![]() Couple these web-based interactions and services with email, text and smartphone and convenience goes through the roof. Shopping and deliveries banking and financial services selling and trading entertainment, gaming and gambling travel and accommodation bookings training, education and coaching bookkeeping and tax returns video-conferencing online registrations, applications and other forms the list goes on and on. You can now pretty much do anything online from the comfort of your home or work. How convenient is that!? When online banking matured people started asking why weren’t other services online. You could shop online and get it delivered to your door. However, it wasn’t long before these basic information services developed into more commercial practices offering speed and convenience. The invention of the internet was intended to provide a vehicle for the dissemination of information and a platform for sharing and collaboration. Personal computers gave people a tool that would make work, study and play much more effortless. In spite of this back-to-the-land revolution, in the 1980’s the rise of computer systems, and in particular, the advent of the personal computer, brought another wave of convenience to grip society. They wanted to add their own value to their lives as unique individuals. These free-thinkers wanted to ‘take the value-added back’ as one of their heroes, E.F. Even though it might not be as easy, self-sufficiency was perceived to be more vital and freeing than being yoked to the consumerist lifestyle. ![]() The counterculture was precipitated by individuals needing to express themselves, to live deliberately, and to live in harmony with nature instead of trying to suppress it. However, by the late 1960s convenience started to mean standardisation and conformity, for many people. The first wave of convenience brought by technological advancements in the first half of the last century included the automobile, electric lights, fridges, washing machines, supermarkets, drive-throughs, telephones, televisions, TV meals, processed food, and many other innovations. They realise that the easy way is not necessarily the best way, indeed it often isn’t. There have always been those who resist convenience and ease, sometimes out of stubbornness, but also because they see a threat to their sense of freedom and identity. Our character is partly expressed in the time and effort we put into the tasks, projects and pursuits we undertake – whether by duty or by desire. But physical work is not always distasteful, indeed it is often rewarding. The desire for convenience is often founded on the distaste of physical work. If people spend their time seeking ease they will tend to become more unhealthy, complacent, isolated, entrapped and unfulfilled. Designed to free us, convenience can become counter-productive, and in the end, subtly capture us in its stupefying web. With its promise of comfort and ease, convenience attempts to eradicate all sorts of troubles, irritations and challenges however it is those very things that can help give meaning to life. Some convenience can certainly be good, but too much convenience is certainly bad. Our economic system is geared to providing ever more convenience and ‘value-added’.
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