The Rise of Age of Conveniences - has it become the necessary Big Evil?

Do you remember those jute bags your father used to carry whenever he went to the market to buy vegetables?

Not sure how that behavior in society got changed slowly.

People do not use jute bags anymore; they bring vegetables in single-use plastic bags.

Convenience.

I do not remember using a fountain pen in recent times; we mostly use a one-time use ball pen; however, we never used it while growing up.

We had fountain pens, filled ink from the inkpots, and changed nib if worn out.

Today, children have never used a fountain pen and mostly use single-use ball pens.

Age of conveniences,

Plastic is not the only convenience the world is indulging.

There are so many-rise of personal transportations exponentially, packaged food and beverages, online shopping, etc., etc.

And this rise of the whole convenience economy, trillions of dollars!

What else we are paying apart from money for this rise of convenience age.

Well, we all know, we are breathing air that is much beyond the prescribed AQI, spending multiple hours commuting on roads because of traffic that hardly moves, mountains of landfills, unnatural floods, whatnot.

Let's take only the plastic.

According to UNEP, the world is drowning in plastic pollution.

According to researchers, there is a very rapid growth in the usage of plastics compared to any other materials, and since 1950 and the world has produced 8.3 billion tonnes of plastics.

60% of them have ended up either in landfills or in the natural environment.

Of course, plastics have some unique usages that can not be replaced or avoided.

But otherwise, why is this exponential rise in the usage of plastic?

It has primarily to do with our addiction to conveniences.

In the generation of our parents or grandparents, things were bought for their long-term utility value; people were not ready to pay extra money for mere short-term conveniences.

Once I noticed a strange incident while traveling through a bazaar in a small town many years ago.

An old lady was buying a one-litre water bottle.

Nothing unusual.

But the next thing that was very surprising to me, instead of drinking the water, she poured it out, took the plastic bottle in her shopping bag, and went away.

This is how utility and conveniences are perceived by people.

We buy plastic water bottles because we do not want to carry our water bottles; there is a convenient product at an affordable cost.

Of course, there could be a situation where we are constrained to buy a water bottle because there is no alternative.

For that old lady, that bottle had a utility value; maybe she needs to buy kerosene from the fair price shop and needs a plastic bottle.

She can not avoid that usage.

Today you hardly get a cutting chai (tea) in a glass on a roadside tea stall.

Everybody uses either plastic or laminated paper cups.

Convenience again, no need to wash the glasses.

We never had food on a thermocol or styrofoam plate in marriages while growing up.

People used banana leaves or plates made out of banana trunks.

In the last couple of years, we have seen how everything is moving towards plastic because of convenience.

Earlier in the restaurant, they kept water jugs or glass bottles; today are keeping portable single-use use bottles.

Almost 100% of plastics are produced from chemicals derived from petroleum, coal, or natural gases.

Cost of this convenience we are already paying hugely.

Today, when you think of product or services development or innovation around it, it is not about having only the utility value; it is also the convenience to a great extent.

These are not two separable things now.

How convenient is your product to buy or use, or how it has eliminated some of the nagging old inconvenience issues matters a lot?

People have built billion-dollar businesses solving convenience issues.

Now, what is the human side of the story getting too used to convenience?

My son gets immediately upset when his comfort and convenience are compromised.

He uses paper napkins to wipe his hands to clean the table.

We used old clothes.

We come from a generation where we were not ready to pay extra cents to marginal conveniences.

Minor inconveniences could not irritate us that much.

You become more resilient when you regularly adapt to slight unease and inconveniences.

Those little mundane struggles arising from inconvenience make us think creatively, actively engage our minds, and seek workable solutions around.

We did not have a stapler in the house during my school days, so we had to take the pain of using the needle and the thread to tie the pages together.

We had to learn that.

Has the age of hyper convenience in everything made the human race less tolerant and more pleasure-seeking?

Will it be sustainable?

Remember that Movie by Charlie Chaplin, "Feeding Machine"?

Food was fed to a laborer by an automatic machine, and how it went horrendously wrong.

While the movie underlines the incredible obsession of industries to bring automation in everything to increase productivity in modern times, it had another side.

I imagine if a day comes when we do not have to use our hands even, we would order, Alexa bring the food and feed me.

And when we do not use our organs, evolutionary history says it becomes vestigial.

We may have smaller hands and smaller legs because they did not have to work much.

Do our endless greed for convenience, does it need a check?