Our Longing for Inconvenience

There’s a line that made my breath catch: “I want to fall in love the old-fashioned way.” It wasn’t uttered by someone who is necessarily nostalgic, but by someone who, like the protagonist of this story, can no longer stand the idea of choosing from dozens of faces on a screen, as if they were shopping online. Here’s the twist: we think nostalgia for old technologies is just a longing for memories, but in reality, underneath it all, there’s a clear desire to rediscover the inconvenience, to reintroduce friction into a life that today seems too smooth. It’s not just the dating app that tires us; it’s the promise of total convenience that leaves us feeling empty. Take Hanif Abdurraqib, author and protagonist. You see him helping a friend move in the middle of winter, at dawn on a Saturday, when it would have been easier to stay in bed. Yet, he says, “that effort immediately turned into a beautiful memory, into an act that made me feel part of something.” Or think about when he was a kid: his family didn't have much money, and they were always behind on technology compared to others. Walkmans passed from hand to hand, cassette tapes rewound with a pencil, hours spent waiting for the right song on the radio to record it without the DJ's voice. He recounts this not with melancholy, but as a lesson in patience, precision, and small rituals. And today? We are in the midst of the “frictionmaxxing” era: there are people who actively seek out friction, who want to go back to VCRs, cassette tapes, and old coin-operated arcade games. Not just out of nostalgia, but because the complete absence of effort leaves us without vivid memories. Hanif also shares something that goes beyond technology: the summer of 2020, those weeks when protests and the pandemic forced many people to sacrifice comfort to truly help one another, sewing face masks at two in the morning, running errands for the elderly, and sacrificing their own time and even their sleep. Effort, she says, can create a temporary community, a fragile sense of utopia that, however, crumbles as soon as the desire to return to comfort prevails. And there is one thing that hurts to admit: often, true revolution would require a level of discomfort that most of us, in the end, are not willing to endure. But it's not just politics: even in everyday life, the pursuit of the easiest path makes us all interchangeable; it flattens us. “Outsource your writing to ChatGPT, and it is easy, but it makes you sound like no one and like everyone”—writing with artificial intelligence is convenient, but in the end, you sound like neither yourself nor anyone else; you are indistinct. To protect himself, Hanif puts his phone in a box and reads a book, connects a hard drive to the TV to watch concerts recorded before he was born, turns down home delivery, and goes to the supermarket in person, even though no one greets him. And when, on a plane, he pays extra for a window seat, perhaps just to feel the inconvenience of having to look out, he realizes that this small act of friction restores a sense of reality to him, brings him back among other human beings, even if only to hear a child crying behind him. This is the perspective that is often missing: we think that nostalgia is an escape from the present, but in reality, it is a strategy to slow down, to once again feel the weight and presence of our actions. We don't really want to go back to the 1990s; we want to go back to feeling needed. The takeaway is this: convenience turns us into spectators; inconvenience brings us back to the world. If this idea resonates with you, on Lara Notes you can press I'm In — it's not a 'like'; it's a way of saying that this perspective is now yours. And if you happen to tell someone why you've brought your old CD player back to life or why you prefer to meet people by chance, on Lara Notes you can mark that conversation with Shared Offline: a way to record that the exchange of ideas truly mattered. This Note comes from The New Yorker: you've saved yourself almost fifteen minutes of reading.