Make Convenience Expensive Again

Modern society is not only obsessed with efficency but also saving time. Efficency is not a bad thing when it removes waste from the system and enables greater productivity, but often efficency is used exclusively for purposes of convenience – trading money, energy and waste for time savings.

The problem with convenience is it often too cheap and too relied on for dubious time saving, time that is then wasted in other ways. For example, a person buys a television dinner and eats it while watching television. No actual time is saved, but the person consumes unhealthy calories, wastes energy and fills up their garbage can with packaging that they purchased with the food.

Price is often a signal on whether or not somebody purchases an item. If it’s expensive, it gives a person some pause and forces them to consider alternatives. I am not worried if tin cans become somewhat more expensive, or for that matter electricity or automobiles. While nobody likes inflation, if it encourages better behavior it is net gain. If it forces less consumption, then it really is a net benefit to all in society.

I don’t buy pre-baked bread or any of those bread making kits. For the simple reason that while I like bread, I don’t want it to be convenient. Instead, I want to have to work to cook it, so that I don’t eat all those calories and carbs every day. It’s a weekly treat or maybe every couple of weeks. The same with cooking with dried beans – I like beans – but I don’t want to always be eating them every day, so I cook them myself. Plus who wants all those cans in the “recycle” garbage that don’t burn and have to be taken to the transfer station?

But you could save so much time not taking your cans and garbage to the transfer station! Or by driving to work! Really, almost an hour a day, compared to biking or busing it to work – especially now with the transfer to the shuttle. But what would I do with that extra time? Sit home and watch a movie or read a book? Write a blog post? I can do that on the bus. Or when I bike in, I get exercise, rather then the evening walk. The thing is that most “free” time earned by convenience is usually squandered.

One of the reasons I’ve been interested in homesteading is it’s a good way to eat better, because usually the easiest things to grow, store and cook are the healthiest – namely vegatables, especially root vegatables. You shouldn’t eat meat every day, so it should be difficult to raise, put a bullet through it’s brain, slaughter, freeze and cook. Likewise, the healthiest meats usually are the easiest to raise, butcher and cook, namely rabbit, quail and chicken. And you don’t have all that packaging trash, especially the Styrofoam that is so noxious to burn, assuming you don’t pay somebody to pile it up on outskirts of time for reasons of convenience. Instead, you compost the guts and turn it into soil that grows even more crops.