The Boring Stuff Should Be Good Too: How Convenience Is Making Your Life Worse
Life Is Mostly Ordinary
Recent mainstream culture has taught us one thing: you gotta optimize your time for maximum productivity.
I was on that train for a long time: as an Engineer who loves systems, the idea of a “perfectly performed day” where you wake up, blast through your optimized morning routine that gets in you your glass of water, exercise, coffee made, washed up and out the door to work in 26 minutes just felt great. To this day I love reading books on productivity and learning about ways to create systems to get more done.
Trying to optimize for enjoyment? Nope. That’s for vacations. That’s for when I set aside special time for quality me-time.
But recently something has shifted.
After years of trying to get a “perfect routine”, I realized that a lot of the habits I build don’t stick for the long term. They start to just feel too monotonous. Boring. And the other day, I sat down with my morning cup of coffee and decided to just be present. And I sat and drank coffee while looking at the overgrown grass in my backyard through the dining room window. I thought about how the coffee I’m drinking right now is actually a pretty good coffee that my friend brought me from a trip to Colombia. I hadn’t taken the time to appreciate that yet. I thought about how nice the weather was.
It was just…nice. Not optimized. Just…nice.
And you know what? It felt pretty good.
I didn’t worry about the next thing that I have to do. I didn’t think “oh man I’m wasting time just sitting here, I could be reading or checking work emails!”
I just…sat and thought.
And I thought “You know what, we try to optimize for productivity, but how about optimizing for feeling good? Shouldn’t that be the goal?”
Productivity is great sometimes, but the implicit promise is that if you’re productive, you’re going to feel happy. True sometimes, but other times it just feels like a slog.
Sometimes (maybe all the time…), I think the boring stuff should just feel good.
How We Got Here
I think there are a lot of factors that have gotten us to this mindset we have today. Glorifying busy-ness in work culture, apps that deliver everything instantly, services designed to make everything as convenient as possible. It all makes us feel like we’ve got to do more if we want to be respected and therefore happy. But at what cost?
Our everyday routines have now just become races to see how much we can do in a day, with no thought to whether it’s actually making our lives feel meaningful. Every item we use is maximized for convenience (disposable coffee cups, plastic forks, etc.) rather than a great experience.
How many people bring their favorite coffee mug with them to Starbucks so they can enjoy their coffee their favorite way? I’ve even been to restaurants where they use disposable dishware in the restaurant so they don’t have to wash dishes. We sacrifice the experience for convenience.
We've learned to fast-track everything. Clothing production doubled globally between 2000 and 2014, with people buying 60% more clothes but keeping them half as long. Fast fashion companies now run 52 micro-seasons a year, each one designed to make last month's purchase feel already outdated. Housing followed the same logic — 98% of newly built homes in the US have no direct involvement from an architect. We copy-paste the plans and build, build, build. The goal stopped being "good." It became "cheap and done."
And somewhere along the way, we started applying that same logic to our own lives.
What "Low Baseline" Actually Looks Like
One of my favorite examples of this can be found in your local grocery store: white bread.
It’s the perfect example of something that we’ve completely given up on any sense that it should have quality or nutritional value. It’s cheap, tastes “good” (i.e. loaded with sugar and makes your brain light up), but it’s a highly processed, simple carbohydrate — quick and easy to digest but with little nutritional value. Engineered for convenience, not nourishment.
Another great example is clothes. I remember as a kid, clothes could be symbolic representations of who you are. The examples that come right to my mind are Indiana Jones’ fedora, Marlon Brando’s leather jacket, or Marty McFly’s red puffer vest. The idea that you had this article of clothing that is part of who you are and symbolizes an aspect of your personality was so cool to me. Indiana Jones risks his own life to make sure he doesn't lose that fedora!
These days, we buy clothes that barely survive three washes before holes start to show up, toss them, then get whatever the new style is.
A life full of convenience starts to feel less like “fun and easy” and more like “sacrificing quality of life for corporations’ profits.”
I think about this a lot when I remember one of my favorite things I discovered in Japan: the quiet shrines. Not the famous ones packed with tourists. The small ones tucked into forests in the middle of nowhere, the kind that look like they came straight out of a Studio Ghibli film. You'd walk into one of these places and just... settle. Small rock gardens, carefully tended plants, open space that invited you to stand still for a moment. No elaborate architecture trying to say something important. No grand statement. Just a deliberate, quiet reverence for the space and what it sat within.
What struck me every time was that nothing there felt like it was trying too hard. It wasn't optimized. It wasn't productive. It was just deeply, carefully good. And that goodness was available to anyone who walked in on any ordinary afternoon.
That's what a raised floor feels like.
Raise the Floor, Not the Ceiling
I think we tend to want to maximize quality and enjoyment in certain situations - situations where we're “supposed” to enjoy. When we go out on a dinner date we go for 5-star restaurants, or go on vacation and want to spend top dollar for the best helicopter tour so you can maximize your experience and have some crazy pictures to show off on the Instagram.
But what I want to suggest to you is that we raise the floor, not the ceiling. Let's take the things that we find ordinary, like the food we eat, the routines we create for ourselves, the clothes we wear, the pen we write with, our means of entertainment…And go for quality rather than what gives you the best bang for your buck or gives you the best productivity.
One place that I've tried to do this is my exercise routine. I used to try to speed through it. Get the reps done and out of the way so I can move on to the next thing on the list. But now, as often as I can, I try to take my time - really pay attention to how my muscles feel and that I’m working the ones that I want to work while I exercise. It’s almost a meditation. It makes the exercise feel more meaningful as well as effective.
Give it a shot!
If this resonates with you, I don't think it requires a dramatic overhaul of your life. It starts smaller than that — noticing the difference between moving through your day and actually inhabiting it. Maybe it's taking ten more minutes with your morning coffee. Maybe it's buying one fewer thing and spending a little more on the one you keep. Maybe it's slowing down during your workout enough to actually feel it.
The goal isn't perfection, and it's not about spending more money on nicer stuff. It's about raising the floor so that on any given ordinary day — no special occasion required — your life is quietly nourishing and worthy of you.
