Eat it, Nike. Now, brands proudly appeal to the saddest parts of us.

Who among us isn’t guilty of posting the same verdict on the same tv show watched on the same service to the same social network via the same phone while ordering the same food through the same app sitting in your same comfy pants in your roughly-the-same furnished apartments.

It’s so easy!

This piece on the tyranny of convenience takes a look at the trade-offs between convenience and meaningful effort, and raises some points about our choices worth examining.

Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.

Convenience, he argues, can be a trap. When the convenient becomes the unthinking default, it leads us to make the same choices, and in sanding off the rough edges of life, leaves us without texture.

How is a life of convenience making you more boring than you might be otherwise?

What are the least-convenient things you do that keep you from being boring?

At least the books whose contents *I* only vaguely remember are more neatly organized.

A desire to spend more time engaging with the vast trove of ideas and information we encounter everyday drove the creation of this site. The intended purpose: to make some of it stick, or extract more value than the momentary intellectual rush of reading things on the internet.

Apparently lots of people experience that gap between input and retention, and not just with articles that pop up in our feeds every day.

Surely some people can read a book or watch a movie once and retain the plot perfectly. But for many, the experience of consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and then watching the water run down the drain. It might leave a film in the tub, but the rest is gone.

Wow does that metaphor ring true.

How bad are you at remembering the facts, details, plots, or characters from the media you enjoy?

What tends to stick? What doesn’t?
What makes some things stick and others not?

7-11, terrified, clings to the hope that Amazon Go never sells cigarettes.

This week Amazon launched their first Amazon Go store in Seattle, an automated convenience store that watches what you pick up, and automatically charges you as you leave.

But the technology that is also inside, mostly tucked away out of sight, enables a shopping experience like no other. There are no cashiers or registers anywhere. Shoppers leave the store through those same gates, without pausing to pull out a credit card. Their Amazon account automatically gets charged for what they take out the door.

Later in the article Amazon says that eliminating cashiers frees up humans to do other less-automated tasks, like restocking or performing customer service, which, sure. But for most, this store will be no different than a giant walk-in vending machine.

I think of how rarely today, compared to decades past, that I need to interact with humans for basic tasks. I can buy a tank of gas without interacting with anyone. I haven’t been inside a bank in years. Movie theaters are down to ticket-tearers and pop-corn poppers, who surely won’t be around much longer. I’m totally fine with self-checkout at grocery stores or in Amazon’s new convenience store concept. And I actively tense up at the approach of an employee in the rare instances I browse a physical clothing store vs buying online. Bartenders, though — take away my favorite local bartender and my life would be poorer for it.

What retail scenarios (if any) would you still rather deal with people vs automation?*

(*Automated customer service lines don’t count. Everyone hates those.)

Which ones do you currently dislike most and want replaced fast? Or currently enjoy and hope they don’t automate away?

What unforeseen side effects, beyond job losses, might arise as this trend continues?

On the blockchain, everybody can securely verify you’re a dog, without knowing which dog.

In an article I’d highly recommend about the potential of blockchain technology beyond cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, author Steven Johnson is more excited about the further possibilities of decentralization than he is about new ways to send money.

For example, our personal Social Graphs are currently tethered to places like Twitter or Facebook, who own the lists of our follows/friends that define our experience on social media. But what if, for example, those connections were made through an open standard we could port to any service?

Perhaps someday, every single person on the planet might use that standard to map their social connections, just as every single person on the internet uses TCP/IP to share data. But even if this new form of identity became ubiquitous, it wouldn’t present the same opportunities for abuse and manipulation that you find in the closed systems that have become de facto standards. I might allow a Facebook-style service to use my social map to filter news or gossip or music for me, based on the activity of my friends, but if that service annoyed me, I’d be free to sample other alternatives without the switching costs.

In that world, the list of people you know, news outlets you read, celebrities you are interested in, etc., could be your own. Then you could lay any type of software on top of that to interact with all those things how you saw fit. You could build all manner of new social networks using the underlying connection data, from scratch, without having to convince everyone else to switch to the new platform to make it work.

If you were to build a new social network from the ground up, how would it be different from what we use today?

How could these new social networks avoid some of the pitfalls of the ones we have now?

All those moments will be lost in time… like tweets in rain.

There is a constant tension between our desire to live every day like it’s our last — to maximize our impact on this world and the joy we find in it — and our tendency to do the opposite, by frittering away precious time doing mundane, pointless, unfulfilling things. Well, there’s an app for that.

“Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

…

As I scroll through Instagram or refresh Twitter, WeCroak interrupts with the sobering reminder that it is not just my attention these other apps are consuming, but chunks of my life.”

The simplicity is beautiful, if potentially morbid. And don’t count out the fact that it may have the opposite effect on the more jaded among us, who find the comfort of an inevitable end a source of relief.

Would you get anything out of an app like this?

How might these reminders affect your daily behavior?

What other “tech” with such a clear and simple purpose do you wish existed?