Can something be too convenient? That’s a question I’ve been grappling with for years.
You see, I’m a product manager. My entire job is built on making things more convenient for customers. In tech speak, we call it “removing friction.”
That’s the Silicon Valley playbook: find pain, remove friction, scale up, cash out. Mobile payments eliminate the pain of carrying cash. Delivery apps eliminate the pain of calling for takeout—no more language barriers, no more phone tag, no more getting your address wrong. Dating apps eliminate the pain of rejection. And in each case, you make the system smoother, faster, cheaper. The user wins. The investor wins. Everyone wins.
Until something breaks.
Friction and Resilience
A few weeks ago, Amazon Web Services’ main data center in Northern Virginia—US-EAST-1—went down. For hours, the internet itself seemed to wobble. Ben Thompson at Stratechery pointed out that this wasn’t just a glitch; it was a parable.
In theory, the internet was built to be resilient—decentralized, redundant, and nearly indestructible. But over time, everyone put their data in the same place: the cheapest, easiest region. The system that was supposed to be distributed became dangerously centralized.
As Thompson wrote, “the true price being paid for global efficiency is [lower] resiliency.”
The smoother we make things, the more brittle they become. And the more dependent we are on a single, frictionless path, the more catastrophic it is when that path fails.
That’s not just an engineering story—it’s a human one too.
What Convenience Does to Us
I’ve watched this pattern play out in my own life. The more convenient things become, the less I can tolerate even the smallest frustration. Waiting in line feels intolerable. A phone call that requires me to deal with another person—especially when I’m frustrated and want to just get something done—feels like a huge imposition.
People are inherently inconvenient. They misunderstand me. They have different goals than I do. They make mistakes. That’s what makes them people rather than machines.
What we call inconvenience is often just engagement with the world. Dealing with the tiny annoyances of everyday life—lines, neighbors, phone calls, mistakes—builds the muscles of empathy and flexibility. These little failures and frustrations are what keep us human.
If you smooth out every human interaction, you risk smoothing out what makes life worth living.
You can see it in dating.
Faith Hill’s piece in The Atlantic describes how fewer teenagers are getting into relationships. Many say love feels “too risky” or “too much work.” They prefer “situationships”—connections without commitment, emotions without vulnerability. It’s the frictionless version of romance.
But that friction—the awkward silences, the heartbreak, the vulnerability—is what makes connection real.
We’ve come to see friction as failure. Waiting, misunderstanding, uncertainty—all feel like bugs to be fixed. But these “bugs” are what teach us how to adapt.
The beauty of life is that everyone you meet lives in a slightly different context. Every interaction forces you to adjust your own. It’s inconvenient, but this is what living is all about.
Addiction to Convenience
In his audio series Inconvenient Truth, Oliver Burkeman makes an observation that stuck with me:
“It’s like we’re constantly trying to outrun any difficulties in our lives. Yet, the smoother we make things, the worse the remaining difficulties feel. No matter how quick and easy things get, you never stop being inconvenienced. It’s just that your standard of inconvenience shifts along with technology and the new reality. The goalposts keep moving, and maybe there’s a societal delusion that we can outrun our instinct for inconvenience.”
Oliver Burkeman, Inconvenient Truth
That’s the heart of it. We’re addicted to convenience—not because it makes us happier, but because it feeds the illusion that we can finally escape frustration.
And companies know this. Amazon has built an entire business model around the fact that customers always want more. As Jeff Bezos puts it, customers are “beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied” even when they’re happy—which means there’s always another pain point to solve, another bit of friction to remove.
Addiction always starts as a solution. It works at first—it makes life easier, smoother, more efficient. But over time, it hollows us out. The less friction we experience, the less resilient we become. Waiting in line, calling a restaurant, talking to a stranger—these once-normal parts of life now feel intolerable. We’ve built a world that promises we’ll never have to feel discomfort again.
We don’t call this addiction because it looks like progress. We call it “innovation.” But the underlying pattern is the same: every shortcut erodes a bit of our tolerance for reality.
It’s tricky because that’s what I’ve been trained to do at work. But I’ve realized that just because I have access to all of these tools of convenience, that doesn’t mean I need to use them all.
The Magic Dial
If convenience is an addiction, how do we break ourselves of it? The best answer, of course, is to consult a psychologist. But I’ve been reading psychologist David Burns a lot over the last few months, and he offers a framework that’s helped me think about this differently.
Burns is one of the founders of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and one of his most important tools is what he calls “the magic button.”
Here’s how it works: Burns asks patients to imagine he has a magic button. If they press it, their problem disappears completely. A person with social anxiety would never feel anxious around people again. Someone with perfectionism would stop caring about mistakes entirely.
At first, almost everyone wants to press the button.
Then he asks them to think about it more carefully. If you press the button and your social anxiety disappears, you might also stop caring about how you come across to others. You could become insensitive, oblivious to social cues. Your anxiety, while painful, is also trying to protect you—it’s what makes you considerate, what helps you read the room.
The very thing that causes pain also carries something valuable inside it: care, conscience, awareness.
What people really want, Burns says, isn’t a magic button. It’s a magic dial. They want to turn their anxiety down from an 80% to a 10%—not eliminate it entirely.
At work and in life, we’re thinking too much about magic buttons, when what we really need are magic dials.
I don’t want to eliminate all inconvenience from my relationships. I want enough friction to stay engaged, to stay flexible, to keep building those muscles of empathy. I want to be inconvenienced by my kids when they interrupt my work, because that interruption reminds me they’re real and present and need me.
The beauty of being alive is this constant reworking of context, this endless recombination of perspectives. It’s messy and inefficient and sometimes exhausting. But it’s also what makes connection possible. It’s what makes love possible. It’s what makes us more than just nodes in a perfectly optimized network.
Life is inconvenient because people are inherently inconvenient. Everyone you meet lives in a slightly different context—different assumptions, different experiences, different ways of seeing the world. Every interaction requires me to adjust, to translate, to meet someone where they are.
That’s not a bug. That’s the whole point.
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