Oliver Burkeman’s Inconvenient Truth

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29/05/2023

Oliver Burkeman explores the insidious way in which convenience has warped our existence.

Oliver Burkeman brings his keen sense of the ridiculous to bear on our obsession with convenience, exploring the hidden pitfalls of a life of ease.

Oliver Burkeman takes aim at our habitual quest for convenience and at the industries which thrive on the promise of eliminating tedious and time-consuming tasks, with the only result being that our lives get subtly worse. In attempting to excise dreary and mundane experiences, we accidentally end up cutting out things we didn't realise we valued until they were gone.
 
It's this contention that Oliver will explore in five episodes, rich with his trademark eye for our shared ridiculousness. The core of the argument starts like this. In start-up jargon, the way to make a fortune is to identify a "pain point" resulting from the "friction" of daily life-and then circumvent it.  So Uber eliminates the "pain" of having to track down a number for your local taxi company and call it, or worse still - hail a cab in the street. These services offer to smooth your passage through life. Except it's often the unsmoothed that make life worth living. The effort of interactions with others helps nurture relationships crucial for mental and physical health, to say nothing of how they build resilience in communities. It's one of the great ironies of modern living that while so many claim to be lonelier than ever, we avoid contact with other people at all costs because we perceive their expectations and demands of us as well, all a bit inconvenient.

To help him to critically assess the consequences - destructive or otherwise - of convenience in our lives, Oliver calls on those who have chosen to relinquish convenience, such as ex-Silicon Valley mathematician and author Coco Krumme, who has chosen a cabin on a remote Island near Canada as her home,  or Kat Rosenfield whose teen advice column has reflected the effects of generation Z's convenient lifestyle and Mark Manson, ex Digital Nomad. Co-founder of the thinktank Perspectiva Jonathan Rowson and author Craig Lambert also add their insights to Oliver's mission to uncover the true cost of convenience.

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Oliver Burkeman's Inconvenient Truth: Optimised Living

Optimised Living

BBC Radio 4 - Oliver Burkeman's Inconvenient Truth, Optimised Living

Oliver Burkeman concludes his exploration of the hidden pitfalls of the culture of convenience, drawing on his experience of living in Brooklyn and now rural Yorkshire.

Oliver Burkeman concludes his exploration of the traps awaiting us in the culture of convenience.  He draws on his experience of living in Brooklyn and and the contrast of his new home in rural Yorkshire. Resisting the seductive nature of a convenient lifestyle is tough but necessary for our wellbeing.  With ex mathematician and writer Coco Krumme and co-founder of Perspectiva Jonathan Rowson and philosopher Julian Baggini

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