What do you do when you finish work in the evening? There’s statistically a very high chance that your answer is “go home and watch Netflix (or insert your streaming platform of choice instead). Why do you do this? Let me rephrase that: I certainly spend most nights either watching a show on Netflix/Peacock—often a show I’ve already seen 3 times before. Why do I do this? Why do we do this?
Let’s begin with what the answer just can’t be; let none of us delude themselves. Can we agree that the answer is not “because this is undeniably the best use of my time, the most fun I could possibly have”. Sure: there are some nights where I really do just want to (literally) Netflix and chill. But surely most of us, most of the time, would rather be doing something else: board game night with the neighbors, pickup soccer with friends, a pint of beer with classmates at the local bar. So why do we, most of us, most of the time, end up on the couch, bored with what we’re watching but unwilling—indeed, seemingly incapable—of doing anything else?
Like most important questions, there are many answers to this question, many angles from which to approach this question. One could consider the question as a psychological one, a sociological one, a political question, an economic one, a neurological one, or a biological one. Each discipline,, would add its own nuances, clarity, and share of the truth. But let’s try to keep it simple.1 If we just pay direct attention to our own feelings, our own motivations in the moment, what do we discover?
It seems to me that the reason we sit, bored on our couches, with the TV on but also scrolling through our phones, and feeling extremely bored with both screens, yet simultaneously unable to get up and go do anything else, is nothing more or less than Convenience.
We might be bored with what we find on Netflix. But finding it is so easy, so frictionless. It takes next to no effort, no risk, and involves no uncertainty. Ditto with our phones: I scroll Substack not because I expect to find something new to read, but in spite of the fact that I know, with near-certainty, that I won’t. And yet…I keep doing it. Because opening the app and scrolling costs me next to nothing.
On the other hand, organizing a board game night takes calls, texts, planning, cleaning, cooking…and more than that, it involves asking other human persons to agree to spend time with me. What if they say “no!”? That will feel defeating. That whole process involves at least an order of magnitude more work, and it very well may end in futility, to boot. Meanwhile, being bored on the couch with Netflix on the TV and substack (and/or reddit, twitter, etc.) may be, well, boring, but I also know exactly what I’ll get. No risk. No uncertainty. No risk of rejection or defeat.
At least, no sense of acute, immediate defeat. But surely I’m not the only one to have felt that in this effort to avoid one night’s worth of futility, we are falling into a lifetime of it. Technology provides us with very convenient modes of entertainment. But the actual entertainment value of these products seems inversely proportional to their convenience: watching Netflix on the couch is super easy, but it’s not really all that fun. And yet, we find ourselves there far more nights than not.
Convenience may feel like a trivial property, something nice but not essential, something we like but don’t need, and therefore it may seem inconsequential to the big decisions of human life. But I think our engagement with newer entertainment technology reveals that convenience, and the quest for convenience, plays a larger—and more pernicious—role in our lives than perhaps we had noticed, or would want to admit.
To get a better sense of the role convenience plays in our lives, we could approach things a bit differently. Try to imagine yourself living in the year 1900. When work ended, what would you do? You certainly weren’t going to go home and stream Netflix. Nor were you going to watch network TV, or listen to the radio. Because none of those things existed. It was very unlikely that you even had a telephone in your home, or on your block.
So if you wanted to have fun after work, your options were pretty limited: you could read a book (again, most people would have only a few of these in their home, at most, and a good chunk of people were not literate anyway), you could go on a walk—or you could go do something social. And that’s the crucial point. For tens of thousands of years, the answer to the question “what do I do when I don’t have to labor to survive?” was spend time with other people. Chatting, or playing a sport, or drinking, or going on a walk, whatever—having fun almost always meant being social.
And I mean really being social. We talk today of “social networks” online, but of course there is very little real social activity going on there. In 1900, being social meant physically being in the same space as someone else, face to face. You had to look at them, you had to make space for their body, you had to think about if they were hungry or thirsty, you had to meet their gaze and you had to just deal with them, in the full weight of their spiritual and animal being.
Having fun in this way has all kinds of limitations, and it wasn’t always convenient. Sometimes the people who happened to live near you were people you didn’t like or didn’t share any interest or hobbies with.2 And sometimes they were just boring, or unneighborly.
Now, it’s important that we don’t get confused as we consider this hypothetical social scene in 1900. First, as I’ve already implied, we had better not romanticize the past, for a vast number of reasons. Second, I am definitely not suggesting that people in 1900 were somehow better than people today. In fact, my meditation on the power of convenience suggests just the opposite: the only difference between them then and us today is that we have these very convenient entertainment technologies, and they didn’t. If they had had Netflix in 1900, my guess is that they would have spent countless bored hours on the couch, too. We have the technology that they didn’t, and that’s what makes the difference.
We have this technology, and we use it, and it dominates our time—but I just don’t think we’ve thought through its implications enough, we haven’t really thought whether the kinds of lives we’ve built in and around and on this technology are actually the lives we want. Our dependence on them feels more or less inevitable. But it might be helpful for us to consider whether we have other options.
The temptations of convenience shape more than our entertainment choices, of course. Consider the food we eat. It’s not just fast food, but also the prepackaged food we often buy in the grocery store. Few people actually think either fast food or prepackaged food tastes better than, say, a home-cooked meal or an apple pie made from scratch. But fast food and prepackaged foods are extremely convenient. And when we are busy, or just tired, that convenience provides an allure that few of us can resist. And again, let it not be thought I accuse others of crimes I am innocent of: I often find myself seeking out relatively bland, boring food just because I can unwrap it and eat it without any further work or thought.
But again: I don’t actually enjoy this food more! And that’s the rub: if we ate fast food or prepackaged food once every few weeks, when things were busy or we were just absolutely exhausted, I think most would agree that’s perfectly fine. But many of us are eating convenient food every day, multiple times a day. Many of us are eating almost nothing but such convenient food. We don’t really want to, but we do. That obvious and simple point is one I think we should dwell on further.
And again, if we are looking to understand the full set of causes of this situation, we will find ourselves in an interdisciplinary jungle. Psychology, sociological, neurology, biology—these and many more disciples could offer their own verdicts. For example, many people might point out that they, in fact, only eat convenience foods when they are very busy and exhausted—it just so happens that they are very busy and exhausted every day of their lives. And I don’t doubt this.
My point is certainly not that we, as individuals, are wholly or even primarily to blame for this situation. Nor do I have any well-formed thoughts on a solution. I just felt a need to name this situation, to announce it, to write it down, because it strikes me as a massive aspect of modern life, and a very tragic one as well.
Part of this tragedy is that, even if one of us, as an individual, realizes they don’t really like spending their free time bored by streaming shows, they don’t really have the ability to unilaterally free themselves. Well, of course, in one sense, the individual can do this. We could always turn the TV off. We could even throw it away, and cancel our Comcast service. But then what? If everyone on your block continues to watch Netflix, and you no longer do, what do you do?
Certainly, you could read more (and that might be a good choice!) But if you wanted to try to re-create something like the inherently local-social community that we imagine in the (admittedly stylized and simplified) circa 1900 neighborhood imagined above, you’d pretty much be shit out of luck. That’s the thing about being genuinely social: you can’t do it alone. If you want to stop looking at your phone while you walk the dog, you can certainly leave it in your pocket (or even at home! Though…can you imagine that? Not having your phone on you, just in case!?) But if every other person walking their dog is staring at their phone as they pass by…what difference does it make?
I don’t want to be overly defeatist here. Of course, even if everyone else has their phones out while they walk their dogs, even if you can’t really get a genuinely social interaction when you walk yours, putting your phone down is still certainly a certified Good Idea. You can look at the trees, you can look at the sky. You can pay attention to the cracks in the sidewalk, how each is utterly unique, and how each hosts its own colonies of ants and rolly-poly bugs, how there is a whole little world going on under each slab of concrete, and how amazing and genuinely interesting that is.
In other words: choosing, as an individual, to “opt out” of at least some of these convenience technologies, is possible, and is almost certainly a very good idea. But! But: it won’t fix everything. If we come to the conclusion that what we are missing, what we need, what would fill that void of boredom at 9pm with Netflix on the TV and substack on the phone and boredom, boredom, boredom in the brain is some community, then individual acts of opting-out—as valid and worthwhile as they are!—simply won’t get us there.
What will? Well, as I said above, I don’t have any neat and tidy set of well-thought ideas. Like many online thinkpieces (and actually, most human expression, in my experience), I am full of critiques, sure of what isn’t working, but much less sure of what we could do that could actually fix the problem or replace what’s broken. But, my guess is that you do have some ideas of your own. I am sure you’ve noticed the pernicious influence of convenience in your life—even if, until now, you wouldn’t have phrased it that way—and my guess is that you have already begun, in perhaps rather small ways, to try and find ways to spend your time more valuably. And so I will end by simply encouraging that: be honest with yourself about the hold convenience has on you, and if you can think of ways to do things that are less convenient, but more worthwhile, well, do them! Do them now.
Wrestling with the Angel 