A couple of days ago I came across a story on Medium about a pizza order gone horribly wrong. The author, a skilled storyteller, was equating the end of the world with services that aren’t working as they once were. All of their concerns are valid, but it got me thinking. It inspired me to write this piece.
What if the problem is not that we can’t get our favourite brand of sausage anymore from our local grocer, or that they didn’t have the right flavour of children’s Tylenol. Perhaps — just maybe — we’ve had way too much choice and convenience way too long in North America, as anything less has become unacceptable.
Maybe it’s not that the world is crumbling. Maybe we’ve just become so entitled that it feels like society is doomed when we experience an inconvenience.
We’ve grown accustomed to the newest and best
This is how capitalism in the Western world works. Companies continuously woo us with more selection, and the newest products, and we’re used to getting them without much trouble. It’s really about selling us convenience, and the promise of looking more important by owning the newest gadgets.
Now, our most overworked people (at pizza stores, for example) are starting to slip up. Why? In our race to convenience, we are trampling over an almost invisible population.
I think the mess-ups are happening because we’re not addressing the root causes. Workers are tired, stressed, anxious, and mildly traumatized from recent pandemics, political upheaval, and wars. We’re not paying most of the people we rely on enough. (In Ontario, that includes teachers and healthcare workers.)
I think we’ve raised the bar too high across the board. Whether that’s having 30 different flavours of chips available at the convenience store, guaranteed delivery times of items we ordered without leaving our homes, or owning the newest smart television — we demand a lot with little margin for error, without considering who actually makes it all happen. (Humans, mostly.)
We need a collective reality check
Perhaps we do need some minor inconveniences now and then to remind us that the supply chain is not magical, and people that work in the service industry are not immune to burning out.
Perhaps we can learn a bit more patience, and how to be a bit more empathetic about others trying to make ends meet.
Perhaps we can wait a bit longer for that new dishwasher delivery, and can do dishes by hand before that time. I chose this example because it’s the situation at our house. We have to wait until the end of October to get our new appliance, and have to *gasp* do dishes by hand until then.
I have switched my frame of mind from “why will delivery take so long?” to “someone invented a machine that washes our dishes for us, and we’re getting one soon.”
I guess what it comes down to is holding a bit of gratitude, even if our food order is a bit messed up or we have to wait for a parcel longer than usual. Even if the service industry is dipping in reliability, we still have it remarkably easy here across Canada and the U.S.
It’s just that our idea of “good” is perfect, and anything less is seen an inconvenience.
What are your thoughts? Have you had an experience recently that shows cracks in society?
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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Photo credit: Włodzimierz Jaworski on Unsplash