In the last ten years, and increasingly after the COVID pandemic, we've pulled off something remarkable: we've made effort itself the enemy. Not laziness, effort. Actually pushing through difficulty, building a skill the hard way, talking to a stranger, tolerating an awkward silence, showing up in person, all of it has been quietly reclassified as optional. Whether it's mental exertion, physical activity, or basic human interaction, the average person in the Western world has developed a near-allergic reaction to anything that requires showing up fully. We've dressed up convenience as a right, and anything that challenges that is now an affront.
This piece looks at where that attitude has taken us. We'll go through the body we stopped using, the food we stopped cooking, the financial infrastructure that traded our privacy for frictionless spending, the dating apps that turned intimacy into a slot machine, and finally what we actually did with all that time we saved. The answer is not flattering.
Let's start with the most obvious place: our bodies. The world is getting bigger, and not in a good way. Kids are hitting obesity before they finish middle school. And a big part of that comes down to parenting, or the lack of it. Parents are too drained, too busy, too checked-out to actually push back on their kid eating garbage and staring at screens all day. They need to unwind after work, apparently.
But it isn't just parenting. The institutions that used to compensate for it have quietly given up too. PE classes once built real physical foundations in children, strength, agility, endurance. In 1961, JFK launched the Presidential Youth Fitness Program after studies showed American children were dramatically less fit than their European counterparts. It worked. For decades, school fitness was taken seriously, with standardized tests and real expectations. That culture has largely collapsed, replaced by the logic that physical exertion shouldn't be compulsory because someone might find it uncomfortable.
Beyond school, kids used to move simply because life demanded it. They helped their fathers with repairs, their mothers in the kitchen, their grandparents in the garden or the fields. That kind of labor wasn't framed as exercise, it was just participation in family life. I still help my grandfather in the fields when I visit, and there is something in that work that no gym membership comes close to replicating. That connection between effort and contribution has been almost entirely severed for the current generation.
Here's a thought experiment: take those exhausted parents and drop them into the 1800s for a week. A real twelve-hour shift, seven days a week, no weekends, no ergonomic chair, no HR department. Then come back and tell me about being too tired to go for a walk. The fatigue most people feel today isn't from working hard, it's from the absence of any real structure or discipline. The body mistakes boredom and mental noise for exhaustion.
What this produces, over a generation, are adults who genuinely can't delay gratification. They want everything now, frictionless, delivered. The consequences are predictable: debt, weight problems, and a menu of addictions ranging from social media to harder things. These aren't personal failings that emerged from nowhere, they're the logical output of a culture that made convenience the highest virtue and called effort a burden.
The same epidemic of easy seeped into our kitchens, dressed up in the excuse that nobody has time to cook. You do. There is no compelling reason to spend €10–20 on a single takeout order when that same money buys healthy ingredients for two days of meals. The maths aren't complicated. The will is just absent.
And if the cost argument doesn't land, consider this: takeout apps like Wolt and Glovo have built enormous businesses on a single insight, that people won't walk 200 metres to pick up their own food. That's it. Not that people are busy, not that they're working double shifts. Just that the friction of a short walk has become too much to ask. Some people have taken it further and now do their entire grocery shopping through delivery apps, paying a premium to avoid the mild inconvenience of entering a supermarket.
This is not a logistical problem. It is a discipline problem. And it shows up directly on the body, in the same waistlines, the same energy levels, the same kids who've never seen someone cook a meal from scratch and have no framework for doing it themselves.
We don't just sacrifice our health for convenience, we sacrifice our privacy too, and with the same cheerful indifference. The financial world has run the same play. Everything's an app now. Visa and Mastercard process every transaction. Central bank digital currencies are on the way, promising even more seamless spending, and complete visibility into every dollar you move. Which is great for governments trying to get their tax calculations exactly right. Less great if you thought your finances were your own business.
These systems exist so nobody has to walk to an ATM anymore. So nobody has to physically go to a store, move their legs, interact with a human. And fair enough, convenience has real value. But we handed over our financial privacy for it without blinking. Algorithms now understand our spending patterns better than we do. The idea of a transaction that isn't tracked, categorized, and stored feels almost quaint.
That's not progress. That's just a different kind of cage with a nicer interface.
Then there's modern dating, or what passes for it. Apps like Tinder and Hinge have turned human intimacy into a commodity. You browse people the way you browse shoes. There used to be a word for treating your body and your company as a product to be marketed and exchanged, now we just call it "being on the apps." Something that was once considered degrading has been rebranded as empowerment, and pointing that out gets you labeled a prude.
The mechanics of it make the problem worse. You swipe left or right on a human being based on a photo, in about the same time it takes to decide whether you want fries. No conversation, no context, no attempt at understanding who someone actually is. Just a gut-level visual call, driven almost entirely by the same impulse that makes people click on thumbnails. And then everyone wonders why these connections feel hollow.
Here's the part Tinder definitely won't put in a press release: there is no financial incentive for them to actually get you into a relationship. Every successful match that turns into a couple is two fewer paying users. The business model runs on loneliness, on keeping you swiping, subscribed, and slightly hopeful. It is, structurally, designed to fail you.
The gender distribution makes it worse for almost everyone. Around 75% of Tinder users are men, meaning most are competing for a thin slice of the available pool. OkCupid's own data, from their since-deleted but widely archived "Your Looks and Your Inbox" post, found that women rated 80% of male profiles as below average in attractiveness, while men's ratings of women followed a normal distribution. A separate peer-reviewed study found that out of 100 male profiles, only a single one was liked by more than 80% of women surveyed. A large-scale analysis tracking over 230,000 profiles, covered by MIT Technology Review, put the average man's match rate at around 0.6%. That's not dating. That's a lottery with worse odds and more emotional investment.
And the app is designed to keep all of this happening, deliberately. Sean Rad, one of Tinder's founders, was remarkably candid about it:
"We always saw Tinder, the interface, as a game. What you're doing, the motion, the reaction."
"Nobody joins Tinder because they're looking for something. They join because they want to have fun. It doesn't even matter if you match because swiping is so fun."
The founder of one of the world's most popular dating apps openly admitted that finding a partner was never really the point.
Meeting someone used to require leaving the house, being present, tolerating the slight discomfort of talking to a stranger. All of that has friction. All of that requires effort. And so we traded it for an app that simulates the experience of connection while systematically preventing the real thing, and charges us a monthly fee for the privilege.
So, all this time saved by apps and delivery and one-click everything. All those hours freed up by not walking to a store, not cooking, not dealing with physical tasks. What did we do with it?
We scroll. That's it. We handed over our privacy, our physical health, our financial data, and now our love lives, so we could spend evenings locked into infinite scroll feeds built by engagement algorithms whose one job is to keep us from looking away. We traded genuine connection for curated content. We swapped boredom, which is actually useful, for a constant drip of manufactured outrage and dopamine hits.
It is worth saying clearly: the examples in this piece are not an exhaustive list. They are some of the most damaging, particularly where health and privacy are concerned. But the same pattern runs through nearly every corner of modern life. Students feed their assignments to AI rather than wrestling with the material themselves, outsourcing not just the work but the thinking, and the growth that comes with it. People turn to AI chatbots for emotional support and validation, simulating the experience of being understood without the vulnerability, reciprocity, or genuine human presence that makes that experience worth anything.
The digital convenience revolution was never really about freeing us up. It was about finding a more efficient way to extract value from us. Every time-saving tool saves that time so corporations can monetize the attention we then have nowhere to put.
We were sold liberation. What we built instead is the most sophisticated distraction machine ever created, and we pay a subscription fee for the privilege of being its content. The real tragedy isn't what we lost. It's that most people genuinely believe they came out ahead.