Imagine spending 400,000 years climbing to the top of the food chain, only to lose the will to live because your GrubHub driver forgot the extra ranch.

We’re surrounded by the husks of tools that were supposed to make life easier—once indispensable, now crutches, then chains, and finally, replacements. They promised: “Don’t sweat the small stuff. Save your energy for the big problems.”

But what if the small stuff is the training ground for the big ones? Cooking dinner, balancing a budget, walking to the store—these aren’t meaningless chores. They’re mental push-ups for your brain. Now, we’ve outsourced it all to apps, and the closest thing we do to long-term planning is debating whether to tip 15% or 20%.

We’re “saving time,” but for what? To doom-scroll through the same climate crisis we lack the patience or foresight to fix?

The rhythm of effort—planning, acting, adjusting—has been replaced with a numb, reactive pace.

What happens to a world that no longer practices its problem-solving muscles?

Imagine two societies:

In Society A, getting food requires planning ahead. You need to:

• Check your pantry
• Make a shopping list
• Drive to the store during business hours
• Cook meals from scratch
• Plan leftovers

In Society B, you can:

• Tap your phone
• Have hot food appear at your door in 30 minutes
• Repeat whenever hungry

Which society will produce people better at long-term planning?

Which will naturally select for delayed gratification?

Which one has a chance of "making it" in the long term?

A defense of convenience culture goes something like this:

"By eliminating trivial tasks, we free up cognitive resources for more important long-term thinking."

It's the same argument used to defend calculators in math class – why waste mental energy on mechanical processes when we could be thinking about higher-level concepts?

Here's the thing. Basic arithmetic serves as scaffolding for higher mathematical thinking. The process of working through simple problems builds neural pathways that help us tackle complex ones.

What if the "trivial" tasks of daily planning serve a similar function for our capacity to think long-term?

Consider:

1. Every time you plan a grocery trip, you're practicing future projection
2. Every time you cook a meal, you're engaging in sequential thinking
3. Every time you budget for the week, you're strengthening your delay-reward circuits

Let's look at some data. Studies show that:

• Children who learn to delay gratification perform better on various life outcomes (the famous marshmallow test - flawed but still valuable)
• Countries with higher savings rates tend to have better long-term economic growth
• Societies with strong future-time orientation show better environmental stewardship

All these metrics are declining in developed nations, precisely as convenience culture rises. Correlation isn't causation, but the pattern is suggestive.

But haven't we always been trying to make things more convenient? Isn't that what technology is for?

Yes, but there's a qualitative difference between:

1. Tools that make necessary tasks easier while preserving the core cognitive work (e.g., washing machines)
2. Tools that eliminate the cognitive work entirely (e.g., automatic reordering systems)

The first category augments our capabilities. The second causes them to atrophy.

This brings us to an uncomfortable possibility: what if convenience, past a certain point, becomes a form of environmental mismatch? Just as our bodies evolved to thrive with certain levels of physical activity, perhaps our brains evolved to require certain levels of planning and delayed gratification exercise.

The implications are worth considering:

• Are we raising a generation that will struggle with long-term challenges like climate change?
• Could the rise in anxiety and depression be partly linked to our decreased agency in daily planning?
• What happens to democratic societies when citizens lose the cognitive muscles needed for long-term thinking?

Before you close this tab in despair, let me be clear: I'm not suggesting we return to hunting and gathering. But perhaps we need to be more intentional about preserving certain "inefficiencies" in our lives.

Some ideas:

1. Cook from scratch at least once a week
2. Walk to get groceries occasionally, even if delivery is available
3. Practice manual skills that require sequential planning
4. Deliberately delay some gratifications, even when instant options exist

The counterintuitive truth might be this: some inconveniences are features, not bugs. They're the mental equivalent of resistance training, building the psychological muscles we need for bigger challenges. I wrote about this when I published my first book, Friction.

Whether we're conscious of it or not, we are designing the future with our every action. Perhaps we should ask not just “Can we make this more convenient?” but also “Should we?”

Because if we’re not careful, we might "convenience" ourselves right out of the capacity to solve any of the problems that matter.