How the cult of convenience took over our lives and the cost of effortless pleasures.

Too Convenient is a luminous, essayistic meditation on one of the most pervasive stories of our age: if you purchase little savings of time and effort, your life can be improved. But the story is a lie. The savings aren’t real and our lives aren’t better. The modern promise of frictionless living comes at a terrible cost: stagnation, environmental ruin and social disconnection. Paradise will never be delivered.

Tracing the idea of convenience from medieval lands of plenty to the modern app economy, Revely-Calder shows how the pursuit of ease is far from innocent. He asks what commuters really dream of, why ghost workers vanish behind our screens, and how our most ordinary acts – cooking, reading, sending a message – have been reshaped without our noticing.

Against the pull of effortless living, Too Convenient ends with a powerful argument for why we must pursue a more inconvenient society, and forsake quick and easy pleasures in favour of attention, solidarity and love.