Our Longing for Inconvenience
My dear friend sighs, slides her phone across the table between us so that it’s just beyond her reach, and insists that she wants to fall in love the old-fashioned way. She has said this many times within the past year—at parties, at group dinners, at a nearly pitch-black dive bar in Brooklyn while a singer performed a serviceable cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” which slotted seamlessly into our own feelings of loneliness and longing. My dear friend is saying it again today, over a lunch that neither of us wants to end just yet, because we don’t see each other often enough, because she simply cannot look at the face of another person on a screen and decide, in a split second, whether that person can motivate her to the point of romantic pursuit.
When she insists on falling in love the old-fashioned way, I tell her, every time, that I know what she means. What she’s resisting is not only the dating app as a piece of technology but what the dating app does to the brain, presenting the idea of constant convenience, turning the seeking of an other into an online-shopping excursion. (And yes, of course, for some people that is exactly the dating app’s appeal.) My dear friend wants to fall in love the old-fashioned way because her parents met each other reaching for the same item at a market in the nineteen-seventies, a story she can rarely get through without crying. And I say that I know what she means because she is talking, at least in part, about sacrificing convenience, even at the expense of instant gratification. It is inconvenient to be a person, floating through the grand and impossible world, significant in your own resplendent garden of hours but insignificant as a fleck of dust in the greater arc of the universe. It is, in some ways, inconvenient to believe that your one significant life can collide meaningfully with someone else’s, someone whom you have to put the work into finding, in the outside world, where people still sometimes go to the market, reaching and reaching and reaching.
Recently, I’ve been spending far too much of my time doing cost-benefit analyses of various inconveniences. I want to embrace minor discomforts if doing so can make me feel even slightly more alive and engaged in the world. For example, I wake up early on a Saturday morning in winter to help my best friend move, which inconveniences the part of me that would maybe like to stay in bed for an extra hour (though the word “like” is used loosely here, as that time in bed would probably be spent awake, scrolling through bad news on my phone, and watching the occasional video of a dog as a chaser). In the moment, as my friend and I put together her son’s bed, it feels like simply another task. But almost immediately afterward I am struck by how beautiful it was to get to share in another milestone in the life of my friend, who I have seen in many apartments and homes before this one, who I have watched grow into a loving parent, the kind who organizes her child’s new bedroom on moving day, before almost anything else in the new home is put in proper order. To have that as something that will live in my memory is worth whatever mental or emotional friction exists in rising from the comfort of my bed and putting my feet down on the floor.
I am not the only one thinking about the upsides of inconvenience, it seems; there is even a term, frictionmaxxing, to describe the trend of people resisting the lulling ease of screens. On a Saturday morning when I do not have to help a friend move, I am in bed scrolling Instagram. One video features what appears to be an elder millennial saying that he wants the nineties back. He wants a VCR. He wants old-school arcade machines that you have to feed with quarters. He wants a Walkman and cassette tapes to put in said Walkman. Perhaps because I linger on this reel for too long, as I continue scrolling I am served an ad for a new, revamped version of the Sony Walkman, beneath which, in the comments section, people are declaring that the device is exactly what they’d been needing.
Pining for Walkmans and VCRs is, of course, an offshoot of a larger obsession with the not so distant past. People revel in the nostalgia of ten or twenty or thirty years ago by digging up old photos and posting them—photos from birthday parties or career milestones or from a moment spent sitting under the final sparks of daylight on a beach. For many of us the year 2016 wasn’t exactly ideal, but at least it wasn’t this nonideal time. There is a longing for some previous era, if not actually a desire to return to it. I want my childhood back, even if I don’t necessarily want to be a child again. In some backward way, this reminds me of Sun Ra, who spent a lifetime insisting that Earth was not the place for him, and that he had to get to an unknown elsewhere, an elsewhere that would be better simply by virtue of being somewhere else.
The yearning for the past often lands us on the somewhat hollow nostalgia of ephemera: if we can’t have the nineties back, we can build a life of things that might feel transportative. I have no right to judge, really. I push physical media on anyone who will listen, ranting about the need for hard drives and for ways to store the things you love because, one day, they may not be accessible on streaming anymore. I have a CD player in my home, a VCR in a closet. But I’m also inclined to think about the work that older devices demand of a person compared with the frictionless present day, when we are told that any and all content is at our fingertips (a myth, but a myth that sells.) And I can’t help but think of the reality that there are many significantly larger and more consequential inconveniences that Americans, plainly, do not have the heart or stomach for. One example might be the inconvenience caused by a mass political uprising, one that risks the security, safety, and comfort of its participants. I have seen glimpses of people’s threshold for that level of friction. I think, for instance, of the summer of 2020, when a protest movement collided with the first COVID summer and people’s material needs—at least in my community— weren’t being met. And so, for almost a month, after being on the streets all day, protesters would go and sew masks at night, or make care packages for elders, or do grocery runs to fill pantries, and many of us did that at the cost of our own sleep, or our own time with loved ones at home, or we did it in betrayal of our desire for convenience, ignoring the temptations of the couch and the latest streamable binge.
I return to that time, specifically, because it was the moment in my life that came closest to answering the question “Once this world collapses, how will people build another one?” The solutions were imperfect. They involved figuring things out as we went. And, of course, the energy of the movement proved unsustainable. Eventually, people could not resist returning to their lives, to routines more comfortable than standing in the streets with the sun glaring in your eyes, squinting up to check the position of snipers on a roof, or working with cramping fingers sewing your tenth mask of the night. I understood then that there just weren’t enough people willing to surrender to what needed to be done, which made the burden that much larger for those who were. The utopia was temporary, its beauty and its small victories whittled away by the scythe of inaction.
Convenience and inaction are often bedfellows. Someone online wonders why “Americans still aren’t overthrowing the government.” I scroll past the message and land on a video of some C-list child actor of yore in the present day, participating in an unspectacular trend. A clip, set to the song “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls, begins with the actor now, before abruptly shifting to photos of him in the nineties. There is nothing else, no grander messaging to be pulled from the footage. It is another momentary portal: remember that one time that wasn’t this time; remember the one time that, by virtue of not being this time, was better. I admit that I myself am seduced by the idea: the younger self of this now grown actor, and my younger self who watched that actor on television, in a world that asked far less of me than this one.
When I was young, I had a Walkman far longer than most anyone else I knew. This was, in part, because my family didn’t have a lot of money, and updating electronics was a low priority. We had a giant, clunky computer that hardly worked, whereas most of my friends had Segas and Nintendos. My mother wrote on an old typewriter. My two older siblings had grown up in the cassette era, and so every listening device in our home was either a record or a tape player, which meant that not only did I have a Walkman, I had one that had been handed down twice.
There were newer models that stopped automatically whenever the machine sensed dead space, allowing you to skip among songs. But, with the Walkman I had, skipping a song, or going back to the start of a song, was a guessing game. If you listened to the same song enough times you might get good at the timing, but if you listened to as many different tapes as I did that was nearly impossible. And so you’d stop earlier than you wanted to, or go too far back and end up in the middle of the previous song, until eventually you’d get close enough to be satisfied.
I learned early lessons in patience and precision using a hand-me-down dual tape deck that I kept in my childhood bedroom. I would wait, sometimes for hours, to hear a song on the radio that I wanted to record onto cassette. I’d be careful to wait until the end of the d.j. intro before hitting Record, so as not to get it onto tape, and I’d cut out early if the d.j. intruded at the song’s end. I learned that if I wanted to avoid picking up the harsh click sound of the tape stopping, I could hold down the Pause button and then press Stop. In both the Walkman and the bedroom tape deck, the cassette’s inner spool of tape would sometimes get caught up in the gears of the machine; the remedy was to gently remove the cassette and wind the tape back into the casing with a pencil, lest you destroy your coveted archive of songs—some of which, for all you knew, might not come on the radio again.
I remember these moments with some fondness, but when I see people pining for the materials of the eighties and nineties I don’t find myself especially nostalgic for the same. In doing my cost-benefit analysis around inconvenience, I’ve started to think about the difference between what the heart desires and what the brain and body can manage. The world that we live in now has not equipped most people for a return to the small and repeated nuisances of past technologies. Yet, at the same time, relentless convenience (or being sold the idea of relentless convenience) warps the brain in ways that make nostalgic cravings somewhat inevitable. The world feels as if it is moving too fast, sweeping people up in a forward churn that—among other things—aims to make individuality yet another myth. You are told that everything you desire is at your fingertips, and that your life is going to be made easier than ever, but at the cost of blending into a monochromatic background, as forgettable as the view from another hotel room in another city that is not your city. In your city, there are new gray mixed-use condos that look dreamed up by a bored and unimaginative child, but people live there and work there and shop there, and they don’t have to go outside all that much. You outsource your writing to ChatGPT, and it is easy, but it makes you sound like no one and like everyone. Even if—or especially if—you are someone who yearns for stillness, or for the possibility of brushing the hand of a stranger whom you might come to love, this dissonance can prompt a sense of madness, and a desperation for ways to access the slowness you hunger for.
I try all of the tricks myself. I put my phone in a box and read a book. I attach a hard drive to my TV to watch concert footage from before I was born. I think of when my mother died, of all the people who mourned her because they’d worked at the places she’d frequented—the person at the deli, the person who bagged groceries, the person at the cleaners. This is what I most love to tell others about my mother—that she was kind to the people she encountered in the world with some regularity. She had routines, places she went where people knew her name. I’ve resolved to never have my own groceries delivered, even though when I go to the grocery store no one seems especially interested in making eye contact, let alone in speaking. And I don’t blame them, because some days I’m not sure that I am either. What makes the madness increasingly incurable is that I want parts of the past that are increasingly incompatible with this iteration of our world. I walk through the grocery store, half smiling, with my hood up. My friend finds a VHS player but can’t connect it to any television in his house.
In recalling my friend who wants to fall in love the old-fashioned way, and who once sighed in a dark bar while a singer worked through a rendition of “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” I’m reminded that that tune takes its melody from a French love song called “Plaisir d’Amour,” which was originally composed in 1784, by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini. If the former is about the inevitability of falling in love, a complete surrender beyond the speaker’s control, the latter confronts the pain of romantic love’s aftermath. It is skeptical and somewhat cynical, but also beautiful in its frankness: “The pleasure of love lasts only a moment / The grief of love lasts a lifetime.”
Maybe what my pal who insists on finding love the old-fashioned way is saying is that it shouldn’t be as frictionless as browsing Amazon from your couch. If you believe, as she does, that the next person you fall in love with could be the last partner you ever pursue, and the last who ever pursues you, then that pursuit should find you thrown fully into the world, eager for the beauty and discomfort of spontaneous human interaction. And I tell her that I mostly agree, though I generally just avoid dating apps because the onslaught of visual information overwhelms me. Still, I understand her desire, because so many of my own desires are detached from the reality of the times we live in. I am still inventing inconvenience in order to bolster my desire to feel alive.
For instance, I hate to sound like a travel diva, but on airplanes I love a window seat. I have purchased slightly more expensive and significantly more inconvenient flights just so that I can have a window seat. With noise-cancelling headphones and a window seat, you can build your own universe. From high enough in the sky, the clouds look like thick cotton being pulled from a deep-blue couch. From low enough, and at the right hour, descending into the right city, you can see the dark office buildings dappled with occasional lights from windows, and you can imagine who is still there, what is keeping them away from whatever is awaiting them elsewhere. I’m not saying that I’m above streaming a show on a plane, or buying airplane Wi-Fi just to Google home décor or rare vintage shirts. But it’s when tumbling through the sky that I find myself feeling most attached to the vastness of what is below, and pondering the increasing impossibility of connection. On a recent flight, my headphones died while I was listening to music, and I was shocked back to life by an immediate and urgent wave of sound from the airplane cabin rushing in—most notably, a child wailing, and a parent anxiously attempting to provide comfort. It is useful, every now and then, to be dragged from a fantasy and remember that you share a world with other people, some of whom might be confronting the sudden noise of their own discomforts. ♦