The Art of Inconvenience

By Kenzi Perkins

Edited by Anna Kate Mereness

@kenziiialaina on Pinterest

We live in a society where everything is right at your fingertips. If you want food, you have it delivered. If you miss a friend, you send a text. If you want entertainment, you can have it at the press of a button. Homework? Just ask AI for the answers. 

Tradeoffs

These amenities make our lives seemingly easier, or at the very least, more convenient. Have we lost something, though, in losing the art of inconvenience?

Taking the time to make a meal that you love, a synthesis of a recipe card from your grandma. Writing a letter to your friend who moved across the country, maybe even tucking some photos of what you’ve been up to into the envelope. Making plans to go to the movie theater with a group of your friends on a Friday night. Reading a novel, underlining passages you liked and jotting down your thoughts in the margins.

Do our lives lack the color they once did simply because we’ve chosen to opt for what’s convenient instead of taking the time to do things with intention? What can we do to saturate our lives with, well, life again? 

Resaturation

I’m sure that a lot of us can admit that we spend more time than we should scrolling through social media all the time, our thumb swiping mindlessly across our screen. There are countless better ways to spend this time to add a little bit of color into our life.

Break up with your screen

First and foremost, we need to take a step away from our devices. Yes, they’re convenient and have a lot of helpful features, but they’ve become idols in our lives: they replace social interaction, press endless content into our eyes and occupy every bout of silence with blaring noise. Notifications distract us from the moment. We become so focused on getting content that we forget to actually enjoy the moment we’re in. It’s time to be in that moment. 

Filling the space

Setting yourself free from relying on your device to do things for you creates space for appreciating the moments you find yourself in.

Now, when you want pizza for dinner, instead of opening DoorDash, you take the time to get the ingredients–whether from a store or your very own pantry–and get to experience making the dish. 

Instead of buying a birthday gift from Amazon for your mom, you go antiquing to find the perfect picture frame for the photo the two of you took together last year.

When you’re sending invitations to your party, you make and mail actual invitations instead of an "RSVP" text message.

There are no limits to how things can look once you start taking the time to live your life. The most important thing of all is that you’re taking the time to intentionally do things that you love. Take the time to do the inconvenient things, because you’ll never know what the outcome might mean to someone else, and because it will bring so much color back into your life. 

Make the choice today, even if it’s a small one, to allow the technicolor of the art of inconvenience to seep back into your life.