seem obsolete by offering something new.
And convenience is a great way to do that, but it’s not really the same kind of giant leap forward. And now a lot of the small steps are just sort of all screen based. There’s a screen on the fridge for weather or that tells you your shopping list or whatever, an app for the dishwasher, and then basically everything on your phone. And this I think is the design dead end because the screen doesn’t do something new all the time. It just sort of changes how you do something that you already did. And so there’s the business model because it’s really profitable to keep getting people to upgrade. If something is more computer-based, the software can become out of date really quickly and you might need to not really invent something so much, you just say, oh, well to run the new software, you have to buy the new phone or the new device, that sort of thing.
The other is I think just a limitation. We’re reaching this point maybe where the screen has done everything it’s going to do or done most of what it’s going to do. There’ve been over 50 models of iPhone since the first one. And you look at what was announced at the Apple Keynote, one was the duo, which it folds and that’s cool. The purpose of the fold seems kind of unclear. Folding phones have existed for a while, so I’ll withhold judgment and see what happens there and what that use case might be. But then the other one was the 18 Pro, and I just think it’s not a very inspiring design. On the front of it, it’s basically the same as the first phone. There’s a little more screen. It takes up the entire device. There’s not a button or anything, but it’s a rectangle. It’s a screen.
On the back, it’s got that bulky camera lump because the cameras need more space than the other guts of the phone, which makes the phone sit awkwardly. It’s a little odd. I was watching it and at the same time, I have a neighbor who’s really into classic cars and he has friends who come over with their cars and everything. And you see the designs of the cars are really sleek and a lot of times it’s aesthetics, but then it’s also based on what’s inside the car. The hood has to be a certain way because of where the motor is, all of that. And you see a lot of creativity in everything versus with the phone, it’s just kind of a big block and now with sort of lumps sticking out of it that isn’t all that exciting. And going back to the screen, it’s just like, well, what is this phone doing that it couldn’t do before?
The camera’s a little sharper, the processor’s a little faster, there’s a couple AI features, that sort of thing, but it’s not significantly, it’s not the same leap that the first iPhone was or that some of the iPhones in the middle have done. One thing in the keynote that really brought me down was this. It’s a feature on the Apple Watch where if you don’t hear something, you can sort of get a recap of the last 15 seconds. And there’s accessibility benefits to that, and I’m not going to knock that at all, but the demonstration they show is a person’s at a restaurant and a server comes by and reads the specials and he doesn’t quite hear. And then instead of asking to repeat, he just immediately looks at his watch. And I thought this is a extremely rich company. This is an amazing device. They’ve put so much production work into making this video into the watch itself.
There’s all this advanced technology and this is the best they could come up with. It just kind of brought me down. I don’t know. I really want some sort of gee whiz innovation here and not having to ask a person in a restaurant to repeat themselves is not necessarily high on my list of problems I need solved right now.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. So yeah, things seem stagnant. There’s improvements, but usually improvements in software or just innovations in software, if you want to call them that, but nothing really big has happened. My phone, I have an iPhone 17, but I got it because my iPhone 13 or whatever, the screen cracked and just went on the fritz and it was time to get a new phone. I was like, well, okay, I’ll just get this one. And there’s really no difference between my 17 and my 13.
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah, exactly. And you mentioned the reason for upgrading too. It just always blows my mind how central the phone is to everyday life and how fragile it is. A lot of us have experiences probably of dropping our phone and it doesn’t break or something like that. But my wife bikes to work and one day it was raining and a little bit of water got into her bike bag and that got into the phone and the phone was ruined and she had to replace it. And I thought our entire lives are on this device that can so quickly be just destroyed. And between the phone breaking and getting it replaced, she can’t log into her bank account, can’t do a number of pretty vital things that we need to do for life. And they’re all sort of on these devices that can break so easily.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I hate that when my phone goes on the fritz and doesn’t work. There’s that period where you can’t do anything because it’s like, all right, I need a text message to get in my bank account because you have to do the two factor authentication or do the authenticator app. It’s like, well, I can’t do that. What am I supposed to do? So yeah, it is convenient to have all that stuff in one place with you all the time, but it’s one single failure point that can just blow your whole life up, make it really frustrating for maybe a few hours or maybe a couple days.
Gabe Bullard:
Oh yeah. Flight delays too. There was one time, I mean many times I’ve been waiting for a flight and it’s delayed and my ticket’s on my phone and my phone is just dwindling and dwindling and dwindling and it’s like 4% power. And I’m like, okay, I need to just go ask them to print out my boarding pass because my phone’s going to die before I get on this plane and that’s going to be a whole other problem.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Well, in the rest of the book, you talk about specific areas of our lives where we’ve had these conveniences introduced to us thanks to technology, typically digital technology. And we think, oh yeah, this should make our life easier and better. But then you explore, well, actually let’s take a look at this. Maybe it’s not. One aspect of our lives is communication. It’s much easier today to communicate with each other than ever. And I feel like at the dawn of the internet, there was this feeling or this promise that by making communication easier, we’d end up connecting more with others. We’d feel more intimate with people, but we’ve all seen that hasn’t happened. We’re all feeling lonelier and angrier than ever. And I think one of the issues is that by eliminating friction, that’s what digital communication does. It reduces friction in communication. It makes our relationships worse.
Why do you think that is?
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah, so I think they did erase a lot of friction and I think some of that friction is valuable, but I think they introduced another type of friction too. And so for me, I text friends all the time. I now live in another country for most of my friends, so I’m sort of constantly in a group chat or having these conversations. But I find that when I’m texting, I really can’t get out everything that I want to say all the time. I don’t want to be sarcastic or ironic because the tone might be misinterpreted and I’m just sort of different in how I engage with text. And I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like as satisfying as actually talking to a person over time because it’s asynchronous, maybe the person takes a while to reply. I can be a little bit neurotic and I start thinking, okay, I’ve clearly offended this person and that’s why they’re not getting back to me.
When in fact, they’re just at work or they’re doing something and can’t look at their phone or they forget about the conversation, that sort of thing. And I think that the friction that ended up being erased was pretty valuable. It’s nice to be in front of a person and having that conversation. You can convey stuff in body language and everything. The friction was finding the time to get together and getting to a place where you can meet. The actual communication, I think it’s so much more efficient and so much smoother just to have a conversation in person and read somebody’s body language and facial expressions and see how they behave in public, all of that. And I think also that the smoothness of communication kind of, I don’t know, I don’t want to project too much and I’m curious what you think on this. I feel like it tends to make us think the worst of everyone.
I’ve been posting some videos to Instagram to explain parts of the book and promote it and everything. Every comment I get, I immediately read as negative. I think the person’s trolling, I think they’re critiquing me in some way. And then I read it and I think like, oh no, this person is just agreeing and bringing up another point. They’re not saying I missed a point. They’re saying like, oh yeah, here’s how I’ve noticed this idea or something like that. But I’ve just sort of internalized this idea that people are just sort of inherently being nasty and I don’t like that that’s kind of how I’m just inherently seeing other people now.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I’ve had that experience too with online communication. I typically view it with a jaundiced eye in the most negative light possible. I don’t know why that is. I wonder what it is about digital communication that makes you do that. I mean, I guess it’s because it’s just so flat. It’s just text on a screen and there’s no, unless you add an emoji or some caveats of what you’re thinking or feeling, you can’t really tell what the person is thinking or feeling. And I think our tendency when there’s uncertainty in anything, we assume the worst.
Gabe Bullard:
Oh yeah. And I don’t know, it just seems like that’s not really a healthy way to go about interacting with the world.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Another way the ease of communication has made our lives more inconvenient is that there’s just so much of it. It’s so easy to communicate, we can do more of it. And that causes all sorts of problems because now we have to manage this inflow of information and you have to juggle different communication baskets that you might have. I know this is a reoccurring hobby horse on the podcast where I complain about it. But I mean, as a dad, it’s amazing the number of apps I have to have in order to get information about my kids doing. So there’s an app for the school and the teachers use this app to communicate the parents about what’s going on at school. And then there’s an app for each individual sports team that my kids are on. And then we have a GroupMe, different GroupMe’s for sports teams and then church groups.
And I have to download all these apps. There’s no choice. You have to do it. And of course I turn off the notifications because I don’t want to get pinged all the time. And so I have to juggle this thing in my head. It’s like, all right, I have to spend 20 minutes at the end of the day or just check these things periodically so I know what’s going on. And we’ve had instances where coaches will at the last minute change the plans for a practice and it’s too late. I didn’t check the thing in time and so now my kid’s not going to make it to the practice. And it’s because it’s just so easy. It’s like, well, yeah, I can change the practice because all the parents will see this at once. And so you don’t have to think about coordination anymore like you used to.
Before, if you’re a coach or something, you’d have to think about the schedule and be very deliberate about it because you’d have to make phone calls. Now you can make these changes the last minute on the fly because, well, I can just send out a GroupMe message. And when it works, it works, but when it doesn’t, it doesn’t.
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah. Yeah. As you were saying that, I was just thinking about, I played soccer when I was young and then refereed soccer for a while in my teen years, and we always had a phone tree where it’s like, alright the coach is going to change practice or there’s a change. The coach calls one person, that person calls another person, that person calls another person. And you have a backup plan and everything, but it’s just like it’s taped to the wall next to the phone or whatever, and it worked. It would be rare that an announcement wouldn’t get out that way. There would just be enough of a community kind of coming together. And it’s not like it was a ton of effort. It’s one person calls one person.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I remember the phone trees. Those were fun. Another thing with these communication apps, they promise that we can meet new people, whether that’s friends or romantic partners more easily, but it hasn’t really worked out that way. Why is it harder to make friends and find potential dates or spouses with our communication apps?
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah. I am fortunate that I met my wife and we started dating and everything before dating apps took off or anything. But yeah, every single person I know or every person who’s been sort of dating, it says it’s gotten worse. And I think part of it is because of what you mentioned. It sort of flattens the experience. And so you’re on an app and you see statistics, you see a profile, you don’t really see a person. They’re just sort of like a product on Amazon or something that people are choosing between. And the other side of that too, you’re not getting the full picture of the person, you’re also not really… There’s this implication that there’s going to be a million more people there. And when you read articles or talk to people who do a lot of dating, one thing they say is they feel like they reject people super fast, either in the app or in person over some of the smallest details because they have this idea of, well yeah, there’s a million other people on the app.
Eventually I’ll get a match. And I think it sort of drives this idea of, oh, we’re going to have this perfect connection right away. And I think that the fact that it’s being done through technology probably suggests that too, that, oh, it’s this high tech app, of course it’s going to work, of course it’s going to connect you to a person right away and you’re going to get along perfectly. And so we go into it with these super high expectations that are never really going to work. I think the other thing too, the apps that are supposed to connect us to find friends and everything, they’re sort of built around this algorithmic similarity that this is what is going to connect you. And when I think about the best friends that I’ve made, we’re not the same type of person. I don’t know if an algorithm would’ve really connected us in any sort of way.
We have a lot of different interests. We have a few things in common as well, but it’s not something that I think I would really be looking for. I don’t want to be friends with a person who’s just like me.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. All right. So our communication is much more convenient and it can be convenient. Like you mentioned earlier, email is much more convenient than writing a letter. A text can be convenient, but if you overdo it, and that’s the problem with convenience, when something’s easy, we want to do more of it. That’s the natural tendency. It just ends up making things more inconvenient for you.
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah, exactly.You start piling these things on top of each other and all of a sudden you realize that you’ve not had an in-person conversation with somebody in a long time. You’ve not left the house in days perhaps because you’re getting everything ordered, you’re working remotely, you’re talking to people. I think that’s the part of it that’s difficult because some people might really benefit from a certain convenience and then not want to give that up. And I don’t want to say, oh, you shouldn’t text, you shouldn’t do this, you shouldn’t do that because everyone’s going to have a different relationship to it. I think the thing is just you got to think about how you’re piling these things up and what you’re cutting out of your life.
Brett McKay:
Going back to our phones, they’ve become these powerful cameras and it’s a camera that we have with us all the time and it’s really easy to take really good looking photos these days. And you think this would be great. Oh, fantastic. I can capture more memories, capture more of my life. But you talk about how this convenience counterintuitively might be making our lives more inconvenient. How so?
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah. So in a few ways, and I love this question because this was one of my favorite parts of the research to dive into, and it sort of broke open how I think about just kind of multi-use devices as well. And so where it started was I just always assumed that digital photography was cheaper than film because you’re not paying to buy film, you’re not paying to get it developed, all of that. And then I saw this photo editor and writer Emily Keegan had posted this story saying that’s not necessarily the case. And the way she thought about it is if you have nothing and you want to take a picture, you could get a camera, a roll of film and pay for processing. You could buy a digital camera, you could buy a phone. And with the film, you’re getting a printed piece of paper that you can pass around, you can make copies of, you can frame it, all of that.
But with the digital device, you’re going to need a data plan. If it’s on your phone, you’re going to need, if you want to do anything other than look at it on your phone, you might need wifi, a computer, a memory card reader, all these different things. And then you can share the photo more widely. You have this great photo, but you’re paying for the device, you’re paying for the data, you’re paying for all these ancillary things. And now a phone can do a lot more than be a camera. So maybe the camera costs nothing, but maybe it costs the entire price of the phone if the camera’s the main thing that you use your phone for. So it’s just sort of impossible to determine what the value of the actual device and that function is. And I think that happens with a lot of tech, but then over time we start to lose the value of anything that the device can do.
So like with photos, when it’s a physical object, there’s something really nice about it. One, it just kind of looks nice, but also you can pass it down, you could save it. All of this, it exists as this physical object. With a digital photo, they’re so fast and easy to take and to share. We’re just sort of awash in photos all the time, constantly looking at photos, constantly seeing images. And I think that that has started to deplete the meaning of images. You can look at the news and see some shocking photographs from around the world, photographs that the equivalent 30, 40, 50 years ago would be the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph that shifts public opinion on an issue on war or something like that. And now we just sort of are constantly scrolling through images. And now with AI and everything like that, manipulation has gotten so much easier.
There’s almost like not a trust of it. And so photos, what used to be and still are depending on what they’re of, these dear valuable things that you would pass down and preserve are just sort of this almost kind of meaningless digital file It passes in front of our eyes thousands of times a day.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I’ve noticed with digital photography with my phone, both my wife and I aren’t really big picture takers, so it hasn’t been a big issue for us being inundated or having our phones just overwhelmed with all these photos. But we’ve got friends that have hundreds of thousands of photos on their iCloud drive. And I’m thinking, how do you even go through that? How do you go through your memories when you have that many? And what do your kids do when you’re dead? Well, I got mom’s iCloud drive. What do you want to do with these photos? And it’s like, well, I guess I don’t want to go through that. I’m just going to delete it. But before, if you had a photo album, okay, look, grandma made this great photo album, curated it. It looks great. We can look at this and enjoy this, but that’s hard to do with digital photography.
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah. And there are tech solutions that come up. I think most of the photo apps now, and there’s TimeHop and everything, they have this memories feature where it resurfaces stuff, but that’s not how our memories work really. Timehop for me is a ton of screenshots of things that I saw online that I though were kind of funny that I sent to a group text. And it’s like I open the app and I scroll through and it’s like, I don’t know. For every one meaningful photo, I’m just reminded of all these kind of pointless digital files I took that aren’t serving any purpose. And then at the same time, I’m like your friends, I have thousands upon thousands of photos. I don’t want to take the time to go through all of those. I barely look at them after I take them a lot of the time or after I send them to somebody versus there was an advantage to getting an envelope full of photos and thinking, all right, well, these are the ones I want to keep and I’m going to set them aside and the others just go in another box that’ll be forgotten about or something like that.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I mean, something that I do every week is on Sunday I go through my camera roll on my iPhone and I delete stuff I don’t need anymore. So yeah, screenshots and just random pictures that I took. And then every few months, my wife and I will go through our photos on our phone and then print out the best ones and she puts them in a photo album. And it’s nice because my kids love it because when they’re bored on a Sunday, they’ll just pull that thing out and they’ll look at pictures when they were a baby, when they were a toddler. I don’t think they would do that with our phones.
Gabe Bullard:
I really like that you’re doing that. I love the intention of doing it and revisiting those because I don’t know, I need to have better digital behavior there. And then I was thinking of the equivalent of if you were getting printed photos and they started piling up that way, you’d eventually think like, all right, I got to do something with these. But it’s so easy to just ignore those files as they sit in cloud storage.
Brett McKay:
Let’s talk about entertainment. You have a whole section about entertainment. So as I mentioned earlier, music, television, movies, easier to access than ever. You can watch a movie on your phone, then you can continue watching it on your smart TV. So why does it feel like our entertainment has gotten worse? I might be speaking for myself. Some people might think, oh, it’s never been better. But then also, here’s another question. Why do I have such a hard time figuring out what to watch on the multiple streaming services that I have? I have this moment every night, I should watch some TV. And I end up not watching anything because I can’t figure out what to watch.
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah. Streaming is for me personally, that’s the biggest disappointment of so much of this tech because it should be great. If you had said to me at any point in the past, hey, there’s going to be an infinite database of music, movies, television, everything, and there’s going to be a super smart robot that tells you what to watch or that learns your taste and recommends things to you, that sounds amazing. I think a lot of these problems though are more of the business side than the tech side. Everything kind of took a different path to just being this streaming thing. On the music side, you have Napster came along and told people that music was free. In fact, you still had to pay for an internet connection, you had to pay for a computer and everything.You’re just paying a tech company. It devastated the music industry.
Apple tries to help with the iTunes store and everything like that. Streaming comes along, but streaming doesn’t just replace buying a CD. Streaming replaces owning a catalog of CDs. It replaces owning an iPod. It’s your library. It’s all the new releases that would be at the record store. It’s the radio, it’s everything. And it’s such a great value for that to pay 10, 12 bucks a month or whatever to get all of that. There’s huge profits for the record companies and the labels and everything, but it’s not trickling down to artists. A lot of artists say, “Hey, we get a third of a cent every time somebody streams one of our songs.” And there’s different debates over why that is and everything, but the money gets split among a bunch of different rights holders. There’s this pro rata system that’s kind of complicated for how everyone gets paid, but it really is leading to artists not getting as much money for many artists as they feel like they deserve for the music that they’re getting and for the listenership they have.
And what that’s translated to is if you want to make money from your music, you have to have millions upon millions of streams. You have to have so many listeners that you can’t really be in a local scene anymore. You can’t be selling CDs at a table after a show, that sort of thing. So you see a lot of artists are trying to go viral on social media or they’re trying to make music that’s going to fit into playlists. And that’s not really how you make great music.That’s how you make something that’s going to sound like everything else. With TV, it’s a little bit different and then movies follow TV, but there was cable before, which was frustrating because it was really expensive. And I think that’s where the convenience of streaming really came in is that Netflix was a lot cheaper to stream than to pay a cable bill.
But the cable business model more and more is looking pretty great because I think Mad Men’s one of the best shows ever made. I was able to watch Mad Men because AMC had the money to produce that in part because they ran ads, but in part because they got all this money from people who were paying for a cable package that included ESPN and the History Channel and all these other things. And at first streaming shows were really good. They were taking risks, but the streamers wanted signups and then they have to make money so they start cutting back. And unlike with cable, you don’t have to watch a streaming service, you just have to pay. And so the goal of a streaming service is not to make new stuff that you’re going to tune in and watch, it’s to just keep you signed up.
And I think that’s why you’re not seeing these big creative swings because to try to make this huge risky movie or this experimental thing or just anything that might be one of these big movies, even if you make a blockbuster, that’s going to do the same for your bottom line on a streaming service as people not watching it basically, unless you get a ton of signups. So it’s just really not an incentive to do anything different. It just sort of encourages doing something that’s the same, doing something that is going to be really easy to consume, really easy to have as a second screen experience while you’re looking at your phone. And there’s more and more conversation about the way streaming shows look because they’re shot to look decent enough on every device or maybe even be clipped to be like vertical video, that sort of thing in clips.
And so I think that that’s one reason why just things don’t seem as good anymore because they’re not really made to be sat down and watched directly and engaged with and thought about in the same way. They’re made to be half ignored or split up and thrown all over the place to try to get more signups or to keep you signed up. And then as for why it’s hard to choose stuff, I think the algorithms aren’t really working to recommend things. I open any of my streaming apps, I’ve got hundreds of options and nothing really seems that appealing.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. With the streaming services, especially for television movies, I’ve noticed that in order to watch the stuff I want, I have to sign up for multiple streaming services. So I might sign up for Hulu because I want to watch this one thing and then I’ve done watching it. I want to delete that. It’s another thing to juggle. I didn’t have to worry about that with cable. And I’m actually probably spending more on streaming services than I was with cable maybe. I haven’t really looked at that. And then I’ve noticed too, even with my own kids in their entertainment consumption, they don’t listen or watch a lot of new stuff. My daughter’s Spotify playlist is mostly stuff from 2000 and before. And then my son, the shows he watches, he’s watching Suits right now. And then he’s been watching Friends, but I’m like, okay, Friends wasn’t that good, but whatever.
And Seinfeld too, and he’s not watching any of the new stuff. I’m like, why aren’t you watching any new stuff? He’s like, well, it’s not very good.
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah. And I think that’s the way that a lot of these streamers keep people signed up is they have this deep catalog of stuff. And what kind of blows my mind is the business model around reruns. So I remember as a kid watching a news show where they were talking about Everybody Loves Raymond was about to have its hundredth episode and they were saying that some milestone in TV because that means it’s enough episodes to sell for syndication, which is a way just to keep a show going because all these other people are going to pay money to have the reruns. And that sort of basic scheme seems to just dominate streaming. I forget the exact figure, how much Warner Brothers paid to get friends on HBO and how much, I think Peacock runs The Office now. They’re paying huge sums for these reruns, more than they might be putting into an original show to have it.
And then you look at the ratings. I mean, yeah, everything’s like your son. Everybody’s kind of watching these old shows. I know there’s a remake of it of Little House on the Prairie, but the ’70s, ’80s Little House on the Prairie was at one point, I think if it were a streaming show by viewed minutes, it would be the fourth most popular original show. It’s more popular than all these shows being made by the original streamers. And I think that’s just because it’s more valuable. Streamers know it’s a tested thing. It’s something somebody’s just going to watch. They can start recommending it. But I don’t know, that seems really bleak.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I want my kids to have their version of new movies. I remember in high school, I’d go to the movies all the time. I remember 1989 was a great year of movies and that doesn’t really happen all that often for my kids. And I want them to have that. And the same with music. I want them to have their version of Weezer or Cake or whatever, and I don’t want them having to have to listen to Weezer and Cake because that’s the good stuff.
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah.
Brett McKay:
Let’s talk about one more thing that you highlight in the book where we’ve gotten more convenience, but maybe it’s made our life more inconvenient and that’s food. So we can have food delivered to our home from pretty much any restaurant in town with a tap of the button. And the pandemic just exacerbated that because everyone had a shift to delivery mode when we were doing stay at home and all that stuff. How does this convenience end up not being very convenient?
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah. I mean, one, the food’s just not as good. Going to a restaurant is great. Somebody comes and brings you food that you asked for that they just cooked. It’s sort of marvelous and delivery is kind of cool and it’s convenient that you don’t have to go, but this food isn’t really made to travel. One thing I looked at is pizza and American Chinese food were the two big delivery foods for the longest time. And restaurateurs had figured out how to make containers that would help this travel, all of that, which didn’t really happen with a lot of delivery food. And there was this big rush in the pandemic and all that. So you just have an experience where it’s not really faster. It’s certainly not cheaper. It’s way more expensive because the restaurant has to upcharge to pay the fee to the app, they have to pay the driver, they have to pay for the container, all of that.
So it’s not cheaper and it’s maybe a little bit easier, but it’s not a better experience with a lot of this food. And for a restaurant, that’s a big problem too because now customers expect that they’re going to offer delivery. They might have to change their menus. They might have to do any number of things to try to appeal to people on an app that isn’t going to be as appealing if you’re inside the restaurant either. And so you go to sit down in a restaurant and you’re at war with the people who are getting delivery, you get delivery and you’re at war with the people who are going to sit down.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I had this experience this weekend actually, and I just finished up your book and saw this was top of mind. My family and I went for some pasta at a local restaurant, Italian restaurant here in town. It’s basically like local Olive Garden. So not great Italian food, but it’s cheap, relatively cheap, decent, and you could get it fast. And so we thought we’d go in, we’d get our food fast. We’re just ordering pasta, so just throw some sauce, put a protein in there, you’re good. We go in and we ordered our appetizer, which is pepperoni bread, and our food at the same time because we were ready to order. And it took 40 minutes to get our appetizer and then another 20 or 30 minutes to get our meal. And I was like, “What is taking so long?” The restaurant wasn’t packed, but then I looked over to the kitchen because there was one of those kitchens where it’s open so you can see the chefs cooking and you just see this big stack of delivery orders.
And I’m like, “Yeah, they’re probably just working on all those to-go orders from the apps and I’m waiting on that.”
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah. And it’s same thing with Starbucks, you’re ordering on the app, you kind of cut in line in front of somebody who’s been waiting because those online orders are always coming in. I also experienced this. There’s a pizza place I like in the city I used to live in, and I noticed all of a sudden it just didn’t taste the same. The crust was different when we’d gotten some pizza and I though, oh, maybe they just had an off night, something like that. And so a few weeks later we get it again. Still not as good, tastes different in every way, different texture to the crust and all that. And we though, maybe there’s some sort of change. And then I though, you know what? Let me check something. And I put the address into Google and immediately five restaurants came up and it’s like, oh, to even make their rent, they’re now functioning as a ghost kitchen for four other things.
And the reason the pizza’s not as good is because three of their other restaurants are offering flatbreads. And I’m like, okay, yeah, they’re just making a bunch of flatbread dough and offering it. And then certain things were just all the same. It was kind of the same 10 ingredients just repurposed in different ways, but it was just such a bummer because it’s like, okay, this pizza place, one, the wait to get a pizza is extremely long. And two, the pizza’s not as good anymore. And I don’t know, it was such a downer to experience.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Another way these food delivery apps, not only for restaurant food, but for groceries as well, can make life more inconvenient is that it adds more people to the transaction. So usually when you go to a restaurant, it’s just you and the restaurateur. But when you have the app, the delivery app, you have the app provider. They’re now a middleman between you and the restaurant. And then you have the app delivery driver. It’s a third person. And so at any one of those points, things could go wrong. And so if your order is wrong or doesn’t show up, who do you go to? I mean, before you just go to the restaurant, but the restaurant will say, “Well, no, we handed it off to the driver.” So I can’t get in contact directly to the driver, so I have to go through the app and I wait for that.
It just makes things complicated. And then you also have issues, the app services, these app drivers, they’re just kind of strangers. I mean, they’re 1099 employees, or not employees, but contractors. And for the most part, it’s great. They do a great job, but then every now and then you get kind of a rogue guy. We had one guy said the food was delivered and we looked out the door and the food wasn’t there. And then we checked our text messages and the guy had taken a picture of himself with a smirk on his face eating our food. We’re like, “What the heck?” So yeah, I mean, that’s another way. I mean, it just mucks things up, makes things more complicated.
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah. One time, geez, we’re looking like 10 years ago now. It was my second or third time ever, and then one of the last times using a food delivery app, we had ordered and we had people over and everything and just ordered some snacks for everybody to eat. And it wasn’t showing up and it wasn’t showing up. And eventually people were going home. And then the delivery pulled up and the person had a sticker for every possible service, every possible ride share, that sort of thing. And that was it. He was picking up rideshare rides, he was dropping off food. He was sort of doing all this different gig work all at once. And not to default him because he’s probably got to do that. He’s got to make the money. The economy is so tough and that’s what he’s got to do. I’m not faulting him at all, but it’s just like, man, what a bleak world this is where it’s like, oh yeah, I could get this delivery, but at the same time, the gig economy is such that the person who’s delivering it also has to be functioning as a taxi for two different taxi providers and making 10 other deliveries at the same time.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. All right. So convenience can be inconvenient if we do too much of it or if we just do it in the wrong way, don’t think about it right. Let’s talk about how we can embrace some more friction in our lives while still holding onto the conveniences that really do make life better. You highlight some questions that the late Wendell Berry, the famous agrarian author, proposed asking yourself before you start using a new type of technology. Can you walk us through those questions?
Gabe Bullard:
I’ve got the essay here on my desk. I’ve sort of kept it here as a guide. So it’s from this essay that he wrote in the 80s called Why I’m No Going to Buy a Computer. And he basically is saying he writes with pencil and paper, he has this process, it works. So he has these rules for what a new tool should do. And he says it should be cheaper. It should be at least as small as whatever it replaces. It should do work that’s better. It should use less energy. It should use some form of solar energy or energy from the body. It should be able to be repaired by a person of ordinary intelligence, as he writes, provided they have the right tools. You should be able to buy it and get it fixed as close to home as possible. It should be from a small privately owned business or someone who ill take it back to maintain it and repair it.
And then also that it shouldn’t replace or disrupt anything good that already exists. And this includes family and community relationships. And that was how he closed out this essay. And then he wrote a response to it a little bit later based on some letters that were written to Harper’s when it was published there. But yeah, those were his rules for adopting a new tool. And I use a computer. I’m talking to you now on a computer. There’s a lot of digital devices and everything, but I find that list really helpful in thinking about when a new convenience comes along, am I going to adopt it or not? Does it fit into my life in these ways?
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And you kind of developed your own list of questions for yourself as well, correct?
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah. Yes. I love a list-based ethos. I also quote Deere Rahms, the industrial designer, he had a list of principles of good design. So sort of inspired by these two ideas, I have this list of questions. What does this save me? What does it cost me? What does it replace? What problem does it solve? How will I be able to stop using it? What is it doing for me? And is it necessary? Or sorry, who is providing it and is it necessary? And those are sort of the questions inspired by Wendell Berry, inspired by Dieter Rahms that I recommend all of us kind of ask before we bring something into our lives because maybe a convenience comes along and it’s exactly what you need to solve a problem, but maybe it’s just something that you do because it seems like we need to be moving into the future or something.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, just be more intentional about it because I think the default is just like, “Ah, well, it’s new. I’m going to get it.” It’s like, “Well, maybe not.”
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah. And I think in that intentionality too, doing a deep level of thought of just kind of game out what is this going to do? Because as I was writing the book and researching all these different conveniences, sometimes things kind of went out of hand in a way where it’s like, oh, I don’t know that I would’ve predicted that. I don’t know, that getting all my news from Facebook might lead to a complete shift in the political stability of the Western world or something. There were plenty of other factors in that, of course, but just kind of thinking of these little effects, it might be hard to predict, but I don’t think that we’re necessarily inclined to do a lot of that prediction. Thinking about cause and effect and how our lives are going to change is not something that can be comfortable to do a lot of times.
But I think when you see a new piece of technology, think, okay, what’s going to happen if I do this? What’s going to be day one? What’s going to be day 10? What’s going to be year three of using this? And do I really want that to happen? And sometimes you might approach something with a pretty rosy idea and the more you think about it and the more you think about what you’re going to lose or what you’re going to give up and how things are going to change, the less rosy it starts to look.
Brett McKay:
All right. So just be more intentional about the conveniences you integrate into your life, but sort of practical like brass tacks. What are some everyday things people can start doing today to embrace a little bit more friction and push back against convenience slop in their lives?What are some things that you’re doing? Kind of give people some ideas.
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah. So one thing I started doing, thinking about how much time and energy I’m saving is just kind of taking stock at the end of the day of like, okay, what do I really need to do? What have I done? How much energy do I really have? And thinking about what I did. So even I feel like I should be because I write, but I’m not a very good journaler. I’ve never been able to maintain keeping a journal, but I have sort of started at the end of the day taking stock and thinking about, all right, what was really saved with all this technology I used? Where did my time go? That’s one of them. I think the other thing is if you’re not happy with something like with streaming or something like that, you don’t like the selection, you feel like you can’t make a choice, just get rid of it.You’re not going to overturn a whole system by giving up one thing by being one person who does it, but you’re going to make your life better.
And potentially if a lot of people do it, that’s how change happens. A lot of people kind of banding together. But just in your personal life, think about, do you really enjoy scrolling that much or would you rather have a different experience? Do you enjoy the things that you’re watching, that you’re listening to, the food delivery and all of that and think maybe it’s worth just a little bit of extra money or a little bit of extra effort especially to do something, go out to the restaurant and set a delivery. And over time, I think your habits will just start to change. I’ve seen a lot of my habits start to change the less I’ve relied on certain things, particularly e-commerce. I’ve just found a different way of doing things that it really isn’t that much less convenient. It’s pretty easy to be able to go into a store and get what I need based on where I live, which I’m fortunate about.
I think just the more you start breaking yourself of some of these little habits, the more a more productive habit starts to form and then the more you find that it’s just more enjoyable.
Brett McKay:
Well, Gabe, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Gabe Bullard:
Yeah, you can go to againstconvenience.com or you can go to gabebullard.com.
Brett McKay:
All right. Well Gabe Bullard, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure
Gabe Bullard:
Pleasure. Hey, thank you. This was great.
Brett McKay:
My guest today was Gabe Bullard. He’s the author of the book Against Convenience. It’s available wherever you can get books. You can learn more information about his work at his website, gabebullard.com. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
