Suffering in a World of Convenience

Somehow we’ve sleepwalked into a world of convenience. We can order groceries on demand, find partners to hook up with on our phones, and now have robots that will cook food for us. Every attempt to make the world a little more convenient equates to every person becoming a little less competent.

An overly convenient world does not endow us with the traits we need to persevere in life, namely grit and resilience. The proverbial rich-kid who grows up with a silver spoon in their mouth is miserable because they’ve been denied the ability to grow through struggles. In the absence of struggle, the mind will begin to consume itself.

This isn’t a new phenomenon either. The Buddha was the original rich kid, having escaped from the luxuries of his palace so that he could know what it would be like to be poor. After being away from his spoiled existence for so long, he came to the realization that a rich life and a poor one both entail suffering.

It’s ostensibly more preferable to cry yourself to sleep in silk bed sheets rather than a cardboard box, yet the reality of our existence is the same. To suffer is to be human.

I’ve been grappling with the idea of necessary and unnecessary suffering. People who suffer from debilitating anxiety disorders have an overactive amygdala that misinterprets innocuous life events as being emotionally salient. These events are often misinterpreted due to our habituation to familiarity. In other words, over long periods of exposure, we’ve grown accustomed to the comfort zone and averse to anything outside of it.

Is an overactive amygdala a product of a world of convenience? If that point were true, that would be to say that our convenient lifestyles and aversion to suffering are making us increasingly more sensitive to anything we’re unfamiliar with. A person who limits their life experience by spending most of their days in front of a computer instead of exposing themselves to the world outside becomes more habituated to comfort in an interesting way.

Let’s take the accessibility of information and multi-tasking as an example. The fact that we have an unlimited supply of information at our fingertips 24/7/365 means that we can get whatever, wherever, whenever (www.) Coupled with this facet of the internet is the phenomenon that we have a lower threshold for boredom, meaning that we will consume one piece of information online and move to another one before we are finished.

This isn’t to say that it’s all social media’s fault either. Human beings are naturally inclined toward the path of least resistance, similar to how we seek to make our lives as efficient as possible. We want everything, but have to limit ourselves to what is immediately accessible and retrievable. Our neuroanatomy is evolving, albeit at a slower rate than at which innovation is progressing.

Our tolerance for the speed at which information is delivered to us is lower, just as we expect our loved ones to respond to our messages as quickly as possible.

We are creating a world where we are becoming more and more dependent on technology to cope with the unbearable reality around us. This is creating a generation of incompetent humans who not only struggle to deal with their own emotions, but also to understand that reality doesn’t deliver the same results that a high-speed connection does.

A world of over-convenience creates unprecedented externalities. Choosing convenience over discomfort on a regular basis leads to an ever decreasing comfort zone, which limits the amount of novel experiences you’re able to subject yourself to.

To break free and experience the other side of fear, we must move beyond the realm of convenience and willingly expose ourselves to things that we are afraid of. This is the basis of exposure therapy, one of the most commonly practiced methods for treating anxiety disorders.

The other side of fear is freedom, yet the difficulty of reaching it is what truly makes it liberating.