In my admittedly anecdotal view of the world, I often see what I consider to be some unusual behaviour. Daily habits from driving to locations a short walk away, to reaching for the air conditioner a bit too readily. Resorting to eat take away or microwave meals several times a week, or the habitual use of disposable cutlery and crockery.

All of this has one thing in common. That is convenience.

The Pre-industrialised brain

The way I see it, we are hard wired to find the easiest and most straightforward solutions to achieving the goals in our lives.

This is in no way a bad thing. It is in fact part of our human nature and what has no doubt made us an extremely successful species. In our non-industrialised days, seeking out ways to achieve our goals as efficiently as possible would have led to more food, more time to be productive and more time to seek out the best mate.

In those days, each increase in efficiency lead to real gains in safety, security and advancement of our knowledge and understanding of the world. So we became hard wired to seek out and and take advantage of it.

This is analogous to our craving for high energy food sources. This ensured we we had enough energy to stay alive, particularly during times of scarcity.

We were not designed for our modern environment

This was great when we needed to hunt our own food and your next meal was not guaranteed. Almost every meal involved using our minds, speed, strength and team work to hunt down a wild animal and painstakingly skin it, cut it up, gut it, perhaps preserve it and cook it. However our current environment is far removed from the surroundings that we evolved in. Now this incredibly useful instinct has been allowed to run free into the distance.

We have almost infinite convenience if we want it….the problem is we do want it. We have become obese on convenience.

This has given rise to our modern couch potato. Mr Potato has effectively outsourced all of the hard work in his entire life. Lean Cuisine and his Panasonic microwave do all his meal prep and cooking. Toyota has almost completely removed his need for actual legs. Fisher & Paykal take the hard work out of cleaning dishes, clothes and drying. Daikin has climate control covered. LazeBoy, Apple and a collection of remotes have made it possible to control a lot of this every night when Mr Potato gets home without having to stand up for too long. There are a team of willing workers ready to do almost anything he needs on Airtasker. All the while, Mr Potato feels more and more time poor, while consuming increasing amounts of media and feeling like he has accomplished nothing every night.

Our brains were never designed to cope with the abundance that we now experience. You can see it clearly in the unhealthy bodies that now make up the majority of Australia’s population. If you look a little harder you may also notice that our minds have become lazy, always opting for the easiest and most convenient option, sometimes to the detriment of our physical and mental health.

Unfortunately there are no hard and fast rules

I am not one to completely bash the endeavour for ease and convenience. Hell, just thinking about it shortly, I am on one gigantic mission in my life that is striving for ease and convenience. I am just doing it on a much larger scale than most. I do however think there is value in approaching discomfort and hard work with a bit more gusto.

Those who read of Pat the Shuffler know that I love taking things to the next level of ‘Badassity‘, some may even call me ‘extreme’. Unfortunately taking this to it’s logical extreme doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I can’t hunt and grow all my own food, nor produce all of the things I use day to day from scratch. I would never get anything done.

But do not despair Shufflers, for we all have some grey matter that we can engage from time to time to make a few small daily decisions. These decisions should include a fair few that involve taking a slightly less convenient route. The kind where you decide to:

cut up your own vegetables instead of buying the pre-cut ones

use your bike instead of the car

hang up your own washing instead of using the dryer

It can also be even better than that where you choose to do some research and make some of your own small repairs to broken items.

Of course, there will be other times you have done a monster 14 hr shift at the office, the trains were delayed due to trackwork and today was your day to pre-prepare food for the whole week. Having a stash of easy to prepare meals will save you from ordering takeaway on these exceptional days.

Just like we are conscious about staying active and eating a balanced diet, we can also make conscious decisions about when to engage in some discomfort and hard work to solve our own problems, instead of throwing money at the problem until it goes away.

I like to call this going on a convenience diet. This way we can balance convenience with hard work and accomplishment.

By doing more for ourselves we win twice. You will save money right now, dragging your financial independence date closer. You will also gain knowledge, strength and life skills that will continue to pay dividends for decades when these situations present themselves again and again in your life.

That is what I call shuffling

Shuffling convenience and hard work

Pat the Shuffler

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