The Problem With Making Life Too Easy

There is a peculiar thing that happens when life starts going well.

You begin by wanting to make things easier.

Then, before you know it, you have spent half your income making sure that absolutely nothing mildly annoying ever happens to you.

And this is where things get interesting.

Because inconvenience, it turns out, may actually be good for you.

I know. Ridiculous.

We have spent the last 50 years inventing machines, apps, services and enormous corporations specifically designed to prevent us from having to do anything ourselves.

You don't need to cook. Someone will bring food to your door.

You don't need to walk. The car is outside.

You don't even need to go to the supermarket. Someone will bring the supermarket to you.

And if the delivery driver takes seven minutes longer than expected, civilisation is apparently on the verge of collapse.

The Great Human Quest to Do Absolutely Nothing

Money is brilliant.

It can solve genuine problems. It can stop you worrying about whether the washing machine can be repaired, whether the electricity bill can be paid or whether you can afford to replace the tyre that has just exploded on the motorway.

This is all very useful.

But then something strange happens.

You earn more.

So you buy a nicer car.

Then a nicer house.

Then someone to clean the nicer house.

Then someone to maintain the garden.

Then someone to organise the people who clean the house and maintain the garden.

Eventually you have achieved the ultimate goal of modern civilisation:

You are no longer required to do anything.

And this sounds wonderful until you discover that you have also become completely useless.

The smallest interruption to your perfectly lubricated existence becomes a national emergency.

The cleaner is ill.

The Wi-Fi is down.

The restaurant has run out of your favourite wine.

The hotel room has the wrong pillows.

And suddenly you're behaving like someone has just announced that the North Sea has evaporated.

The Trouble With Removing Every Bump

Think about a car.

If you drive a modern luxury car, it will do almost everything for you.

It will keep you in your lane.

It will brake for you.

It will warn you about cars you haven't noticed.

It will tell you when you're tired.

It will tell you where to go.

Soon enough, I suspect it will simply refuse to let you drive because it has decided you're not emotionally prepared for the roundabout ahead.

All very clever.

But there is a problem.

If the car does everything, the driver stops learning.

And life works rather like this.

If you constantly remove every bit of difficulty, you don't become stronger.

You become less accustomed to difficulty.

It's like never lifting anything heavier than a takeaway menu and then being surprised when a suitcase destroys your spine.

We need a certain amount of friction.

Not because suffering is inherently wonderful. It isn't.

Nobody wakes up and thinks, "Splendid. The washing machine has broken. What a character-building experience."

But some inconvenience keeps us connected to reality.

The Holiday That Went Wrong

Think about your best holidays.

Oddly, they are rarely the ones where absolutely nothing went wrong.

You remember the holiday where the weather was perfect, the hotel was flawless and every restaurant reservation happened exactly as planned.

Fine.

You probably don't remember much else.

But the holiday where the airline lost your luggage, the rental car was a tiny three-cylinder thing that sounded like a lawnmower and you accidentally drove 40 kilometres in the wrong direction?

That one stays with you.

You laugh about it years later.

Why?

Because something happened.

There was friction.

There was uncertainty.

You had to improvise.

You had to solve problems.

You were actually participating in the experience rather than merely consuming it.

Convenience Has a Hidden Bill

This is the bit we don't usually talk about.

Every convenience has a benefit.

But sometimes it has a hidden cost.

Get food delivered and you save time.

Fine.

Do it every night and you've lost the habit of cooking.

Take the lift every time and you save effort.

Do it for 20 years and stairs suddenly look like an Everest expedition.

Pay someone to solve every little problem and eventually you stop knowing how to solve problems.

The bill doesn't arrive immediately.

That's why we don't notice it.

The cost accumulates quietly.

Then something genuinely difficult happens.

And suddenly you discover that your highly optimised life has the structural integrity of a chocolate teapot.

A Little Bit of Deliberate Difficulty

I'm not suggesting we should abandon modern civilisation and start washing our clothes in a river.

There is no prize for making life unnecessarily miserable.

If you can afford a washing machine, buy one.

If you can afford a comfortable car, have one.

And if someone wants to deliver a pizza to your front door while you're watching television, frankly, I see no reason to involve the police.

The point is different.

Don't remove every inconvenience simply because you can.

Occasionally take the stairs.

Cook something.

Drive somewhere without having the entire journey dictated by a computer.

Stand in a queue without immediately reaching for your phone.

Go somewhere without a detailed itinerary.

Take the slightly uncomfortable option occasionally.

Do something that makes you wonder whether you've made a terrible mistake.

Because there is a useful distinction between making life easier and making yourself incapable of dealing with life when it isn't easy.

The Real Luxury

Perhaps the greatest luxury isn't having a life in which nothing goes wrong.

It's having a life in which something can go spectacularly wrong and you can simply shrug and say:

"Right. What do we do now?"

That is resilience.

And resilience doesn't come from avoiding problems.

It comes from occasionally having to deal with them.

So by all means enjoy the air conditioning, the food delivery, the automatic gearbox, the heated seats and the increasingly ridiculous number of buttons on your coffee machine.

But every now and then, make life slightly harder on purpose.

Walk somewhere.

Fix something.

Cook something.

Get lost.

Wait.

Carry your own suitcase.

Talk to a stranger.

Take the road that isn't the fastest.

Because if every moment of your life is perfectly smooth, perfectly efficient and perfectly convenient, you may eventually discover something rather uncomfortable.

You've made life so easy that you've removed the bits worth remembering.

And frankly, that sounds exhausting.