Convenience: An inconvenient truth

Watson. Come at once if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same.

― Arthur Conan Doyle, Adventure of the Creeping Man

There is something slightly embarrassing about how quickly we learn not to struggle.

Not embarrassing in the moralistic sense, as in the old-fartish complaint that people today are soft and have things too easy, although there is probably some of that, too. More like embarrassing in the way it is embarrassing to discover that you have been unconsciously avoiding some small difficulty for years because it was possible to avoid it, and then to realize that the difficulty was not merely an obstacle between you and the thing you wanted but, in some strange and retroactive way, part of the thing itself.

A convoluted way of saying: Consider the ordinary act of obtaining something.

There used to be, embedded in this act, a little sequence of resistance: you had to know where the thing was, travel toward it, locate it, decide whether it was worth the money, carry it home. The object arrived with a history attached to it, however trivial. You had spent something besides money. You had spent time. Attention. Maybe endured some inconvenience. You had been required, briefly, to organize yourself around the world rather than demand that the world reorganize itself around you.

Now the thing simply appears via an Amazon cargo van. Puff! The magic wagon.

This is one of the miracles of contemporary life. The thing appears because you tapped a rectangle. Food appears. Information appears. A stranger appears. A translation appears. A movie appears. A song appears. An answer appears. Sometimes an entire essay appears. Maybe this one. I might be a bot for all you know. One with bangs and luxurious curls. If only.

This is difficult to argue against on practical grounds. Convenience is, in nearly every conventional sense, good. Friction wastes time. Waiting is inefficient. Difficulty often serves no noble purpose whatsoever. There is no inherent virtue in standing in line, memorizing a multiplication table, navigating a city without GPS, sitting nine hours waiting to be seen in an ER while your knee and wrist are exploding, or spending three hours trying to understand something that a competent explanation could make clear in three minutes.

But there is another category of cost, much harder to quantify, because it does not appear on the receipt. What if some of the friction we remove was also doing the invisible work of making things matter?

This sounds sentimental until you notice how often value seems to depend on difficulty.

The mountain matters partly because you climbed it (we’ll check in with Sisyphus later). The college diploma or the university degree matters partly because you suffered through the years required to obtain it. The meal cooked for someone you love means something different from the meal selected from an infinite menu and delivered to your house 15 minutes later. A handwritten letter carries the peculiar weight of having passed through a person’s hand, having required them to sit still long enough to form sentences, cross something out, begin again.

(Man, I miss the cursive writing of friends and the pattern of grooves, dots and curlicues it used to make on the other side of the paper sheet. I miss opening envelopes that weren’t either bills or junk mail. I miss Christmas cards.)

But back to the thesis here, which is this: Effort does not merely precede value. The effort becomes an integral part of the value of anything humans do.

This is inconvenient to admit because it complicates one of the great promises of modernity: that technology can remove the unnecessary suffering standing between human beings and what they want.

And to be clear, some suffering really is unnecessary. The person who can receive lifesaving medicine without travelling three days by foot should receive it. The person who can communicate across an ocean without waiting six months for a ship should communicate. Accessibility is not a spiritual failure. Efficiency is not a sin.

The problem is that we are remarkably bad at distinguishing unnecessary suffering from salutary difficulty.

We tend to put them in the same category because, from the perspective of desire, they feel identical. Both are obstacles. Both delay gratification. Both produce the same little internal complaint: Crap! It’s 2026. Why can’t this just be easier?

And so we remove stumbling blocks. One by one. Until eventually the path from wanting something to having it becomes so short that the experience of wanting begins to change. This may be one of the strangest effects of abundance: not that we get too much, but that getting something ceases to tell us anything about it.

A thing obtained at great cost arrives carrying evidence of its own importance. This is not necessarily because it is inherently more important. Humans are susceptible to the sunk-cost fallacy, status signalling, scarcity effects and all the other psychological hoohah that can make a difficult acquisition feel valuable simply because it was difficult. But the opposite error is possible, too. If something costs us almost nothing in time, effort, attention, uncertainty or sacrifice, then there may be nothing in the experience that teaches our minds to dwell on it.

The thing comes and goes. Tap. Receive. Consume. Next.

There is something almost metaphysical about this sequence. We have become very good at eliminating the interval. And the interval may be where significance lives.

Think about anticipation. Anticipation is, technically, an unpleasant state. You want something and do not have it. There is an itchy absence. Carly Simon even wrote a song about the annoyance it entails:

Anticipation, anticipation is makin’ me late is keepin’ me waitin’

Didn’t claim it was Shakespeare. But my point (again) is, people often remember the waiting for an event almost as vividly as the event itself. The days before a trip. The weeks before hearing from someone. The slow accumulation of pages before finishing a book. The months required to become good at something. The period in which you don’t yet know whether you can do it.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a famous line about it in his essay El Dorado:

Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.

Waiting gives desire duration. Difficulty gives desire shape. As Albert Camus never actually wrote, notwithstanding the popularity of one of those randomly attributed apocryphal quotes carelessly shared on social media: “We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.”

When every interval can be compressed, desire begins to behave less like longing and more like a reflex. And this is where artificial intelligence introduces a problem that is still surprisingly difficult to talk about without immediately collapsing into either utopianism or panic.

Most contemporary discussions about AI properly revolve around jobs, misinformation, education, creativity, privacy, power and whether the machines will eventually become smarter than us (on that last point, we can all thank our lucky stars that a high-IQ U.S. president is setting such a high bar re. human cerebration).

These are legitimate and enormous questions. But there is another possibility, quieter and therefore easier to miss:

What happens when intelligence itself becomes convenient? Not when information becomes convenient. That happened decades ago with search engines. Not when communication becomes convenient. Heck, that happened with the telephone.

AI is different because it increasingly offers to perform the process by which difficulty morphs into understanding. (If you glossed over that sentence, read it again; it’s not that difficult to understand.)

You can ask any AI platform a question and receive an explanation. Ask for a counterargument and receive one. Ask for a poem, a business plan, a workout routine, a curriculum, a legal summary, a translation, a piece of code, a diagnosis of your own argument. The machine does not merely retrieve an object. It can participate in the cognitive labour that formerly stood between confusion and clarity.

This is extraordinarily useful. It is also extraordinarily dangerous in a way that is not primarily about misinformation. And the danger is this: We may begin confusing producing an answer — even the correct answer — with having learned a damn thing.

A person who struggles for two hours to understand a vexing mathematical idea might emerge with something that cannot be adequately described as “the information that two hours of struggle produced.” The struggle itself changed the person. It created connections. It exposed ignorance. It forced memory to become involved. It made the eventual moment of comprehension emotionally legible: Eureka!

If an AI supplies the explanation instantly, the explanation may be correct while the understanding remains thin. This is especially easy to miss because the output can look identical.

The student submits the paragraph. The programmer receives the code. The executive gets the memo. The person asking the philosophical question receives the beautifully structured answer.

From the outside, nothing appears to have been lost. From the inside, comprehension has been sacrificed for convenience. As has future competence. As has any sense of achievement. As has the fun.

This is why the AI question is not simply whether machines can do things humans once did. The more intimate question is whether we will continue choosing to do things ourselves when machines can perform them faster, better and with dramatically less frustration.

Once a machine can eliminate almost all the struggle from an activity, refusing its help can begin to feel irrational. Why write the first draft yourself? Why wrestle with the blank page? Why look up a word? Why calculate? Why memorize? Why sit with the problem long enough to become annoyed by it? Why be bad at something? Why spend years becoming competent when competence can be summoned on demand? Why exist at all?

And beneath these questions sits another, less comfortable one: If we remove every experience in which we are forced to become better in order to get what we want, what happens to the self that was supposed to become better?

Encore une fois, this is not an argument for suffering as such. Suffering is not automatically ennobling. Most suffering is simply suffering. There are forms of deprivation that destroy rather than deepen people. Romanticizing hardship can be an especially ugly luxury when viewed from the safe side of it.

But there is a distinction between suffering and resistance. Resistance may be necessary. A muscle develops because something resists it. A mind develops for the same reason. Character, whatever you take that old-fashioned value to mean, seems to require occasions on which the easiest available action is not the action taken.

This is why people voluntarily impose difficulty on themselves even when they don’t have to. They run marathons. They learn difficult instruments. They climb mountains. They garden. They bake complicated bread. They read books that require rereading. They practise their hockey slapshot hundreds of times. They study languages with bizarre, alien-sounding spellings and medieval tenses comme l’imparfait du subjonctif et le passé simple.

The point is not merely the result. The point is that the difficulty makes the result feel habitable. You become the person who did it. And this is what convenience quietly erodes: not value in the abstract but authorship. And when everything is easy, it’s harder to feel like you matter.

An inconvenient truth about AI slopaganda? Coulda just skipped it.

Let’s end this with an authentic quote from Camus’s epic essay The Myth of Sisyphus: The very struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.