Editor's Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.
"I want everything to be hard and I want it to be deeply rewarding," so says the interviewee in an Instagram video that pulled me from my mindless scrolling the other day.
The young man wears a navy blue blazer with his blond hair neatly parted on the left side of his head. He's being interviewed on a street corner in Chicago, his name is Joseph, and he is describing the small town in upstate New York where his grandfather grew up.
According to Joseph, there once were 900 people and six grocery stores in this town - a ratio that's practically nonexistent in today's age of mega-Walmarts and Dollar Generals. More businesses were owned locally, and the vast majority of people walked to their destinations. Things - business, transportation, production - were not efficient.
Post-World War II, the amount of stuff middle-class households owned grew exponentially. Automobiles and television sets arrived on streets and in living rooms, household appliances like toasters and washing machines became commonplace. White women - who in the 1930s and 40s were summoned, Rosie the Riveter-style, to the workforce - returned to the home, playing the role of American housewife surrounded by her three (probably more) children. Technological advances in consumer products meant she could do the laundry one, two, three times per day if she really wanted to.
The suburbs ballooned during this decade when owning a couple cars became a welcome sign of prosperity on the heels of two decades of economic hardship in America. Why walk 10 minutes when you could drive five? Infrastructure followed this logic and businesses were built not a walk, but a drive away from people's homes. In 1956, the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act was passed, developing the interstate highway system that cemented the country's reliance on cars as a primary form of transportation.
Consolidation of small businesses into large corporations - a trend especially common in agriculture - led to "flight" from small towns to the suburbs where there were more economic opportunities. As the 20th century progressed, the towns with six grocery stores for 900 people that Joseph describes became rarer and rarer. Big businesses that could service your every need in one fell swoop became the norm, and life lost some of its friction.
Seventy-five years later, in many ways, this friction is gone for good.
The rapidity at which smartphones took over the early 21st century, turning person-to-person interaction into the smooth tap of a button on an app, has completely transformed the texture of human life. Generative artificial intelligence has now magnified this problem to the nth degree.
Gone are the days when we had to toil over an essay, a cover letter, or even a grocery list: ChatGPT has oversimplified things. "What can I do with too much zucchini," a type of question that could lead to a half-decent solution after the inquirer thought enough about it (or read enough cookbooks), can now be answered in a half-second by AI.
Working hard on something - especially when it's a cover letter that doesn't even garner an interview - seems ridiculous when you could save time and mental energy with a handy-dandy app. Who cares if the tool you're using takes up a couple hundred gallons of water in the central Texas desert; at least you'll have more time to spend watching the latest compilation of funny cat videos.
But it doesn't seem like this new-found time has markedly improved the human experience. The platforms that host those funny cat videos, while free to download, make money from the time we spend on their app; it's what scholars have coined the "attention economy." As they make money off our time, our own lives begin to hollow.
"I want everything to be hard and I want it to be deeply rewarding," Joseph said through my phone the other day, and I knew exactly what he meant. There's nothing rewarding about a frictionless life, where everything is easy so nothing has meaning.
Toiling over a cover letter, an essay, this newsletter - there's friction in that experience, and I'll never give it away.
This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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Previously Published on dailyyonder.com with Creative Commons License
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