Itâs 8:37 PM and you are just out of the shower after a hectic work day. You go to the kitchen and skim through the fridge to find something that is eatable; there is nothing. You curse yourself for not getting groceries last week. A notification pops up: â60% off on your next order,â from a food delivery app. You think thatâs a good deal and scroll for the next half hour trying to find something that is tasty yet affordable; the latter being the deciding factor. You finally place your order and see a 40-minute delivery time. You hop onto the sofa and scroll through a catalogue of hundreds of tv-shows and movies to kill those 40 minutes. And when it is finally out for delivery, you see the delivery personâs name and text them to hurry up, as if they are not already being pressured by the deadlines and the risk of losing the âspeed-deliveryâ tip. They wait at your door, you enter a few digits and they leave, no smiles exchanged, no âthank you.â The food is not anything like you saw on the app, it is banal and you have to put on another movie to distract yourself from the fact that you are eating it.
This is how you live. A future where you donât even need to step out of your home for something as basic as getting groceries. Convenience economy has learned that keeping you indoors is so profitable that companies are willing to burn a shit-load of money just so you install their app and get addicted to it. They have realized that convenience is the most profitable product any company can have.
When was the last time you went to a cinema without knowing a single thing about the movie you are going to watch? Now you buy subscriptions to 3 different platforms, scroll through 10 new tv-shows, read 100 reviews and see a dozen trailers, get decision fatigue and default to the same comfort show.
Even music has been reduced to a subscription product, you pay a small fee and entire history of human recorded sounds is at your fingertips, no trip to the record store down the road, no fear of whether you will like the album that you bought with money you saved for weeks. Donât like a song? skip it, there are thousand others to choose from. Oh, and skipping is a premium feature. And your music taste is more or less tuned to maximize profit for the record label and the service provider, not you, not the artist. And there is a non-zero chance you might be listening to an AI generated song without even knowing it.
You donât buy movie tickets; you buy monthly subscriptions. Groceries and household essentials arrive at your doorstep in cardboard boxes, packed by humans in a warehouse you donât even know the address of, donât have money to buy it up-front? donât worry you can always do Pay in 4.
Want to talk to a friend about your recent breakup? you canât, social media has made the perception that you canât rely on your friends for emotional support because it is âinappropriate,â instead you should talk to an AI chatbot that doesnât even have a heart which can fathom grief or love or any other emotion.
The companies disguise the high fees as convenience to make you feel you are saving time, but whatâs the use of saving time if all it does is buy you more work? The saved minutes donât give you more time so you can listen more to your spouse or lie one more hour in the grass instead you squeeze one more client call, one more episode, one more scroll, and slowly you end up with a daily life that has been poisoned by things that you donât really need and honestly donât care about.
As more and more people prefer to stay home, Third places like parks, laundromats, open-mic venues, cinemas, arcades, etc. slowly die. You no longer bump into unfamiliar faces who share the same interests as you, you donât feel the warmth of people brushing past each other as everyone tries to figure out where the exit gate is, you never get to know that friend of your friend, you stop forming new bonds. As a result, ideas and experiences do not disseminate as easily and freely as they once did; instead, you get confined to a small pool and echo your own thoughts that are shaped by companies who want to monetize every second of your living time.