The Conundrum of Ease – The Misfit Farmer

Ah, yesterday I was searching for Paw Patrol on the TV, when I was momentarily swept up in nostalgia, remembering the good ole days when tasks contained a smattering of difficulty. For example, when I was a child, it was relatively difficult to change a channel on the TV. You had to get up and walk to the TV set, fiddle with knobs and switches, and realign the rabbit ears. And back then you never knew if changing the channel would be worth it because you were at the mercy of the weather and whatever the broadcasters were broadcasting. On a cloudy day, forget it. In the evening, if you were looking for cartoons, forget it–just the nightly news.

Now, with a la carte streaming, your four-year-old has endless choices at his fingertips. He knows nothing of the risk and sacrifice once involved in changing the channels–and, thus, he makes his dad’s life difficult, by constantly pleading with me to change the channel. Ease is creating a tiny monster. 

And if I look in my email inbox for work, I again see the conundrum of ease–people shooting me emails till my brain is riddled with holes. Thirty years ago, people had to put pen to paper, put the paper in an envelope, take the envelope to the post office, and wait weeks for a reply. Correspondence was a big commitment–which is why my second-grade pen pal and I only exchanged a couple of letters before we realized our correspondence was too burdensome and hardly worth the effort. Now, people fire off emails with no commitment or consequences, which make my life hard. Right when I think my brain has recovered, it’s peppered with digital birdshot.

And fast food–well, it makes life easy until it causes you to croak. Truly, I respect vegetarians–not because they abstain from eating higher life forms, but because they abstain from eating fast food. In my rural county, there are no vegetarian restaurants, fast or otherwise. 

Thus, people who can pass a Chick-Fil-A at breakfast and resist the tractor beam emanating from a chicken biscuit earn street cred in my book. Over the last few years, my cholesterol has crept up as has my pants size. Recently, I’ve been trying to pass Chick-Fil-A without stopping in the morning. I’m proud to say last week I successfully resisted putting on my turn signal, and this week I plan to work on not turning. But it is so easy to turn. 

And I think we’d all be better off if we couldn’t buy stuff so easily. In the old days, people had to go to the bank and withdraw money (if they had any) to buy stuff or either remember where they buried their money and dig up a jar filled with coins. Would a Chick-Fil-A biscuit really be worth all the trouble it would take to dig up a jar full of coins? Alas, now all we have to do is swipe a little plastic card or click once online to buy anything we can possibly imagine, at least within the max limits of our credit cards. 

So my new theory is that we should all pretend to live thirty years behind our technological means. Got a cell phone? Well, unless it is an emergency situation, stop using it as a computer, stop using it as a cell phone. Instead, use it as a phone thirty years ago: tie a string to it and tether it to the wall. Suddenly, you’ve got to sacrifice mobility for communication. You can’t talk on the go, you can’t text on the go. If you really want to talk to someone, you must talk to them in one spot. It makes you prioritize what’s important, walking or talking. 

If you want to send an email, go ahead, but pretend you only get to send five emails per day on account of your slow dial up connection. Want a chicken biscuit, go ahead and get one if you’re willing to drive forty miles because most small towns didn’t have a Chic-Fil-A back then? 

Sometimes it feels like technological progress makes tasks easier, but lives harder. Many so-called time-saving devices don’t really save time, but merely divide our attention–and it feels like my brain is a prime denominator that can’t be fractionalized anymore. I’m not ready to go full Amish yet, but thirty years back seems like a good starting point.