Faster means faker. We’re losing access to our simple material pleasures as convenience culture sucks the joy out of everything good and enriching. 

Our simple material and hedonistic pleasures are being outsourced and diluted. Consumers are getting the short end of the stick, yet we accept it under the guise of innovation. We feel cornered into this fast-paced lifestyle with little room for inconvenience, whether it be demanding schedules or cost-effectiveness.  

It started with food. The substitution of real ingredients was snuck under our noses for the sake of convenience, speed and cost-effectiveness. Food started fast, but now that’s the least of our worries. 

Then our clothes were next on the chopping block. We decried the use of sweatshop labor as fabric compositions left us threadbare. Real cotton and organic materials were made luxuries while we draped ourselves in lead and formaldehyde-ridden polyester rib-knits. 

Now art and ideation, while not completely replaced, have become largely taken over by artificial intelligence. Referred to as content slop, AI-generated entertainment is not enjoyable or enriching in any part of its inception or consumption. 

As a matter of fact, it’s all slop. 

The writing and art are conceptual with no real framework or thought, with both the former and latter having been chewed up and spit out by algorithms. The clothes smell starchy and disintegrate upon a few washes, and the food isn’t good for us, but not in a particularly indulgent or enjoyable sense. 

These conveniences are made to serve their purpose and be forgotten. We are not given the space or capacity to luxuriate in the consumption, or have any tactile or sentimental appreciation for the process of creating.We cannot enjoy the fruits of our labor. 

It’s impossible to search up any concept or idea, or peruse any social or artistic network, without being subjected to that telltale indefinite blurred vomit of colors, shapes and ideatic fragments. 

University of Minnesota teaching associate professor of learning technologies Angelica Pazurek said while AI-generated content is readily and quickly available, it needs human discernment and values insofar as its actual capacity for credibility goes. 

“Not all of the information is helpful, not all of it is valid or credible or appropriate,” Pazurek said. 

The formulaic and algorithmic nature of these consumption habits make them feel soulless. Whether it be a hearty meal, a pretty coat or a quick lunchtime scroll, we aren’t consuming to feed our senses anymore, but for the sake of consumption itself. We aren’t searching to learn anymore, or to delve into anything real or comprehensive. It’s all half-baked. 

These types of modernized, mass-produced conveniences are not created for people, but pushed at people for consumption. It’s like slop that’s flung to the ceiling of a break room and made to stick, whose presence is known but not acknowledged, yet accepted through this tacit agreement we’ve made with it. 

University associate professor of the history of science, technology and medicine Jennifer Alexander said time is increasingly becoming a currency.  

“Part of the reason I think students sometimes do turn to something like ChatGPT, or Gemini or something is because they don’t have time,” Alexander said. “And so, in a way, there’s a luxury of having time.”

Intentionality and presence toward labor is a luxury. To be able to put time and labor into things other than pure productivity is something we’re pushed away from, and in turn, losing access to. 

So, whose fault is it? Is it on the consumers or producers?

Alexander said the desire for convenience is, to some degree, manufactured in people. 

“I don’t think we always want to avoid work,” Alexander said. “I don’t think people are always just lazy. I don’t think that’s the reason that people want convenience. I don’t think that, but we do have enormous demands on people these days.”

Money is a currency, as is time. Intentionality and presence toward labor outside of productivity is a luxury.

Pazurek said a job done quickly, as it applies to AI in particular, is not always a job well done. 

“I refer to it as, like, a culture of immediacy,” Pazurek said. “We’re talking about being productive and efficient and quick, and we want our answers to come quickly, and we want to complete things quickly because we have so many demands on our time and attention.”

The corners we’re cutting are stripping us of what used to be considered basic human pleasures. 

Are we being so graciously allowed to cut them, or have we just been told that scissors are the way of the future, or some inevitability?