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?

A popular hobby for years, putting a bird on it has only recently become a viable career.

Now that life is so much easier than it was a hundred years ago — very few of us are farming 12 hours a day to feed ourselves — we’ve grown into a world where we don’t just expect to have a job, but have a job that we love. Turn our passion into our work. This Medium post explores the phenomenon:

With fewer reasons to stay in one job, workers began to explore a wider variety of options. For some, these options included turning a hobby into a business. Young people turned to what they loved, what they were good at, with an entrepreneurial mindset angled toward self-employment. It’s why we have so many artisan lollipops and food trucks.

But the side effects are things like convincing yourself that turning your pass time into a second job is somehow noble. Or not really enjoying the thing you loved the same way you used to once you tack on the added pressure to perform, earn, or succeed.

What are the benefits and costs of turning a hobby into a career?

Have you ever wanted to try? What would you do? What stopped you?

Is there something to be said for working a traditional job and pursuing other creative or recreational things purely for pleasure?