Convenience

What is the trade off for achieving greater convenience? Do we sacrifice a little bit of quality of life by seeking to replace it with ways to make things easier for ourselves? I started thinking about those questions the other day while visiting the National Art Museum in Washington, D.C. with my daughter. While going from one building to another in an underground tunnel we came upon one of those conveyor belts or horizontal escalators as I call them that transport people from one end of the passageway to another. More and more and I see these things in airports. All anyone has to do is just stand on them. No walking. No moving your legs. You just stand. It moves its users at a pace slower than normal walking but nevertheless it saves one the trouble of actual moving and, on occasion, carrying bags of some sort. Upon seeing this, my daughter, being a person of many opinions, immediately commented, "It's no wonder so many people are out of shape." I nodded while noticing that most of the people on the conveyor belt had no bags at all. I guess they simply wanted to take a break from walking.

Are our lives really made better by an innovation of this sort? Is not having to walk for 50-100 yards or whatever the distance of these contraptions might be really a good thing? When the people who use them look back on their day, do they feel grateful for not having had to walk as much as they would have without it? I am not so sure. Walking, even though it may be a bit tiresome at times, has always struck me as a source of accomplishment and not necessarily something to avoid. But based on the number of people who use those conveyor belts, I guess not everyone agrees with me on this.

In the world of communication, a number of technological advancements have been made to make it an easier action to take. The telephone is a great example. Imagine how much easier it would have been for Paul Revere to warn other communities about the advancing British if he had been able to sit down at his kitchen table and begin dialing everyone he knew? If nothing else, his horse sure would have been able to get a good night's sleep instead of being out in the wee hours of the morning galloping from one town to the next. My point in all this is that sometimes things that make life easier may not always make life better. The horizontal elevator is an example. The telephone, however, is not as it makes life both easier and better. Whether it is in communication or some other area, all of us need to be a bit skeptical about contraptions and innovations that supposedly add to our convenience. The fact is they may not necessarily to our lives.