Convenience Con (How You Can Ignore the Lies & Start Living Happier as a Business Owner)

We've been conned into believing we can purchase convenience and it will make us happy.

It's an effective marketing strategy, but you cannot buy your way to happiness. While it makes sense on the surface to buy a microwave to have more time at dinner with the family. You are literally giving up a genuine human activity, cooking dinner. You have sold countless bonding moments for the price of a microwave.

The definition of convenience is:

the state of being able to proceed with something with little effort or difficulty.

You want to skip the hard things in life, but the hard things are life!

As a society, we have fallen victim to not living because we believe money can remove all the hard stuff in life so we can live. We believe hard things are the enemy. We are spending money to remove life from life and so the emptiness grows as we make more money.

The more we make, the more we purchase and give away the rights to our lives.

In one of my favorite books of all time, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, he quotes the French poet Christian Bobin that says,

"I was peeling a red apple from the garden when I suddenly understood that life would only ever give me a series of wonderfully insoluble problems. With that thought an ocean of profound peace entered my heart.”

Life is a journey and if you remove the journey and skip to the destination, you've skipped life.

You've pressed the fast-forward button and you are wondering why you feel you never got to live. It is because you are chasing convenience and that is in complete contrast to living life.

You can't live conveniently and live "life."

My family and I live as modern nomads on a sailboat or when traveling on land, via a school bus.

We love the feeling or having to worry about the basics of surviving. When we rent a hotel for a night, it feels great for a few hours. The next day, the hollowness returns and we are homesick. We are ready to get back to living life.

We are convenienced up and ready for the friction that comes from being on a journey and not at a destination.

The struggle is real, and the struggle is life.

If you can let go of the idea that "Life will be so easy when I can purchase [fill in the blank]" you find that profound peace the poet was talking about. Don't let the convenience con trick you any longer. Money is a tool, not an easy button.

If you use money as the easy button you'll keep on missing your life.