The Seductive Power of Convenience

The other day when chatting with some friends I said I couldn’t understand the allure of pancake mix, why people buy it. Pancakes are so easy to make, I said. I know the recipe by heart - 1 cup of flour, 2 t baking powder, 1/2 t salt, 2 T sugar, 1 egg, 2 T melted butter, milk to make a batter that’s thick but pourable. The responses I got were things like - But have you tried this or that brand? So good and all you have to add is water! True, there’s no measuring spoons needed, no thought, no need to keep all these ingredients on hand, and pretty good pancakes too. Why should we take those few extra minutes to make them from scratch? Our time is valuable after all.

In my mother’s generation (she was born in 1910) convenience meant a fridge replacing an ice box, an automatic washer instead of a ringer washer. In cookery came Bisquick (the beginning of pancake and biscuit mixes), margarine with the colour pre-mixed in, and frozen TV dinners. My mom loved TV dinners right up until the end of her life and, having cooked meal after meal for over 50 years of marriage, it isn’t hard for me to understand why. But we’ve come a long way since my mother’s time. Convenience has taken over the market place.  We do not want to do anything menial. We have not taught our children how, we have forgotten how ourselves. Our expectations have gone miles beyond necessity. We have embraced easy solutions in the name of gaining time to do things we perceive as more important. We have become lazy, unwilling, or unable, to perform even the simplest of tasks. It seems we now need individual packets of nearly every food, coffee packed in single serve pods, full meals delivered to our door, frozen biscuits... Few households lack dishwashers, washers, dryers, blenders, fryers, crock pots… Many families have 2 or 3 vehicles, an RV, a boat, a 5000 sq foot home… Yet we say we struggle to “make ends meet”. Really?

Clever marketing has convinced us to buy and buy more. Quality is sacrificed for quantity. Things are not built to last. The ever growing and totally unsustainable GDP has become the mantra of our market driven capitalistic society. Without new and better things, we are told, we will not be happy or successful.

The internet, movies and TV have stoked a worldwide desire for the perfect middle or upper class comfortable life portrayed in the majority of films produced. If we don’t live this way we want to - we feel we have a right to - we feel oppressed if we are unable to achieve this expected lifestyle. In Canada, although we may do the final assembly, we have nearly stopped producing the components of most products. We embrace the global economy because it makes it possible for us to obtain goods at low prices, delivered right to our door. We say we love the planet and its people, but our greed for more and more of everything at a “reasonable” price has enabled giant corporations to become “too big to fail”, gaining the good will, including subsidies, of our government, making billions in profits while locally owned and operated businesses struggle to survive. We salve our conscience by getting on one bandwagon or another - save the old growth trees, boycott palm oil, stop eating meat… We all try to do something - conserve, recycle, vote out backward thinking pundits, make a scratch cake, ride a bike... But no one wants to go back to the good old days except with memories. We, the citizens of first world countries, continually strive for an easier life even though by world standards we already have an easy life.

The cost of maintaining our comfortable life style is not reflected in the dollar amount we pay. We ignore the fact that nearly everything is manufactured all or in part in countries where wages are well below the poverty line and environmental standards are nonexistent. All this stuff  is shipped to our shores in giant fuel guzzling container ships, then trucked to its final destination. The gap between those who have and those who don’t is widening. Inequalities, real or perceived, are stoking fires of resentment. It’s a cauldron of despair, simmering its way to the boiling point and nearly ready to spill over.

The pandemic has illustrated some of the weaknesses in our global economy. We are being inconvenienced by a lack of products to buy, slow shipping, unavailable replacement parts, but until/unless the economy actually collapses we will likely continue to sail along, never satisfied that we have enough, oblivious to any harm we are causing. 

Has our unabated desire to consume trapped us in an endless spiral? Natural climate change has been exacerbated by poor, unthinking practices in the realms of resource extraction and manufacturing. The earth’s population continues to increase. Our present course is unsustainable. Survival may require us to embrace community over individuality. We may have to be satisfied with less. 

I guess I am not the only person thinking along these rather gloomy lines. But I don’t think it’s hopeless. I see incredible innovations, inventions coming about, as well as a shift in philosophical thought. I've met lots of intelligent, energetic and caring people, many of them still young. Change is on the wind. 

mltipton.blogspot.com, https://www.facebook.com/Northof543/, July 24, 2021