As I’m writing this, it’s 2026 and I’m 23 years old, which is an interesting age because I’m old enough to be noticing more patterns in myself and the world around me, but still young enough that I’d hesitate to speak too confidently about life. One of the things I keep noticing is how easy modern life has made it to get instant relief from discomfort. If I’m hungry, I can order food in minutes instead of having to cook for myself and clean up after. If I’m bored, there is an endless amount of stimulation waiting for me on my phone, so I don’t have to sit with the slowness of a dull moment.
I don’t think these things are inherently bad, and a lot of them do seem useful to me at times. But when relief arrives too quickly, I sometimes wonder if it cuts off the process of actually understanding the feeling in the first place. And if that happens often enough, I think you eventually start losing the ability to distinguish between different kinds of discomfort, so that boredom, loneliness, fatigue, hunger, insecurity, restlessness, anger, frustration, sadness, embarrassment, anxiety, doubt, or uncertainty all begin to blur together into the same vague problem: something unpleasant that needs to disappear as quickly and frictionlessly as possible.
Part of what makes modern life feel subtly off, I think, is that so many of these conveniences are uncannily good at impersonating what people need, close enough to keep people engaged and moving from one little hit of relief to the next, but not close enough to leave them well. If I feel restless and check my phone, or lonely and scroll through other people’s lives, or mentally drained and watch something, or vaguely bad and order fast food, the discomfort often does lift a little, at least for the moment. And once you start seeing the pattern, it becomes hard not to notice how often the most profitable systems are the ones that keep people reaching outward rather than pausing long enough to understand themselves.
The more I reflect on my own life, the more I notice that a lot of the things that actually help me are much less flashy than the things that usually call for my attention. Eating healthy, home-cooked meals consistently helps me far more than defaulting to whatever fast food option I can buy in the moment, and exercise or reading or writing or playing with my cats or talking to my wife often helps me more than another hour of watching YouTube. A lot of these better things are also harder to monetize than hyper-palatable food or algorithmic entertainment, which means that a lot of what is good for us runs against the grain of what is constantly being pushed toward us. Over time, I suspect that can turn into a feedback loop, where the more you escape unpleasant feelings with quick relief, the worse those feelings often get, and the worse they get, the more you keep reaching for the same kind of relief again.
I use technology all the time and like convenience as much as the next person, so I’m not trying to stand outside any of this, but the more I think about it, the more it seems like a lot of these quick responses offer something that feels like an answer before I’ve really understood the question, and maybe that’s part of why they’re so compelling, because a clean, immediate answer is often more satisfying than sitting with something unresolved, even though a lot of the things that actually matter don’t seem to come with that kind of clarity. And maybe that’s why the answers that matter most don’t usually arrive all at once, but have to be worked out more slowly through experience.