against convenience
the root of complicity
So this all started with my 2025 goals.
(except that really it all started way before that and I kind of made a zine about it years ago before I think I really knew that this is what I was thinking about, but the easy place to start is with my 2025 goals)
My 2025 goals are as follows:
Quit all music streaming services. This is the year of the CD.
Collaborate with everyone I know on a zine.
Contribute more to mutual aid.
Have a torrid and illicit love affair.
I also like to crowd-source a few sub-goals, which ended up being:
See at least 10 ducks.
Document people’s smiles.
The relevant goal here is the first one: quitting all music streaming services in favor of physical media. For me, this really just means quitting Spotify - something that I first considered doing back in 2022. If I remember correctly (which I definitely may not, but does it really matter?), both Spotify and Netflix raised their rates a bit around the same time. It was an amount that I could still technically afford, but the increase did make me stop for a second and consider a question I’d been avoiding - were these platforms actually serving me?
The big question was really - is having the world at my fingertips actually a good thing?
I ended up deciding to leave Netflix (my personal account, at least. I was, however, logged into my best friend’s parents’ account on the TV in my apartment, which was above my best friend’s parents’ garage, and I did proceed to absolutely destroy their Netflix algorithm by consuming an insane amount of k-dramas during the year I was 26. 26 was a very difficult age to be, though. I had to cope somehow). I came to that decision because I really didn’t like how I’d come to use it - the lack of intention that went into what I consumed. I watched SO MANY shows that I didn’t enjoy at all, just for the sake of watching something (in this way, me obsessively watching k-dramas was actually a significantly better way of consuming than I had been partaking in, because it was very intentional, and I did enjoy every single one). The result of me not having Netflix now is that most of the time I just…don’t watch things. Our local theatre regularly shows really incredible older films, and occasionally there will be a newer one that I’m intrigued enough by to go see, but that is basically the extent of what I end up watching since moving away from the apartment with the TV already logged into Netflix. And less has been good.
My issues with Spotify had to do both with the lack of intention in the music I was listening to - I listened to a lot of Spotify-generated playlists and radio stations at the time - and with the ridiculous way they compensate (or rather, don’t) artists on their platform. I ended up staying on Spotify because I just couldn’t imagine a better way of getting music. No streaming platform was particularly good at paying their artists, as far as I could tell. My compromise was to at least increase the intentionality with which I listened to music by setting a few rules for myself: 1) No Spotify-generated playlists or radios (I did occasionally break this rule when the daylist was introduced, because Spotify is sneaky and evil and how was I supposed to resist those absolutely ridiculous playlist titles), meaning that 2) all playlists had to be made by me, and I decided that 3) no song could be added to the playlist unless I had listened to and would in theory purchase the entire album it was from. This third rule was created because I did have a vision of one day leaving all music streaming and reverting to CDs, and I thought maybe this would help get me into the right mentality for it.
And lo and behold, that day has come. The thing that really triggered it at the end of last year was honestly the fact that Spotify Wrapped, once an annual bringer of joy, was incredibly stupid and boring. So when I was at my parents’ house for the holidays, I made my preparations (i.e. stealing my little brother’s Discman and almost his entire CD collection, because he’s on his mormon mission until Spring 2026 and he doesn’t need them right now), and I have been music-streaming-free since New Year’s Day. And thus far, one result of this has been that a lot of the time I just…don’t listen to music. Sometimes I run out of batteries. Sometimes it’s too cold out for the discman to work properly. Sometimes I forget to bring a CD with me. I was pretty sure this would be a possibility, and I thought listening less would be much harder to adjust to than watching less post-Netflix was but it turns out…less is still good.
This CD-centered goal is really just a tiny part of a much bigger shift that I’m looking at, which is questioning and ultimately trying to remove things that serve convenience/efficiency, and that fulfill/promote a sense of urgency. It’s about retraining my brain.
In the last year, I’ve thought almost non-stop about the way that convenience is ultimately a massive factor in why I continue to participate in systems that I really do believe are bad. Things like Spotify and Instagram are tiny examples of things that add an insane amount of convenience to my life - convenience in accessing music, convenience in communicating with friends and staying connected to what’s going on in my community - for an insanely low price, considering what we’re getting. And I know that the “real” price we pay for these kinds of things is our data - we are the product, etc., etc. That’s something I’ve just decided to be okay with for a long time, because it feels inescapable. But lately I’m thinking more about the way that no amount of data that’s mined from me is really paying for the ways that people are taken advantage of to make this convenience possible, and the way these conveniences serve larger systems of which I would ultimately love to see the downfall. I think in the world I’d like to exist in - a radically compassionate world - we will have to go without a whole lot of the things that make a comfortable and convenient western lifestyle possible, and I want to live now in a way that prepares me for that as a future reality. So, the convenience has to go.
Convenience also takes away my desire for making intentional decisions - especially because I get really easily overwhelmed by the amount of decisions constantly available to me. I’ve taken a lot of steps towards removing the amount of decisions I have to make to try and increase my capacity for intentionality - limiting my wardrobe, setting routines, etc - but when all the entertainment and information in the world are conveniently at my fingertips, the decisions are still limitless! So, the convenience has to go.
I think efficiency is maybe a big scam. The idea of saving time treats time as a scarce resource, which isn’t how I want to think or feel about time. And it’s obviously very linked to productivity - another scam. Why do I have so many apps on my phone? Why do I need to have easy access to my email, or my google drive, or anything that I can do on my laptop at a later time? Well, because if I suddenly find myself waiting somewhere and I don’t have a book on me, I might as well use that time productively. But also…what if I just sat there and waited instead? What’s going to happen if I don’t see an email until I check for it when I am actually at a computer?
“Time isn’t real; urgency doesn’t exist” has been my big thing for a while now. I say it all the time. I put it on a sticker. I made everyone I know (give or take a few) take one of said stickers. It’s probably annoying at this point, but I cannot be stopped, and I now cannot stop looking at the things in my life that are directly contrary to this idea that I really believe and want to act in accordance with. And basically everything that exists on my phone goes against this anti-urgency stance.
The immediacy of smartphones really stresses me out. The fact that I can be immediately available at any time is a huge stressor. Maintaining relationships through a phone is a huge stressor - which, unfortunately, is how many of my relationships are maintained because I am half a world away from half of the people I love at any given time. I realised how much stress this caused me when I moved to Ireland and had to rely on my phone to maintain all of my relationships with everyone back home. I was bad enough at it that a lot of those relationships really suffered. Some just slowly trickled to nothing; my lack of consistent communication caused major tension in others.
I’ve gotten better about semi-consistent long distance communication via phone through a massive amount of effort, but returning to CD’s for even just a few weeks already has me considering….what if I just went back to letter-writing to stay in touch with people instead of relying on Instagram to get my life updates out to my friends? What if I just saved up all my (very important and profound) thoughts for this newsletter instead of giving in to immediacy and posting them on my story? What if I took the browser off my phone, and any time I had a question like “what temperature should the oven be to roast potatoes?”, I called my mom instead (I actually tried this out and called my mom for a similar question this weekend and she just went and googled the answer herself, but I’m still counting it as a success in taking the less convenient and immediate route and also am giving myself a pat on the back for calling my mother, a thing I do wish I did more often)?
The biggest side effect of the CD switch thus far - which really, feels massive - is that I’m realising that I don’t think anything I’ve previously thought felt impossible is actually remotely impossible. I don’t think I’m actually gaining more than I’d be losing by giving up any of the things I’ve been hesitant about giving up in the last few years.
It’s early days yet and I’m still exploring and playing around with all of these ideas. I change my mind all the time - as evidenced by the few newsletters in this archive. They aren’t even that old at this point, but I went back and read them before I started writing this one and I already disagree, or at least now think differently about, several of the points I made in them. And that’s okay! I think another horrible result of all this convenience and immediacy and having the world at our fingertips is the conflation of what you think at one point being who you are - and the idea that any of us ever has a fixed identity. The important thing here is that I’m very excited to see where all of these thoughts might take me, and for all of the impossible things that might suddenly start feeling possible after all.
xoxo,
the mindful narcissist
p.s. do you want to be penpals? send me your address and we can be penpals!
Could you send me your address? Or do you need to be the first to send correspondence to begin the penpal process? 🙂
Finally reading this and obsessed with the less immediate ways of refusing convenience. Gonna start deleting apps off my phone asap. And since there's no more zines coming in my mailbox, I'd love to start sending and receiving letters <3