All inconveniences are not made equal.
Note: This is also available on Substack. As of now, I am also posting on Substack but at some point, I will likely switch over entirely to my own website. For now, I will be linking to my Substack as well.
The seduction of a frictionless life
After two years of doing qualitative research across brands in India, one trend has emerged again and again – everyone wants life to be smoother, faster, easier. Convenience is not a perk, it is an expectation.
But of course, did I really need research to highlight this for me? And is this necessarily restricted to India?
I take a look at my own behaviour and of those around me (physically and online) and it’s easy to see what we are habituated to convenience everywhere. How could we not be? An assortment of OTT apps hosts more media than you could even imagine at your fingertips. Payments are one QR-code scan-and-pay away – you don’t even need to see the cash move. Restaurants bring delicious food to your doorstep in thirty minutes. Quick commerce apps let you buy forgotten items – and even just do your entire grocery shopping – with everything delivered home within ten minutes.
Note: If you’re not Indian / don’t live in India – please take a look at our instant delivery apps like Blinkit and Instamart. I know there are platforms like Instacart that deliver groceries in an hour, but the ten-minute delivery is a phenomenon still unique to India.
All so easy, all so nice, all so conveniently handed to us on a platter. Convenience is something we are all striving towards.
Don’t take my tone to be preachy or holier-than-thou. I saw a tweet that effectively captures the tone of what I am writing here.
I love ease. One of the ways my neurodivergent brain assesses tasks is by how many steps there are. My ultimate pursuit in life is always to reduce steps for any task that annoys me. So of course, it’s nice to order food in because I simply cannot cook a fancy enough meal. Supermarkets overwhelm me with their lights and smells and sounds – so I do love my online shopping. I don’t think all these conveniences are bad. I get it.
The problem is not convenience. The problem is the habit of convenience. Because once it becomes a habit, it creeps in everywhere.
A text instead of a call. An Instagram reel or a Snapchat streak instead of a text. Algorithms dictating your next movie, show, song, or book.
I remember being on the phone for hours on end – long conversations on the landline that stretched the span of the night without even realising the sun had come up. No agenda, no distractions, just endless chatter. The friction of sneaking to the phone, the inconvenience of staying up just to talk – all of it has been reduced to notifications on a cellphone and lost its value. Perhaps the absence of friction is what has done this – diminished the value of a real connection. We see the flurry of notifications, we’re overwhelmed, and we know we could text or call any time we want – but we don’t. Because it’s so easy to do in theory, we don’t do it at all.
So with the ease and convenience and all this precious time saved from everything being frictionless, the question to ask ourselves is – what are we losing?
What is inconvenience?
I think it’s important to define inconvenience in this context.
Inconvenience is the effort we don’t want to make, but we can. We have the physical, emotional, financial, or mental capacity to make the effort, but we would rather not do it.
It’s forgoing a workout just because you don’t feel like going to the gym. It’s avoiding a walk to the nearest grocery store for a forgotten item because it’s easier to have it delivered home. It’s avoiding that course you’ve been meaning to take because you’ll have to study over the weekend.
It’s a small resistance. It’s friction. It’s not survival mode – it’s just stretching out a bit beyond your comfort zone.
We need to be aware of this because inconvenience isn’t always what it seems. We have to be deeply aware that some things for some people are not just inconveniences, they are structural weights that slow them down – shaped by variables like poverty, caste, gender, disability, or neurodivergence. Something that I can achieve by simply “trying harder” is someone else’s everyday act of survival. I don’t want to romanticize this.
I am speaking about the aspects where we have the capacity to choose. I am speaking about the areas where the world and its systems are not stacked against you and so, you have the luxury of choosing whether or not you will be inconvenienced.
Why bother being inconvenienced?
Why indeed? Why choose the harder path when the easier one is right in front of us?
I feel we tend to misuse the word “boundaries” often. I think it’s worthwhile to consider when boundaries simply become barriers. Boundaries are supposed to protect you while letting you grow, become your best and truest self. But when you restrict yourself to the point of only building convenience into your system, you’re locking yourself into a permanent comfort zone and stunting your growth. That’s not a boundary, that’s a barrier.
Let me contextualize with examples from my life that may resonate with you.
Inconvenienced by my body
There was a period in my life, shortly after my undergraduate studies, when I was truly following some of the healthiest practices of my life. Eating healthy, working out and staying active, doing yoga, mental peace – the works. Yet, something odd happened. I put on a lot of weight very quickly. I am talking twenty odd kilograms in about three months, with seemingly no additional intake of food and consistent physical activity. I was frustrated. The picture of me from my convocation day and the person I saw in the mirror no longer looked the same. I was frustrated because I really believed my body owed me better for how well I was taking care of it.
As it turns out, I was suffering from hypothyroidism as a consequence of a medicine I was taking for bipolar disorder. The doctor ordered the test, saw the result, and changed the medicine. But my resentment lingered.
Years later, I ignored my body entirely – choosing to prioritise work, play, and social life over it all the time. This time when it fell apart, I resented it for not holding up. I didn’t like it for how it looked and now I didn’t like it for what it did.
The truth is, my body is inconvenient to take care of sometimes. Instead of coming at it with shame for how I looked or anger for how it responded, I needed to acknowledge how far it has brought me and take care of it. I am aware of my own hypermobility and troubled relationship with food, I am aware of the limitations these bring me. And now, it is up to me to do the inconvenient work of supporting my body through these limitations so I can have a healthy relationship with it. Carve out time for physiotherapy. Move more. Portion my meals better.
I am better off for being inconvenienced.
Inconvenienced in marriage
I married my best friend. We were long-distance best friends for eight years and a long-distance couple for two years before we got married and finally had no long distances between us. One can say it took us a lot of inconvenience to get here, but what I am referring to is a bit different.
Living together after having spending approximately ten non-consecutive weeks in person in the course of a decade is difficult. We are different people. We live differently. And it shows.
I can be snarky and sarcastic in arguments. I want to have the last word always. I don’t want to back down on what I want because it feels weak.
But I love him and I know he loves me so I had to do the uncomfortable work of unlearning. I had to be constructive in my responses. I had to know when I needed to stop. I had to know when compromise and meeting halfway was essential.
And he had to put that effort for me. He is conflict-averse but he had to learn to open up for difficult conversations. He is quietly loving but he has shown up for me with big gestures. And my favourite, he was terrified of karaoke and now routinely belts out bangers (amazingly too, might I add) when we go to the bar.
I would be a fool to think that this marriage is not worthwhile simply because of moments of friction that feel harder than usual. My husband said this to me once – “Anything that makes you happy is worth learning.” I have written it down and saved it because it is a worthy reminder that for him, I am worth the inconvenience. And to me, he is worth it.
Love is a lot of saying – “Please, inconvenience me. I want to be inconvenienced by you. And please, give me permission to inconvenience you sometimes too.” Love is labour – and that can be inconvenient – but it is not a chore.
Inconvenienced by my parents
Like many Indian children (and perhaps children in general), I have had my share of disagreements with my parents. These have surrounded many discussions from injustices I faced as a child to criticisms and disagreements as an adult. It was painfully easy to see these arguments as right (me) vs. wrong (them) and painfully difficult to maintain a good relationship while feeling this way.
However, as I grew older, I faced a very frustrating epiphany.
I am currently a year older than my mother was when she gave birth to me. And while I have read endlessly about parenting, and have many thoughts on how I wished I’d been parented and how I would raise a child myself, I don’t think I could be a parent right now. This thought gave way to a distressing realization: my parents are human too.
Of course, I know this. But I don’t think in the past I fully gave them the true benefit of this. As children, we tend to put our parents on a pedestal. As adult children, this leads to feeling like the pedestal should have been honoured by them knowing better, doing better – and so they are unforgivable for abusing this pedestal. Parents – who should have been above making any errors – made errors anyway.
Teresa Mummert said, “The moment you put someone on a pedestal they will look down on you. The trick is respecting each other equally.”
While the pedestal of parenthood made sense to me as a child, it simply does not hold up as an adult anymore. It is unfair to them to place them on this pedestal. The inconvenient acknowledgment of the fact that they are just like me – flawed and deeply human – was the only way to build a better relationship with them. I had to realise that they did their best with what they knew and what they had and even now, they continue to do the same. Just the way I am trying my best with what I know and what I have.
It is inconvenient to deal with the fact that even though I was hurt and I should have had some things happen differently, they also had to go through innumerable hurdles to figure out how to get me here. Some days it is still hard to remember this, but it is the only reason I am able to heal myself, acknowledge my pain, while also having a more honest relationship with them which is not that black and white.
Inconvenienced by pretty much everything I love
This list can go on.
I love creating but every so often, the dreaded “creativity block” will pop up in art, music, or writing. Every creator knows this nightmare – the desperate overwhelming urge to create, but nothing comes out. Yet I continue to create, because the only way through is to create – unwillingly, poorly – so I can be back with my preferred momentum.
In my first bout of depression, I stopped writing. I couldn’t write. I felt like I had nothing to say. When I finally felt like myself again, I decided to write again. And I couldn’t. I felt like I had forgotten how to write, like the words had no way to get out of me anymore, like maybe I just did not have anything useful to say anymore at all. I promised myself then that no matter how bad a bout of depression would be, I wouldn’t lose my hobbies. It was desperate and difficult, but I would try. I would sing one song in the shower. I would doodle one stupid-looking flower. I would write one half-assed line in my journal.
It sucked but I did it anyway. Because what mattered to me was that I exercise this muscle even while I felt it had nothing worthwhile left for me in that moment – so I could still use it when I was ready to enjoy it again.
And as you can see, I am writing again.
So much of life is just inconvenience. Reconnecting after a long time or responding to a message too late is inconvenient, but the alternative is a silence that only calcifies further with time. Sitting with difficult emotions and dealing with them is inconvenient, but the alternative is to lose time to distractions that numb us not only from the pain but also from beauty.
Every one of these inconveniences has added something worthwhile to my life. The work in every one of these situations was optional. I could have found new ways to ignore them, move on from them, justify them – and life would go on just fine.
But would it really be fine?
Modern complacence
What is the result of not choosing inconvenience?
Nothing dramatic, at least on the surface. We don’t immediately fall apart. We just drift away. Gently.
That’s the thing about modern complacence – it’s almost invisible. When any source of resistance is so easy to eliminate, walking the path of least resistance becomes the default.
So it starts slow. Staying in a job that drains us because it’s familiar now and it would be hard to change. Friendships that are double taps on stories or wordless memes because there isn’t enough will power to do more. Hobbies of creation like music, art, and writing give way to hobbies of consumption like bingeing shows or doomscrolling.
It’s not that we don’t want to do it. We want to. But later. Not today.
In doing all this, we cocoon ourselves further and further within what we think are boundaries when they are really just barriers. The more we walk the path of least resistance, the lesser we think and question. In doing so, our frictionless, comfortable lives become golden handcuffs – giving us the illusion of autonomy and growth, when we’re really just stagnating. It does not just restrict itself to the seemingly innocuous spaces of socializing and hobbies – it’s far more.
It becomes easier to take “apolitical” stances in moments that demand a moral stance, in moments that require the effort to understand what is happening in the world and what you can do about it. It’s inconvenient to acknowledge that an apolitical stance is political and only feels like it is not because you’re privileged enough to be able to take this stance.
It becomes easier to consume information passively – scanning through headlines, reading Canva-made infographics on Instagram, scrolling through 1-minute TikToks – without once digging deeper, questioning sources, or trying to understand anything. It’s inconvenient to put that extra effort into questioning what has passed by your screen and develop a nuanced perspective.
It becomes easier to choose faster, cheaper services – 10-minute groceries, fast fashion – without asking what conditions the labourers are providing these services in and what the ramifications of these services are on the environment. It is inconvenient to consider that our pursuit of a frictionless life involves other human beings and the planet being collateral damage.
The intensity of the impact of modern complacence evades us because we don’t realise it is complacence at all.
Underneath all this ease and convenience, we lose curiosity. We lose creativity. We lose a sense of responsibility – to ourselves and to others around us.
Our private complacence becomes a public erosion.
When we all avoid inconvenience long enough, it does not just affect individual lives. It affects all our lives as a collective.
Aspiration is not a straight line
So what does this mean? Should you go out of your way to sustain yourself in unpleasant situations in the name of inconvenience? Is everything character development?
At what point does aspiration stop? When does one ever find contentment? Are we not allowed contentment?
Of course not.
Like I’ve said earlier – I am not romanticizing systemic injustices and saying you must suffer in the name of growth and character development. I am also not saying you must go through an endless, punishing hustle that never ends.
Growth is not just one upward path. There is more to it.
A retired person does not need to inconvenience themselves by finding a new way to make money in the name of growth. They can choose a different one – perhaps the inconvenience of learning a hobby and building an identity beyond their job.
A financially stable person does not need to grind even harder to make even more money. They can choose a different inconvenience – perhaps finding a way they can give back to society through a cause that matters to them.
A person recovering from a burnout does not need to jump back into the world to prove themselves anew. They can choose a different inconvenience – learning to set stricter boundaries and tolerating the unease that comes with it so it can cushion them against a future burnout.
When you have the choice, you don’t have to choose the inconvenience that is going to break you down. You have to choose the one that will help you build yourself up. That building up can happen in many spaces in our lives. By choosing different spaces to be inconvenienced, we keep moving, and we give our lives meaning.
We often feel that the meaning of our lives is bestowed externally by some all-knowing entity or some people who validate us, but it only comes when we create it for ourselves through inconveniences.
Resisting complacence
We know the story of the hare and the tortoise. “Slow but steady wins the race.” We know this lesson and we have heard it well since our childhood.
Let me offer an alternate perspective. Instead of saying that the hare and the tortoise are competing against each other – let’s say they are both fighting against the temptation to become complacent.
The hare did not lose because of its speed. We know that if it hadn’t napped midway, it would have won the race easily. It lost because it mistook its comfort for completion. It was convenient to take a break and well, that led to the complacence to take a long nap.
The tortoise won because it did not give in. Knowing that the hare is fast asleep could have allowed the tortoise to become complacent too, but it didn’t. It kept moving till it knew the race was complete.
It was inconvenient. But it sustained the effort till the result was ready.
It’s not about slow or fast. It’s about steadily choosing to not become complacent where we are.
What will you choose?
Here’s the thing – most of the time, we don’t really eliminate contextual inconveniences and problems, we upgrade them.
When someone is unemployed, the inconvenience is finding work.
When employed, it is managing bills and finding stability.
When stable, it’s protecting that security, planning for the future, dreaming bigger.
These are contextual inconveniences – thrown at us by life to survive. But with every upgrade in contextual inconvenience, they become a little less about survival. There is a little less effort, a little more ease. I understand the nuance that it is still an inconvenience, but you know these inconveniences are not equal.
Every upgrade in contextual inconvenience frees up some space for us to choose new ones that align with our values. Where do I want to go next? Who do I want to be? What is inconvenient to do, not because it is necessary, but because it matters to me?
Being inconvenienced is the the only antidote to protect ourselves from the erosion of our own self and our collective future. We have to choose, again and again, small inconveniences that keep us awake to the realities of our identity, our life. We have to do things that make us think, feel, question, reach out. We have to do things that make us a little uncomfortable so we don’t lose out on all the things we could be.
Inconvenience is not an obstacle in your journey. It is the journey.
We have to live in a space between acceptance and aspiration – acknowledge that we are good, but that the work is not done.
In the ideal world, we should be able to choose our specific inconvenience, but still always be inconvenienced.
So, today I invite you to think about this.
What are the contextual inconveniences thrust upon you, the ones where you have no choice or say but are tied to your survival? Have these eased up for you in any way in the past years?
If they have eased up, are there any new inconveniences you have introduced for yourself? Alternately, are you avoiding some inconveniences that could help you be a better you?
And maybe the simplest question – if you could choose just one inconvenience to add in your life, what would it be? Can you do it today?
If you have the privilege to choose an inconvenience, to choose a space to put your effort – then please exercise it to be in service of the person you want to become. Choose it with care. There are inconveniences worth choosing – helping you grow, helping you stay awake to your life. Choose them so you can live to your truest, fullest self – even when it would be easier not to.
Because the alternative is the inconvenience of living with yourself, knowing you wanted to be and could have been so much more.