12/12/2025
For years, convenience has been sold to us as a kind of liberation: next-day shipping, infinite streaming, one-click everything. We live in a world where our desires can be met instantly, often before we’ve even noticed them. Algorithms anticipate our wants and funnel them back to us, keeping us consuming, scrolling, clicking and spending. Finding the pause point, slowing down, can feel almost impossible.
I’ve noticed something uncomfortable: the more convenient things become, the more disconnected I feel. Not just from the people behind what I’m consuming, but from myself: from my attention, my patience, my values. This culture of convenience trains us to expect immediacy, to prioritise speed, to treat everything we want as something we should have right now. With that, something subtle erodes: gratitude, relationship, depth, discernment. The power of delayed gratification is quietly vanishing.
To put it in perspective: there are now 2,781 billionaires worldwide whose combined wealth totals $14.2 trillion. Many of them are not using their wealth to reduce global poverty, but instead fund right-wing political campaigns, legal challenges that restrict the freedoms of marginalized people, or support ICE recruitment. Often, surface-level philanthropy serves primarily as a tax break.
Such extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer than three thousand people stands in stark contrast to the small, human-scale economies I long to be part of.
Lately, I’ve been slowly, imperfectly, opting out of the corporate default. Not because I expect perfection — I do still use Amazon sometimes (I navigate the same messy world as everyone else), but because I want to place my money, attention, and care in spaces that feel more alive, relational, and aligned.
I recently cancelled my Spotify account, after hearing many small-scale musicians speak about how poorly compensated they are on the platform.
Full post on my Substack.
