against convenience

on taking time, and not being productive

A few years ago I had a friend who worked for Facebook in London. On a trip down there one day I went into the office to meet him for lunch. I had to sign in to my Facebook account to be allowed into the building; weird, but given that I was pretty broke, worth it for the free lunch I would get—for staff at the London Facebook office get (or at least, did get) all three meals a day catered, if they wanted them. And if they wanted to bring their friends in to eat, then that was fine too.

Like most things to do with modern tech offices, this food situation was designed for maximum convenience. If you work at somewhere like Facebook, you barely have to go beyond your desk for a coffee, an energy drink, a bottle of water or a meal. You need not spend money on breakfasts, lunches or dinners, because all that is provided for you—meaning that you’ll arrive early, stay at your desk over lunch, and work late too. This is, of course, the point.

I went to my pal’s flat while he worked, and at some point got a bit peckish. I opened up the cupboards in the kitchen to find only two things: Huel and instant noodles, both in packets. Huel, for the uninitiated, is a ‘nutritionally complete meal replacement shake’—yes, kind of like the ones your mother might have been on in the 80s, but this time, marketed not towards a po-faced weight loss, but towards the contemporary tech bro (I believe the name is short for ‘human fuel’). Huel branding, like its market competitor Soylent (yes, genuinely) and others, is all about freeing up the hours of your day that might otherwise be taken up by grocery shopping, cooking, eating. Why waste your time making and eating food, Huel says, when instead you could have this drink instead, and free yourself from the sheer unadultered pleasure of sitting down to a dinner with your friends and loved ones? Why spend your days languishing in the myriad joys of whatever food stuff you might desire, when instead you could make and consume a miserable shake instead?

So if my friend was on the Huel, why the noodles? He confided in me that living predominantly on shakes (save for the times your friends come to the office for a real lunch) makes you crave the act of chewing. If you ever go on Huel forums, you’ll read this over and over; people find they need a ‘chew fix’ mid afternoon—and of course they do. Chewing serves several really important functions, and if you don’t chew your food—well, the forum-goers talk about the weakness of the chewing muscles, and how fatigued their faces become when they finally do sit down for a dinner. They talk about retraining their jaw muscles with gum, with specific facial routines, with other methods, all to solve this issue created by them wanting to save themselves a trip to the shop or a half hour in the kitchen. You really do end up thinking: why don’t you just get a fucking meal deal?

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These days, I increasingly find myself rejecting convenience. In our kitchen, there is no microwave, no toaster, no coffee machine. If I want to heat some food, I slowly cook it in a pan. If I want some toast, I slice a loaf and put it in a cast iron skillet. If I want a coffee, I grind the beans, heat the water on the hob and slowly pour the water over a paper filter. These are all choices that have been made to avoid convenience; to force me to take my time, to enjoy the process of what I’m doing, the labour of feeding myself and others.

The concept of convenience is an insidious one, and of course the vast majority of our lives are dictated by it—for the better. Some things genuinely are convenient, and often necessary (especially if you are disabled/parenting/working several jobs). I want to be able to get the train instead of walking, to buy food on the go when I’m busy, to WhatsApp someone instead of getting on the phone. I’m not going to be out here washing my clothes by hand, though I have discovered that if you buy real wool clothing—which is warmer, more sustainable, longer lasting and affordable, if you buy it second hand—you do have to wash it by hand, and take time wrapping it in towels and laying it out so it dries properly and keeps its shape. Convenience, in this instance (and many more), actually destroys the longevity of the product, ruining things that should last a lifetime and further feeding the capitalist machine.

I'm living the kind of life that allows me to eschew convenience. I'm able bodied, don't have kids, work from home, have a partner to share the load with. But I’ve also spent the last two years suffering from a stress-related illness that totally ruined my digestion, my energy, my wellbeing. I spent nights in pain, sleeping badly. I lost all my enjoyment of food for a while, on a brief but terrible diet to try and isolate the problem (it was stress more than it was any foodstuff). The stress came from the state of the world, and situations in which I was treated badly, but it also came from massive overwork and the pressure to support a household while other things were going on. The freelancer’s curse is that you train yourself to a scarcity mindset in the lean years, then when you start doing better you simply can’t say no, and if you then get a part time job you can’t let go of the freelance work like you should. For several years, there were not enough hours in any of my days—evenings were work, weekends were work, workdays were all about how productive I could be, the number of hours I could sit at a computer. By the end of it I hated everything and everyone, and felt the way I spent the hours of my days was completely out of my control.

Rejecting convenience—in a few, small ways—feels, to me, like a way to regain hold of the important things in life; the things that I enjoy. It feels like a way to give these things precedence, rather than fitting them in around responsibilities and duties. If I want a coffee while working I need to get up from my desk for ten or fifteen minutes, pouring water from the hob kettle into a chemex gently, taking notice of how the water blooms through the ground beans on the first pour. If I want porridge in the morning, I’ll put the oats into a milk pan with water, stirring it slowly over the heat, waiting until it’s just the right consistency and then I’ll drizzle cream, chop pistachios, stir in the jam; having made it, I’m more likely to sit with a book than my phone, trying to savour the gentle moment I’ve created. To breathe, to cuddle my cat, to stare out of the window. To let the stress out of my body.

The focus on appreciation and pleasure disrupts the workday. Sometimes, between meetings, I’ll make the fifteen-minute walk to a local cafe to buy two of their incredible home made macarons, sometimes adding on another five minutes to walk through the park, to breathe in the crisp early winter air and smile at some dogs. I put the macarons in a bowl I bought from a local maker, one that’s broken but I can’t bear to part with. I’ll sit at the window and take my time to eat them. I’ll finish a freelance work day early to make a stock from the veggie ends and cheese rinds in the fridge. I’ll reclaim a Friday to make my own soap, despite it being absolutely no cheaper to do so. All these things benefit me greatly; they calm me, replenish me, remind me of myself and my body. Remind me that some of my work can be towards myself or those I love.

Marx made an important distinction between labour under capitalism, which he described as alienated or estranged, and the other work that we have to undertake as humans. Estranged labour is that where benefit is extracted from the worker’s body, towards a product that benefits the capitalist or boss; if I work in a shoe factory, the work of making the shoe takes value from my physical self, then capitalism estranges me from the product, which will be sold for someone else’s financial gain and used by someone I will never meet. Unalienated labour, on the other hand, exists where a worker is not estranged from the products of their efforts. It is a type of work that’s satisfying and fulfilling, even when it is annoying or tedious (see: cleaning the fridge), because you profit from the outcome of the work. Cooking yourself a meal, making soap, taking time to work out or go for a walk: this benefits us even though it is labour.

Social media would have you believe that all of this labour is extractive. The language of theory and therapy have spread across Twitter and TikTok and Instagram in a shallow sort of leak, giving none of the context and all of the impact, so now it’s not usual to see people saying things like ‘making a coffee for my lover is emotional labour’ (or, in one memorable incident, that washing your child’s hair is emotional labour). This is applying an anti-capitalist lens to a non-capitalist scenario; it’s wrongly wrapping all action up in the language of wage work. By this measure, anything we do ever is extractive; attending a protest, babysitting, helping a friend do their taxes—this is all, under this model, extractive labour. But doing something for someone you love—whether that’s yourself or another person, or someone you have never met—is about giving to yourself or others, not being forced to produce. The labour we (willingly) put towards those around us is unalienated labour; working towards something for your community or for loved ones means we get to see the products of our work—the happiness of another, the lightening of their load, their eventual freedom. When you labour for yourself, your happiness, your pleasure are the products. When you labour for others, you feel some of that happiness too.

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All of this work—the type of work that benefits us and others around us—is necessarily inconvenient. It takes up time in which you could be doing something else. It’s not convenient to attend a sit in for Palestine, nor to sew an item of clothing for your child, nor to batch cook meals for a neighbour so they might have something to eat between night shifts. The inconvenience is the point. The inconvenience is, I realise now, a resistance in itself.

All the language on the Huel website is about ‘complete nutrition’ and saving time. ‘You could save five hours a week just by replacing your Monday-to-Friday lunches with Huel’, we’re told. But what are you going to do with those five hours you’ve saved in your work week? You are, of course, going to do more work. The goal of Huel and other convenient ‘solutions’ is to simply free up more of your energy and efforts to work towards capitalist goals. It is to remove the self-focused or community-focused hours of your day and turn them into wage work instead. Like the free Facebook lunches, it is all about productivity.

Convenience not only squeezes more work time out of your life; it also squeezes out the thinking time. When your body is physically engaged in a somewhat menial task, your mind is often freed up for unfocused consideration, for thinking about something you have not yet had time to think about. This ‘wondering’ time is so important (as writers know), but it is increasingly removed from our daily lives. We think a lot, but we think about things most of the time. Where’s the time to think about nothing in particular; to just think?

The grinding of the coffee beans, the slow pouring of the water: in these things there is a space. There is a waiting, a thinking, a breathing. In the sitting on the floor of a train station, holding a sign, there is a considering: of the people trapped and bombarded, the system that’s at work, our place within the system. In chopping onions to make a soup for a sick friend or lover, there is a moment in which to think of how you love them, how your body and work help their body, how there is really only a thin veneer between one person and another. To choose inconvenience is to make space for all this; to reject the alienation.