How Convenient

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

There is a tension between convenience and responsibility that I think we should spend a lot more time thinking about. Convenience is a measure of how easy a thing is to accomplish, while responsibility is a measure of accountability over what has been or will be done. In other words, doing has consequences, and how much you own up to the consequences of what you’ve done (or haven’t) is a direct measure of how responsible you are. But you can avoid (some of) the consequences of doing through convenience: for example, you don’t have to cook if you can buy a meal. This is convenient because the state of the kitchen, both the quality of the working environment and the quality of the lives involved, is not your responsibility: you do not have to and are not expected to clean up any messes, physical, emotional, or societal, that result from preparing the meal you bought. Convenience always has a direct cost to you (in this example you have to work for the money to buy the meal), but the cost of convenience is generally assumed to be less than the cost of doing the work yourself and taking responsibility for the consequences, at least in the short term. At the end of a long day, most people are quite willing (or too exhausted not) to spend $50 and wait 40 minutes for the delivery of tepid, salty, and sugary grease rather than spend $25 and another ~2 of hours cooking and cleaning up something with actual nutrition, even though most people are (hopefully, more or less) aware that the cost to their well-being is substantial. This is because humans are not, despite what economists—with the relentlessly neurotic hysteria of the profoundly ignorant—keep insisting, perfectly rational, perfectly knowledgeable, unemotional counting machines.

Which is not to say people don’t desire wealth. But it seems to me that the deep taproot of people’s desire for wealth is for the nearly magical convenience wealth enables, at least as much as for the luxury it affords. In other words, it’s not just or even mostly the expensive furniture in a big home that people covet: it’s the fact that when you’re rich, you will be able to pay someone else to do the cooking, cleaning, laundry, driving, paperwork, errands, waiting, worrying, accounting, scheduling, parenting, and so on for you, leaving you with nothing but ‘free’ time in which to enjoy your big home and all the expensive things in it. Such is the carrot tech oligarchs dangle in front of us when they promise the glories of AI for everyone. (I suspect—and I’m of course not nearly the only or first person with this suspicion—that, as has been the case with all their previous utopian promises (see, eg, social media), the reality we will end up with if we continue to allow ourselves to be bamboozled by these pied pipers paid liars will be far less fantastical, far more oppressive, and far more exploitative.) Of course, in the society we live in, in which practically everyone is being run off their feet by the sociopathic pursuit of more and more and more than ever before, in which the sirens of temptation and anxiety never stop trying to drown us in cheap plastic shit, in which each and every breath you take and every move you make is tracked, analyzed, and data-mined (for ad revenue/political intimidation/social coercion), the desire to offload each and every burden you possibly can becomes nearly impossible to resist. It in fact becomes a need, since there is a finite limit to what a person can do in a given span of time. The only way around the laws of physics capitalism is to pay others to do your work for you.

The issue is, when you buy ease and convenience for yourself by paying someone (or something) else to do your labour, you invariably if unintentionally also pay them to do the learning, practicing, and growing that comes from that labouring. And so prioritizing ease and convenience—or assuming/believing that ease and convenience are the goal and purpose of life—can only eventually result in the kind of society depicted in Wall-E, where people are so ignorantly helpless they can barely walk. This is because having someone/something else do everything for you is the essence of infancy. This is why nepo-babies are almost always arrogantly incompetent: they’ve spent their whole life being told by society that they’ve already succeeded (by being wealthy), despite having accomplished more or less nothing by themselves (from never having to labour).

To be clear: that those who were/are, in some cases literally, being crushed to death by the toil they were/are forced to perform for others (farming, mining, fishing, lumbering, constructing, etc) would be eager to swap some of their hard-won pay for a little space to breathe is not at all unacceptable or condemnatory. And that the machines were built on promises of abundance as much as convenience—promises that were not necessarily or entirely always dishonest—is not remarkable: such has been the seduction of technological advancement since we learned to start fires and sharpen sticks. But at some point we collectively lost the plot. Probably this is inherent in our nature as animals who must often survive scarcity, but in the heat of technological elaboration and embellishment we saw mirages of luxuriant opulence and we’ve wandered off into fantasies that cannot be supported by reality.

That we live in an age of ‘polycrisis’ is, I believe, one consequence of this social training and desire for convenient, irresponsible—in a word, childish—abundance. Because the destruction we have perpetrated on Nature, our communities, and each other in pursuit of these hallucinations of a utopia of abundant convenience is severe. It is already more severe than most of the current life on this planet (including us) can survive without massive and rapid adaptations (ie, hard work), although the consequences are not (probably, yet) enough to imperil the possibility of life itself. But, in the way getting a shitty tattoo because you were young and dumb can end up providing a valuable lesson even beyond the cost and pain of getting rid of it, I think we should take the opportunity, as costly (in time and labour) and painful as it will undoubtedly be, presented to us by the infantile, ignorant, and idiotic atrocity that is capitalism, to learn, practice, and grow as we get our hands dirty retaking responsibility for and doing the work of cleaning our shit up after ourselves. To paraphrase Kendrick Lamar’s grandmama, shit won’t change until we start wiping our asses. Because it’s really fucking disgusting (not to mention abjectly humiliating) that, as the supposed adults in the room¹, we’re refusing to do that for ourselves and instead would rather sit around in our own fucking filth waiting for some ‘super intelligent’ robot/hero to do it for us.

In Wired, there was recently an article written by Elana Klein, titled “Dumbphone Owners Have Lost Their Minds” that touches on this disarming urge for convenience from a different perspective. The author has a friend named Lilah, who lives a smartphone-lite lifestyle (she has an “emergency” smartphone which she uses for such ‘emergencies’ as clocking in to her job every day²) and attempts to rely primarily on her own analog and unassisted abilities. Klein and many of her friends are somewhat envious of this lifestyle but probably won’t make the plunge themselves. Why? “I’m terrified! Ditching my smartphone would be completely disorienting. It would significantly reduce my overall competence. It’s deeply embarrassing—it really makes me feel like a giant baby—but I am certain that my smartphone is a part of me. I mean that literally: The panic I feel when I lose sight of it is visceral, existential, as if pieces of my physical body are missing.”

Klein makes the point that our smartphones fit neatly into the ‘extended mind’ hypothesis, which was thought up in 1998 by Andy Clark and David Chalmers, who posited that our tools can be thought of as extensions of our minds as much as extentions of our bodies. For example, the books in which we collectively store far more knowledge than a single mind can hold can be thought of as something like CDs/DVDs/USB sticks/DRM-locked SaaSes of understanding that we can ‘download’ by reading them. Klein notes this is also similar to the way in which long-term partners collectively store information in something like a shared mental mainframe “greater than the sum of its individual member systems,” according to psychologist Daniel Wegner in 1985. I have no issue with this argument; in fact, it fits quite nicely with what I believe about the relationship between individuals and the groups they are part of. (Which is, following evolution: individuals are less important than the group(s) they are part of. This is not only because the group(s) can outlive any one individual and thus by being part of and contributing to their group(s) well-being an individual can achieve a measure of immortality and the assurance that their small existence mattered, but also because every individual depends directly for their daily survival on at least one group. Thus, because the individual benefits from the collective production of at least one group (but more likely several), whether that’s accumulated and organized knowledge or labour or nutrition, it is the individual’s responsibility, even duty, to ensure their own actions benefit the group(s).)

However, Klein further argues that because the “quality of the smartphone is moving in the exact opposite direction as my brain”—that is, smartphones tend to get functionally better over time, while human minds tend to lose functionality—it may be a mistake to attempt to try to stand on our own without digital crutches. “If I get a dumbphone, I’ll have to face the rudimentary version of myself. And although the true capabilities of my bare-bones brain are a mystery to me, I do know that the change would be a downgrade[....] My biological brain has grown like tree roots between the spaces in a pavement pattern. Simply removing the pavement would leave gaping holes in the root system. [...] If I ditch the device, part of me will vanish with it. I’ll face the unextended version of myself. I’m not sure I care to meet her.” What Klein is arguing is essentially that she has come to depend on her tools not merely to alleviate strain or improve the quality of her labour and work, not even for mere convenience, but in a way very alike to how infants depend on their parents: not to make life less burdensome, but to make living possible (or at least worthwhile). Klein views this as objective progress, since the capabilities of our tools apparently only improve over time (which is basically just the economists’ argument that line go up). I suppose depending on your tools in this way might be like having parents who don’t teach you anything, but do get better at anticipating your every desire and diminishing every personal consequence or inconvenience caused by your various inabilities: Can’t cook? Here’s (factory-fresh) food. Can’t read? Here’s (a fourteen day free trial of) a soothing ‘human’ voice to read for you. Can’t figure out where you are? Here’s a ‘soothing’ human voice with directions (available to super-plus subscribers only). Can’t walk very far? Here’s a ride (from a random stranger we’re exploiting mercilessly, but you can trust them/us). Can’t decide? Here’s a ‘relevant’ ad (for our other products). Can’t think? Here’s a soothing ‘intelligence’ to think for you (but we’re not liable if we give it your job, or it gives you lethal ‘medical’ ‘advice,’ or encourages you and your children to kill themselves, or sucks up entire continents-worth of water and electricity just to confidently inform you that the Battle of Waterloo was fought (and decisively won) by ABBA in 1973; also, just because we took everything it ‘knows’ without permission or payment doesn’t mean we stole it (but in any case we’re not giving it back)).

Of course, Klein has also realized depending entirely on technology is infantilizing (“it really makes me feel like a giant baby”), but has decided that the “downgrade” she’d experience by having her smartphone taken away and being forced to rely on her “bare-bones brain” would be perhaps not lethal (in the way exposing an infant would be), but certainly disastrously worse: she’d be stripped (metaphorically) down to her “rudimentary self.” (This is, perhaps unconsciously, very similar to the argument for why people need to be controlled by governments and punitive judiciary and carceral systems: because these things provide the ‘veneer of civilization’ without which we’d all revert back to ‘savages,’ fighting each other tooth and nail. Which is, apparently, unlike how we live now.) Not knowing the woman, I of course have no idea what Klein is or isn’t capable of (although I assume it is at least as much as the average person, but likely more since she’s managed to get an article published in Wired while still being—I’m guessing—in her mid-twenties or younger; in contradistinction, I haven’t managed to get anything published anywhere except on my own website (and even that’s been one hell of a struggle), and I’m at least a decade older), but in any case I would argue that whatever the average “bare-bones” human brain is capable of, it is at least sufficient for meeting human needs. I mean, it got us this far.

To develop your own capabilities necessarily lessens your dependence on what you were previously incapable without. Like growing up this can often be bittersweet, representing and embodying as it does an irretrievable loss of innocence. Like growing up, developing your own capabilities—especially in the things you are least capable of—is an often difficult, uncertain, and mistake-filled labour. It is also—especially at first—unfortunately prone to making you feel uncomfortably incompetent and embarrassingly undignified (ie, childish). But what Klein and far too many other people have seemingly either not been taught or have since forgotten is that the “pavement” that supports our “roots” is not and has never been technology: it is community and diversity (which can more accurately be described metaphorically as earth (ie, dirt), in that it is wholesome and nourishing (and alive); whereas technological pavement merely fills space, like empty calories). That we are even attempting to use technology to replace our community (ie, those who teach, guide, and support us) only shows how crucial and fundamental community is to our well-being. To continue the tree metaphor (not least because I genuinely love trees): a forest is not an orchard. But a forest probably seems quite terrifying and ‘out of control’ to the technologically stunted pampered trees of an orchard. But then again, a forest can survive when the irrigation system stops, when the fertilizers and herbicides and insecticides aren’t applied, when the patented designer genes fray and fall apart, when the bank reposesses the orchard-keeper’s property³.

I want to be very clear, I don’t think Klein’s opinions about technology are invalid or stupid or thoughtless. In fact, I think she has analysed her situation reasonably and come to a well-considered position that she then wrote intelligently and intelligibly about. (Not that Elana Klein, Wired contributor, needs me, random blogosphere weirdo, to validate her.) That I have a different opinion should be both unsurprising and unremarkable, since Klein and I are, in fact (spoiler!), different people who live different lives. I hope, too, I haven’t given the impression I’m dismissive and derisive of young whipper-snappers and their gizmos. I don’t moan about the youth being the cause of all society’s problems, because the youth can only do what they know, or, in other words, have been taught. Nor do I believe the youth threaten my social relevance and therefore self-respect (I’ve never had any self-respect social relevance). For one, it’s not just young folks who’re dangerously, if not helplessly, dependent on technology in ways a lot of people other than myself think they shouldn’t be: it’s clearly practically everyone, from boomers who can’t figure out PDFs to gen Zs who can’t find the home row. It’s also nearly impossible to put the technological toothpaste back in the tube. No one’s managed to uninvent a tool yet. At best we can supersede this or that technological thing if we can’t turn it to less destructive or more limited purposes (I’m thinking particularly of all these fucking cars and roads and parking lots and associated bullshit ruining everything with all their noise and danger and pollution and destruction: realistically, I know we’re not getting rid of all that shit—or even very much of it—any time soon, despite the almost miraculous benefits the removal (and recycling) of such colossal and colossally harmful infrastructure would bring to our communities and ecosystems), like how blacksmiths were once the premiere defence contractors of the European medieval era, but are now little more than talented and skillful curiosities at Renaissance Fairs. Anyway.

Another perspective on how convenience destroys responsibility comes from Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge. In a recent article titled “Marc Andreessen is A Philosophical Zombie,” she argues that

“If you stop using some skill, mental or physical, you lose it and its benefits. We’ve already seen signs of this with heavy users of AI [From the linked source: “Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support [...]”], along with AI psychosis, which may occur because chatbots are too sycophantic. [...] So I’m going to suggest that overreliance on AI is bad for you — which suggests a corollary: Whatever is happening to normal people as a result of AI overreliance has already happened to the ultra-wealthy.

Consider: I spend a lot of time standing in line (at the supermarket, at the post office, at a bakery, at a coffee shop). While I’m standing there, I can either be annoyed at how long it’s taking me to get to the front of the line or do something else: goof around on social media or retreat into my mind palace, where I might daydream, review events from earlier in the day, or think about something interesting, like whether it matters if I don’t have free will. I have a lot of opportunities to hang out in my mind palace, because I do a lot of mundane chores, like grocery shopping, laundry, and picking up after myself.

The ultra-wealthy don’t have to do any of this. They pay people to do it for them — cooking, cleaning, shopping, you name it. There are no periods of the day where they are forced to figure out how to entertain themselves in the face of repetitive chores. If you don’t use it, you lose it — so maybe a lot of them lose introspection. In fact, they can offload any cognitive activity they don’t enjoy! That’s what subordinates are for, isn’t it? And whatever gets consistently offloaded, they lose.

But, worse, they don’t notice they’re losing any skills because they are constantly surrounded by people on their payroll, or people who want something from them. People who are, you know, aggressively financially motivated to flatter them and agree with them. If that yes-man tendency in chatbots is what’s driving AI psychosis or social skill atrophy in normal people, then the same thing has already happened to the very rich.” (Links and emphases in the original.)

For my part, I believe merely having so much more (wealth, power) than others is on its own sufficient to destroy whatever empathy and social skills such people may have had, but regardless, the point Lopatto is making is pretty much the same as mine: emancipation from labour, whether physical or cognitive, is certainly convenient but it seems invariably to create humans who are severely irresponsible, even incapable, in some morally crucial way. Perhaps this is why Marc Andreesen declared not only is he incapable of introspection, but, ludicrously, introspection is itself mythical: it’s hard to be held responsible for being unable to do something no one has any capacity for.

Lopatto doesn’t really connect Andreesen’s adolescently provocative and demonstrably stupid pop-psychology to any wider examination of our social conventions beyond implying the rather banal commonplace that the rich are selfish and are fully prepared to declare and perhaps even believe any and every idiotic justification of selfishness (and thus the status quo)⁴. But David Futrelle does, in an article for The Nation, titled “Marc Andreessen’s Dangerously Unexamined Life”:

“Zero introspection is not just a personal quirk or a supposed productivity hack. It’s a permission slip for zero accountability. And Andreessen, it turns out, has good reasons for wanting to avoid accountability. [...]

His firm has bet big on war and the companies that provide the technology behind it, one of them being the notorious Anduril Industries, [... whose] Lattice AI platform—a command-and-control system that integrates drones, surveillance, and targeting into a single architecture—is part of the operational infrastructure of the current war against Iran; the Army signed a $20 billion contract to use Lattice during active combat operations, describing it as providing AI-driven targeting ‘where it is needed most.’ The company has also formed a joint venture with the state defense conglomerate of the United Arab Emirates, a country accused by the United Nations of widespread human rights abuses and war crimes, to manufacture autonomous drones for export across the Middle East. Nice work if you can get it.

Then there’s Shield AI, another company benefiting from a16z’s largesse, whose Nova autonomous drone has been used by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza to navigate inside buildings to locate and engage targets; as a result, the American Friends Service Committee formally lists Shield AI as a corporation profiting from the Gaza genocide. [...]

These are some of the crown jewels of the defense-contractor-heavy portfolio that a16z’s Katherine Boyle manages under the banner of something called American Dynamism, which she has built into a $1.2 billion fund within the firm. Boyle is religious, Republican, and a long-standing personal friend of JD Vance [....] Accordingly, much of her professional life is devoted to wrapping the defense industry in the language of patriotism and national purpose. The American Dynamism website describes its mission as embodying ‘the spirit of innovation, progress, and resilience that drives the United States forward’ and defending ‘the values upon which this country was founded.’ [...]

We should note that Marc Andreessen does in fact have an inner life, because we all do. As a result, his declaration of zero introspection is either a weird and extreme failure of self-knowledge or (more likely) a performance, a brand identity so thoroughly constructed and maintained that it functions like an authentic account of the brander’s experience. Either way, the practical effect is identical: a man with enormous influence over the technologies of war and surveillance, over the political direction of the country, over the infrastructure of violence that his firm has spent a decade funding, has, in effect, announced that he has no interest in examining his conscience.”

So this is where I circle back to Elana Klein and her uncomfortable dependency on (modern) technology—not for mere convenience or even necessary assistance, but for something close to survival. Klein clearly has no issue with introspection; her article is a genuinely excellent example of introspection done well, and with courage. It strongly suggests to me that she would not actually be disappointed in the capabilities of her bare-bones brain should she choose to ditch her smartphone (although she is almost certainly correct to think the experience would initially be very disorienting; but humans are excellent adapters—we may actually be too good at it, since it seems to have led to an unconscionably arrogant belief in our right to ‘dominion’ over Nature—, so I doubt it would be as bad or long-lasting as she fears).

But what is the likelihood Klein actually ditches her smartphone? I don’t know but, whatever it is, I don’t think it has much to do with her intelligence. Smart people do extremely stupid shit all the time. A lot of anti-vaccination chucklefucks are, according to their various credentials and titles, allegedly quite intelligent. Most people continue to insist that voting once every few years somehow qualifies as meaningful participation in their own governance. Most people seem to believe laws are something like magic spells that are supposed to prevent criminals from criming⁵. Most people, according to the facts of climate change, are fully prepared to jump off a cliff just because everyone else is. Most people, it seems, regardless of their intelligence, prefer to remain childishly irresponsible rather than take up the demands of adulthood. In my opinion, this is abject cowardice. And nowhere is this vile cowardice more abhorrent, obscene, repulsive, and immoral than in the politicians, CEOs, economists, and the rest of the self-titled ‘elite’ who are herding us over the cliff because they have made destruction conveniently profitable, and they are themselves too ignorant and selfish to consider what happens after the whole world has been reduced to heaps of dead money.

Unfortunately, the rest of us are not absolved of our own failures of responsibility merely because the rich are an abundance of even bigger fucking failures. We all and each of us must accept the responsibility for our own lives, which means accepting the labourious responsibilities inherent in building and maintaining human community. Fortunately, this is something that comes very naturally to humans: it is good for us to grow up. A tree that wishes to remain a seed becomes neither, becomes only maladapted, unfit and incapable in every circumstance. And so long as smart people like Elana Klein convince themselves that life would be an intolerable slog without being able to offload (download?) the responsibilities of a more or less self-sufficient adulthood to apps that are merely the digital hand with which tech oligarchs and robber barons, politicians, ‘experts,’ and the ‘ruling’ class in general use to administer opiates to the masses the way a farmer uses antibiotics to manage livestock for more profitable slaughter, we will find ourselves incapable of avoiding (or even understanding) our own civilizational suicide.

And, because I’m worried that I’ve perhaps given the impression of punching down on women (my sincere apologies to both Elana Klein and Elizabeth Lopatto if they feel insulted or in any way demeaned by what I’ve written; they are not the problem), I will finish my ranting with some exceptionally important words from On Self-Respect by Joan Didion, words that were fundamental and crucial to my own growing the fuck up:

“Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

[... P]eople with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nevertheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”

1 Sapiens comes from the Latin word sapio or sapēre, which means to be wise, intelligent, to have good taste, or to know. I think it’s pretty fucking relevant that this is a title we gifted ourselves, according to qualifications we made up, based on nothing more than an uncritically assumed superiority (just as we long assumed the Earth was the centre of the universe merely because it’s where we found ourselves). I find it repulsively arrogant and entitled—not to mention ironically idiotic, considering the most consequential thing we’ve yet accomplished with our ‘intelligence’ is to construct a civilization which relies on destroying its own foundations (ie, the biosphere, each other) to survive. In other words, we’ve used our self-crowned intelligence to become a malignant cancer to all the life on this planet. Awesome show! Great job, everyone! To that end, I prefer the term homo faber, which means something like “we who build.” (I took that term, so far as I know, from The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt.) It’s a lot more honest and a lot less hubristic.

2 To be clear: I’m not making fun of Lilah for being forced into using her emergency smartphone for non-emergencies. I’m making fun of Lilah’s employers for requiring employees to ‘log in’ to work through some undoubtedly nightmarish surveillance app. It’s fucking absurd—among other, worse things—that someone who doesn’t want to have a smartphone is forced to for something as trivially unnecessary as attendance records for adults. I mean, for a start, if we absolutely fucking insist on having adults take attendance, what the hell was wrong with a fucking punch card and clock?!

3 Naturally, a forest cannot survive the chainsaw- and defoliant-enforced ‘property rights’ of the orchard-keeper. But, of course, Nature is well aware that it’s not survival but only death which is guaranteed, and does not run crying to any higher power whining for restitution when living gets difficult.

4 It also seems to me her statement that introspection is useful for figuring out “how to entertain [yourself] in the face of repetitive chores” betrays either a flippant attitude toward or a serious misunderstanding of the point of both introspection and labour. Or it betrays my occasional inability to understand when someone’s joking. In any case, being constantly entertained, like having everything conveniently and abundantly available, or being happy all the time, is what a child fantasizes being an adult is like. Which is not to say adulthood is nothing except dreary labour without relief or levity, nor should it be. But I am saying that to be an adult, one must understand there are things which need doing regardless of their inherent inconvenience, emotional unpleasantness, or lack of entertainment value.

5 Whenever someone says something like, “There ought to be a law against that sort of thing,” I like to ask, “How many more laws do you think we need before crime stops?” Obviously there’s no actual answer (and most countries have more laws than they can remember or even count), but my point is that laws do not prevent crime, (no more than the police do) and they’re not supposed to. Laws (and police) are an attempt to control behaviour. (The word crime is very similar to the word weed: what it refers to says more about the person uttering the word than who or what they’re referring to.) So, unless you believe there is some magical incantation of legalese that can transform each and every person into essentially the same person, so that no matter what the situation or context each and every one of us will always behave in exactly and precisely predictable ways (which is more or less totalitarianism), you may want to stop believing or hoping for salvation from the legal system.