The Cost of Comfort, Convenience and Complaisant Consumerism
During my up-bringing on a family farm in rural Austria active involvement in farm work was unavoidable and expected; every family member contributed according to ability and age to make the farm work, in particular at harvest time. These tasks were in general quite tedious and taxing once the initial excitement of being outside wore off. Soon one starts counting the number of times a certain procedure or sub-task has to be performed in order to obtain an estimate when the task will finally be completed. Everyday life on a farm is very different from the idyllic view city dwellers might have from life in the countryside: lots of toiling, little time for appreciation of nature and not much comfort.
When ploughing a field, for example, going backwards and forwards, I tried to work out how many return trips will be needed to get the entire field done, given the duration of one return trip, the width of the plough and the estimated width of the field. In a similar vein, when making hay I tried to count how many times a fork-full of hay has to be manipulated, from the first swing of a scythe (or mowing implement), to spreading out the grass, turning it over two to three times a day, making rows in the evening, all that for three consecutive sunny days, followed by harvest onto the trailer, off the trailer, into the blower up the barn; in the winter down from the barn, distributed; perhaps in total about 20 times.
That said, being faced with a repetitive task, it can be reassuring to monitor progress towards a goal, at least this was and is still my tendency. Where my thinking probably differed from others is that, beyond some simple accounting for the tasks, my mind wondered off thinking of ways to automate some aspects of them, or even all of it, taking the tedium away, reducing my efforts. My childhood experience, together with perhaps some innate disposition, was certainly responsible for my later desire to study mechanical engineering and specialise in industrial automation, robotics and control systems. The driver was clear: reduce tedium through automation and obtain comfort and convenience.
Generalising my personal experience and propensity to automation of tedious tasks, in all of us there is perhaps an innate desire to reduce personal energy expenditure in all our tasks. Many examples can be found in modern life, and the pursuit of convenience is omni-present. For instance, should I take the bike to get some bread? No, just take the car parked at the front of my house; too much hassle to get the bike from the shed and change into my cycling gear. Another example, a simple feature of modern cars: automatic car boot opening and closing (not my car though). At the press of a button, or even a gesture, the magic happens which is particularly convenient if you are carrying bags or a child on your arm. The industrialised civilisation is full of these improvements we get so accustomed to, little by little. The result is a consumer society relying and aiming for comfort and convenience.
In essence, what happens is that we shift our own energy expenditure to a helper. In feudal times, only the aristocracy could enjoy these luxuries or conveniences by offloading tedium to staff through hereditary entitlement: having fellow humans as staff doing the washing, cooking, harvesting, etc. The industrialisation of our society transferred tedium onto machines, enabled by fossil fuels, first coal, then oil and later gas; automation in agriculture and all industries happened over the past centuries and continues to do so. Every little invention promises to take away even more tedium, offer more convenience and more comfort: buy this little tool to help you to do this or that and shave a few minutes off a tedious task, minimise your effort and energy expenditure, don’t worry about the rest. But where do the machines come from?
Having worked in industrial automation for a while, I do understand that convenience comes at a cost: an environmental impact through material extraction and waste. The automation of a task that takes a certain amount of time and effort needs raw materials, mining and energy. On the other hand, during the process of automation and innovation, investment in time, money and resources will create a returns on that investment: tedium reduction and financial gains (not necessarily equitably shared). The time gained by the new invention is first cherished, it provides comfort and convenience; but soon the void is filled with more endeavours (investors) or work to pay for the custom of that convenience (consumers). This cycle of investment and return on investment evolved from the beginning of the agricultural revolution thousands of years ago, and is omnipresent in Western culture. The result is a complex industrial civilisation with its financial system, all of it relying on economic growth as any productivity gain has to be compensated with expected growth in the future. In this process comfort creeps up as we get used to every state, we become complaisant as well as complicit in this inescapable system. Life should get simpler, but the opposite is the case; it’s a curse for us and planet Earth.
On a global scale an evolution over time and space can be observed: civilisation is characterised by a simultaneous increase in affluence expressed in GDP per capita and energy consumption per capita, with energy also being a proxy for natural resources. Countries, as they industrialise and do “better” move from the bottom left to the top right on the diagram below. There is little economic decoupling, i.e. the notion that affluence can increase independently of a material and energetic base; every innovation and automation, every increase in affluence, comfort and convenience requires energy and minerals to some extent. It is difficult to see that in the foreseeable future the inferred rising curve will take a turn to reducing energy (and resource consumption) with a steady GDP/capita increase (required for absolute decoupling).
Important questions have to be raised: Can this upwards trend in energy (and resource) consumption and affluence continue on a finite planet at all? At what point does that become unsustainable? To me the answer is self evident, like David Attenborough once said: “sustainable practice means that an activity can be continued in perpetuity”. Given the limited amount of resources on the planet (and its finite size), material growth can per definition not go on in perpetuity; there is no such thing as “sustainable growth”, this is a contradiction in itself. Our ambitions to grow are constrained by a finite planet (don’t get me started on space travel and the limitless opportunities in space). Well, what remains to be done is that humanity needs to devise a different economic system.
There were times in the past when economists tried to extrapolate from a certain situation into the future given current needs (without an allowance for evolution). For example, John Maynard Keynes predicted in a short essay entitled Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1931) that in 100 years hence people would only need to work 15 hours per week (as opposed to about 48 hours/week in the 1930ies, i.e. a drop to less than a 1/3). Keynes further said: when “problems of economic necessity have been practically removed”; then mankind can focus on purely human activities and “We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well.“ How close are we to that state at the time of writing, in 2025, which is roughly when Keynes’ prediction should have been realised, and what was missed in his prediction?
There might be some compounding factors that prevent a stationary society and drive progress. First, there is an innate (or acquired) desire to be creative, at least for me; beyond economic necessity, if given the opportunity, some people (engineers) will find a way to improve products, or to create new products, even in good faith and not driven by markets. Second, the current economic system has improved life for a lot of people and continues to do so, not only by eliminating tedium; it would be difficult to convince the general public in elections that the trajectory cannot be in fact continued and we should content ourselves with what we have got. We got accustomed to continuously improving standards of living in comfort with lots of convenience. The increase in car size is perhaps a good metric, too, living rooms on wheels like SUVs are perhaps a prominent example as they become very popular.
As a third factor, there may be vested interests at play in the system by the beneficiaries of the system, as expressed in Kerryn Higgs’ article A Brief History of Consumer Culture which points out that in the 1920s “the fear that the immense productive powers created over the previous century had grown sufficiently to meet the basic needs of the entire population and had probably triggered a permanent crisis of overproduction”. Psychology and propaganda had to be employed to the spread the “`new economic gospel of consumption`, in which workers could be educated in the new `skills of consumption`.” A few decades later, in 1955, Victor Lebow proclaimed “that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.”
Now, this consumer culture is firmly entrenched in our society, fuelled by a desire for novelty and social status. From producing stuff for subsistence, we evolved to producing and consuming stuff for convenience in a take-make-and-waste system. As things stand, with our propensity to innovation and novelty, the marketing driven and growth based economic system, we became victims and kings of convenience. We appear to be following the trajectory of Business-As-Usual (BAU) as introduced in the Limits to Growth and re-assessed in Update to limits to growth
Comparing the World3 model with empirical data, that leads to overshoot and collapse. There are many signs as explained by Tom Murphy in his Death by Hockey Sticks; a prime example is ocean acidification, as shown below, or soil degradation, aquifer depletion, biodiversity loss, etc. The Earths biosphere, our life’s foundation, could be the final cost of comfort, convenience and consumerism.
There is hope still, we can try. What matters is to maintain life, a duty for a species proclaiming to be on top of the evolution. We are not travelling on the Starship Enterprise, living off innate matter; we rely on an ecosphere as our life support system. I doubt that a market-driven approach with delayed feedback of externalities will solve the problem in time (stability of feedback systems is determined by the time constants involved). If we are truly clever, can we devise a system that works with the means on board by being part of a life on Earth? Gaya Herrington advocates a shift from a “never enough” mindset to an “enough for each” approach, emphasising human and ecological well-being over perpetual economic growth.
As the situation on the planet will surely become more dire, however, there is a chance that the worst in humans will be brought out, i.e. fight for resources and war; I can already sense the shift towards protectionism and militarism in many countries and regions over the world. On the other hand, there is also a chance for co-operation and modesty; we are all in this together. These voices get louder, too. Finally, let’s hope that humanity does not succumb to what Ugo Bardi calls “are we destroying ourselves because we are wasting our natural capital on useless tasks, from battle tanks to SUVs?”
