The hard problem of convenience

‘Let's chat over lunch' or 'shall we walk-and-talk?'. These are the signs that someone wants you to know that they are capital-B Busy!

For knowledge workers, or the laptop classes, busyness is social currency. If you are busy, you are important. You have status and your time is in high demand. Busyness is a marker for a strong work ethic, and for talent. Busyness, in this context has an unbreakable link to self-worth.

When your worth has a direct relationship to how busy you are, it makes sense to stay as busy as possible. Working late, being available on email out of hours, catching up on tasks over the weekend, feeling the need to pretend at work that you are not a parent at home, when in reality parenthood is intrinsic to who are  – the more you hand yourself over to busyness, the more value you have to whoever is paying you, the more value you feel you have in general. In a competitive market where there are more university educated knowledge workers than jobs for them, there's always a nagging threat that if you don't look busy enough, someone else will.

And yes, there are those who take it to absurd extremes but there are plenty of regular people who get caught up in the busyness paradigm without having planned it that way.

The busyness factor creates the perfect conditions for convenience. With so many people short on time, it stands to reason that products and services step in to help. Food delivery, car services, dog walking, nannies, laundry services, travel, home delivery of everything from tampons to live insects, home delivery today, serviced apartments, goods subscriptions, soothing luxuries, virtual assistants. All these conveniences release the pressure for those whose self-worth is so tied to busyness that to cook would be to admit that they were expendable. The work of living is passed on to those with lower pay and fewer options. Carbon footprints go up, waste increases, and still, no one ever really feels like they are on top of things.

Add in a couple of dependents – children, for example – and the trappings of convenience become an essential tool in the family tool box. Some families I know, where either there is only one parent, or where there are two but both work, simply cannot run without a conveyor belt of goods and services delivered by third parties and designed for convenience – amazon deliveries, meal deliveries, car services, abundant toys and entertainment, after school clubs, gym memberships and health supplements to make us feel better about all of it. Green labelling is another time saving deployment. Another shortcut to feeling better about oneself.

Capitalism and convenience work together in near perfect symbiosis. The laptop classes are so busy making money, they have to spend that money buying back the basics of existence.

In the hierarchy of Global North suffering, the laptop classes are not doing badly compared to low paid workers in the gig economy, for example. But that doesn’t mean that they are doing well out of capitalism either. The workers who provide conveniences barely survive on their share of these spends, because most of that money flows not downwards, but upwards. Someone is benefitting, but it’s not your Deliveroo driver.

It's easy to make enemies of those caught in the convenience trap – you only need to read The Sustainability Class to see how. Calling out greenwashed goods as nothing but virtue signalling and blaming this type of worker/consumer creates a convenient bogeyman. But making this group of people the ‘bad guys’ misses a crucial point about self-worth and about choice. It assumes that they have more choice than they do. No, they don’t suffer the same precarity and poverty as those who provide conveniences, but while it’s nice to think that the solution is simply that they stop, in reality the problem and its solutions are far more complex.

The hard problem of convenience is that while it must stop  – it's extra fuel, packaging, disposable stuff, and waste and relies on badly treated, under-paid casual labour – finger pointing and shaming the people who rely on convenience is not a strategy.

These are the battle grounds in which I increasingly find myself. As an ex-knowledge worker who has come to understand that capitalism fuels climate breakdown, I feel like I can see all the reasons convenience needs to end, and all the reasons why in our current situation it will not. I understand that preaching to others is not my role; not at all. I also know that me on my own, living a pristine, green life in the woods and weaving my own hair shirt is not going to change anything either.

In an ideal scenario, there would be no need to look or act busy because we would all have robust self-esteem and the financial freedom to work less in an economy that doesn't strive for endless growth. While we do the hard work trying to make those things a reality, the best I can do is talk about busyness and convenience with the people I know in a way that reflects my true feelings about it – that busyness for its own sake is not something to be proud of; that other ways to find self-worth are possible. That if you are able avoid it – and not everybody can – it has never been more urgent that you do.

And then there is the tough job of building real communities, through which we can ease the pressure that capitalism creates. For those people who are trapped by conveniences that rely on the exploitation of the people who provide them, what can be done to break the cycle? How can we share the burdens of capitalism as they present themselves outside the workplace in a way that feels empowered, workable and positive? How can we reboot the image of community so that it starts to look like a real, workable alternative to the easy independence of buying and using more, rather than yet another drain on time, or a hobby for local busy-bodies?

There is no single solution to our reliance in the global north on the trappings of convenience, and if there was one, it wouldn't be shaming people. That is the hard problem of convenience. The hard solutions must come next.

Photo by Alex Sheldon