Convenience, Technology, and the Rise of Loneliness

Hi there,

When I lived in Barcelona, making lasagna took most of the afternoon. I wasn't trying to slow life down. That was simply how it worked.

I’d walk to my favorite neighborhood market with a loose idea of what I needed. If I wanted eggplant, I went to the stall that sold eggplant. Olives came from another stall. Cheese had its own counter. Meat was from a butcher who spoke too fast and seemed faintly amused by my attempts at Spanish.

I didn’t plan conversations. They just happened on their own. The cheese lady would always ask where I was from no matter how many times I told her. Someone else would correct my pronunciation, especially the day I tried to say I’d been living there for two years and discovered that in Spanish, forgetting to pronounce the small squiggle can turn años (years) into something anatomical!

Regardless, by the time I got home, I had everything I needed, and I’d interacted with more people than I now speak to in an average week.

At the time, it felt mildly inconvenient and a little inefficient. I remember standing in line thinking it would be easier if I could grab everything from neat rows and aisles without the chit chat.

What didn’t occur to me then was how little effort it took to feel part of something larger than myself. The slowness wasn't a flaw. It was just the texture of life.

That texture feels harder to find now.

That contrast is even harder to ignore since coming back to the U.S., where nearly everything is designed to remove friction. One stop shops and one-click checkouts are everywhere. Or no stops at all, with groceries and entire meals delivered without leaving the house.

It’s efficient, and there’s no denying how much time it saves. But the ease comes with a loss of depth, connection, and being fully engaged in and with life.

When I was working overseas, I encountered another version of this slowness that I initially found frustrating. It was considered rude, genuinely rude, to get down to business too quickly. Meetings didn’t begin with agendas or objectives. They began with cups of tea.

The first cup was for pleasantries. The host would ask about your life, your family, how you were settling in. The second cup was when you asked about them. Only after the third cup did anyone talk about business.

At the time, this tested my patience. I was used to efficiency, to calendars and clear objectives, and to getting to the point. I remember checking my watch and wondering why we hadn’t started yet.

Looking back, the ritual of the first two cups were a way of establishing something that couldn’t be rushed: trust, tone, and a sense of mutual regard. They signaled that the relationship mattered before the work and the business transaction ever entered the room. The relationship came first, and then the work-related stuff came next.

Now, especially in America, we try to compress, commoditize, and optimize everything. And then we’re surprised when relationships feel brittle, transactional, or strangely hollow.

There was a moment recently that made this harder to ignore. A Gen Z coworker was talking through where she wanted to eat. She said she was craving Chipotle, then immediately ruled it out because it would mean going inside and ordering face to face. Instead, she opened DoorDash and placed the same order, adding a note to leave it outside the door so she wouldn’t have to interact with anyone at all.

I don’t think that’s an isolated experience.

People seem to be sensing this loss, even if they don’t have a clear way of articulating it. Everywhere you look, there are small, quiet attempts to reintroduce friction into daily life.

People are buying dumb phones, carrying paper planners, writing letters, listening to vinyl records. Some are even taking up needlepoint and just generally choosing activities that can’t be sped up or optimized.

It’s easy to dismiss this as aesthetic or trendy, another form of performance. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I think many people are responding, instinctively, to how thin life can feel when everything is optimized.

When everything is instant, there’s no pause between impulse and action, no space for reflection or attunement. You scroll, respond, react, and consume faster than your nervous system can keep up, and over time that speed becomes the default.

Analog experiences introduce resistance in small, but meaningful, ways. You have to walk somewhere. You have to wait. You have to tolerate silence or mild awkwardness. You have to pay attention to the person in front of you rather than the device in your hand.

These moments don’t feel productive, but they do something productivity can’t. They are grounding. It slows the moment down just enough to make presence necessary rather than optional.

The thing I keep coming back to is that a life of connection seems to require some amount of friction. Not a lot, but enough to create weight. Waiting your turn, being slightly inconvenienced, staying in the conversation when it would be easier to disengage. These are the moments where trust, familiarity, and something real forms.

Technology removes many of these moments, not out of malice, but out of efficiency. And efficiency, for all its benefits, is indifferent to meaning and depth.

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Final Thought

You can be reachable all day and still feel unseen. You can communicate constantly and still feel lonely. None of this makes technology bad. It makes it insufficient when it comes to meeting our most human needs.

I don’t think the answer is to reject modern life or retreat into nostalgia. That’s neither realistic nor honest.

What I’m noticing instead is a growing desire to be more deliberate about where ease belongs and where it quietly costs us something. To choose, intentionally, to take the longer route in certain areas of life. To make the phone call instead of sending the text or voice note. To sit through the first two cups of tea before getting down to business.

Ease isn’t the enemy. But when convenience becomes the organizing principle of everything, it strips life of the very moments that make connection possible. And maybe that’s why so many people are reaching for friction again. Not because they want life to be harder, but because they want it to feel more real.

And maybe making life slightly harder, in the right places, is how we recover some of the warmth we’ve been missing.

See you next week,

Shakila