Written by Bouchra Haddani
A couple of years ago, one of my closest childhood friends didn’t attend my 18th birthday party. She wasn’t sick, she wasn’t traveling, she wasn’t busy. She just couldn’t be bothered to leave her house on a cold winter day to a function where the only person she knew was the host. I put my feelings aside, and we made up in the following months, but that left a bitter taste in my mouth. I had noticed the rise of the “prioritizing myself” mentality online, but that was the first time I had a friend cancel on me because of the inconvenience it presented for them. Since then, I have started thinking about the price of inconvenience.
We live in a convenience-driven society. That’s an undebatable fact. In recent years, the world has transformed in so many ways, and most of them have made our lives better. We no longer have to leave our apartment to do our groceries, we can get food delivered at any time of the day, and we don’t need to get our cinema ticket at the booth anymore. Most of the newer services created are prioritizing our comfort: don’t want to write that email to your prof? AI. Don’t want to carry your book in your bag all day? e-readers. We’ve created so many products and services to ensure that we’re not bothered by the simple tasks of our everyday life.
However, that comfort has a price beyond the money needed to acquire it. It feels like more and more people choose individual and time-saving activities over face-to-face interactions they deem unnecessary or a waste of time, preferring the self-checkout booths to an interaction with the cashier. The speed and ease of these actions may save us time, but kill our sense of community. This search for absolute comfort has seeped its way in every area of our lives, so it obviously couldn’t stay away from our relationships.
Recently, on social media, people have been bringing to the forefront of the internet discourse the idea of prioritizing your own well-being, self-care, and boundaries. While these are legitimate arguments to have in certain discussions, as with anything on the Internet, they got taken out of context and began being applied to any and every situation. Setting down certain boundaries in friendships and group settings is great. Making sure you spend enough time on your own to rest and refill your energy is also great. However, an issue comes up when that prioritization becomes the easy route. When any effort needed in order to maintain your friendship feels too much. When cancelling on your friends because you’re too lazy feels okay. When your boundaries feel like a well-fitting justification.
Yes, the alternative to staying on your couch doomscrolling requires more effort, but the reward is disproportionately bigger than the effort. We could compare that to working out: who actually wants to get up from bed to go exercising? No one, I’d assume. However, getting your body to look the way you desperately want it to takes hard work and effort. You indeed need to get up, put on your workout clothes, leave your house, and most importantly after that, exercise. But the reward of that – whether it is feeling better in your mind or your body – definitely outweighs the effort in the end, so much so that you often forget how much you dreaded leaving the warmth of your place.
On the other hand, we’re being so encouraged to go on “solo dates” and enjoy experiences on our own. As an avid solo traveler who is also not scared of (and actually loves) going to the cinema alone, I agree. We should spend more time on our own to get to know ourselves. But as with everything in life, balance is key. Choosing a travel destination alone or deciding what movie you want to watch without anyone else’s input is great, but that little extra effort of having to discuss it with everyone and following through with the plan is what creates beautiful memories with your friends. When I brought up this topic with a friend of mine, she shared that she actually “never wants to go partying” but that she never regrets it afterwards, and that her most beautiful memories were created on nights where she had to force herself to dress up, get ready, and get out. She could be a certified homebuddy, but actively refraining herself from being that has allowed her to foster her beautiful and long-lasting friendships.
Humans want to feel accepted; we strive for community and long for a sense of belonging. No kid wants to eat alone at the canteen, and no adult wants to eat alone at a restaurant. This desire to fit in is not completely superficial; it comes down to an evolutionary sense of survival rooted in our biology as humans. But as the world has grown into evermore individualistic societies, we have learned to prioritize our peace and comfort over the sacrifices we need to make to maintain our communities. As a kid, my dad used to incessantly repeat the famous African proverb: “alone we go faster, together we go further”. In times where real-life communities feel fragile, and humans need to rely on each other more than ever, “going further together”, creating a real community where everyone feels welcome makes inconvenience worth it.
What if inconvenience is the price we have to pay for community?