One of my favorite writings from the past couple years is called The Tyranny of Convenience. It neatly captures the primary, often unspoken driver of many decisions we make.

But our obsession with convenience may be even more dangerous than the oppressive rule of tyranny. If it were oppressive rule, a band of people could come together to overthrow it – either via democracy, revolution, or coup.

Instead, the danger of convenience is that it comes from inside each of us like an addiction. And how could we not love convenience? It saves us time. Increasingly, it saves us money. We love convenience so much we will sacrifice seemingly any other priority for it.

I espouse many beliefs. But I seem to only put my money where my mouth is when it’s sufficiently convenient. My money says Amazon’s convenience is more important to me than my concerns with their labor practices and ruthless optimization of our society. My mouth says it’s not.

For my own mental health, I’ve sent the past year trying to align my behavior with my beliefs. A primary method of doing this has been this simple 3 step plan:

• Consider not buying something at all unless I plan to keep it for at least the rest of my life
• When I do buy something, spend more time researching and shopping for the right product
• Whenever possible, buy that product second-hand from a local and independent business

But who has the time to do this while all of our own jobs are increasingly optimized so we can make other people’s lives more convenient? We spend a lot of time thinking of companies as product offerers. Perhaps we should spend more time thinking of them as employers.

The dual role most of us play as employees of a company and consumers of many companies’ products perpetuate the cycle. We don’t have enough money so we want prices to go down…so companies cut wages and lower prices. By focusing more on our roles as employees / workers rather than our roles as consumers, we may be able to break the cycle.