By The Editorial Board
Are you chronically online?
No, we’re not asking about your screen time or how many TikTok sounds you accidentally use in conversation with professors. Instead, when was the last time you went to a restaurant or even a drive-through instead of ordering from UberEats or DoorDash? Do you prefer curbside pickup at H-E-B, or do you go in and shop like a Boomer? When was the last time you went to the doctor in person instead of having a Telehealth appointment or consulting Dr. Google, MD?
If you’re guilty of some of this, you’re not alone. Eighty-six percent of people order from food delivery apps like DoorDash or UberEats at least twice a month, according to DoorDash’s Food and Alcohol Delivery Statistics and Trends report. The report also notes that people who ordered food delivery did so for convenience and because they “didn’t feel like going out.”
That feels consistent with the general trend happening in the world. Being alive is more convenient in affluent countries than ever, as most of what we need to survive can be ordered with the click of a button and delivered to our front door, and the only trade-off is that pesky delivery fee.
But is that really the only trade-off? What do we lose in a world gone digital?
Food delivery isn’t the only way that our lives have become more catered and comfortable, and thus less social. Streaming services have brought the movie theater to the living room, allowing us to be entertained without having to interact with workers in the service industry. Nobody scans our tickets or takes our order, and we don’t have to make small talk or sit next to a stranger. What a relief.
No longer will we have to sit in a doctor’s waiting room, faced with sick people, families, loud children, crying babies and the general public. Thank God we can just have a phone call with a doctor. Who cares that the standard of care available over the phone is necessarily lower than if a medical professional saw you in person? At least you don’t have to leave the house. At least it’s more convenient now.
We have become a lazy and antisocial society, and the constant push towards innovation for convenience’s sake is one way we have indulged that urge. Contactless delivery satisfies our need for more things and to have them brought to us without having to interact with a soul, while streaming services, telehealth, personal grocery shoppers, curbside, home gyms, FaceTime, online school and remote work beg the question: why leave the house at all?
In the 2008 movie “Wall-E,” the last remnants of humanity live on a spaceship after destroying the Earth with millions of tons of trash and waste. Because they’ve built their lives on convenience and ease, they travel the ship in floating armchairs, not even bothering to walk. Rather, they’re no longer able to.
Maybe that’s a far-fetched future, but “Wall-E” is only 16 years old, and all we have done since its release is inch closer and closer to its projection for humanity. DoorDash and Favor were founded five years after the movie hit theaters, and Shipt came to grocery stores the next year. In the past decade alone, we have seen the boom of streaming services threaten to choke the movie theater industry out of existence, nearly obliterating one of the favorite “third places” of the past century.
At our cores, humans are social animals. We are built to be around each other. We evolved that way. We formed cities and neighborhoods from isolated bands of peoples, we built social media networks to make connecting with each other easier, and long ago we gained the capability of language so that we could communicate, tell stories and be together.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves a little bit now. We figured out how to streamline every dull and boring aspect of our lives. We invented the end of discomfort. But in doing so, we are inadvertently seeking to alienate ourselves from the outside world — and from other humans. That’s not evolution; it’s regression.
You’re free to get comfort food delivered on a Friday night after a hard week, and we think you should continue to turn on your favorite show when you’re sad and have friends over for a movie and pizza. But continue to do things for yourself, and don’t take convenience for granted or treat it like some sort of American right and freedom. Get off your couch, leave your house and live in the real world.
