Facility Or Contempt For Dignity
In today’s world we have gone from breaking the barriers of difficulty to a massification of ease. The human being needed, and needs, to make some tasks easier to make several of his goals and projects possible. The wheel, for example, made it possible to move large weights from one side to the other. A good part of human history has been that of the struggle to facilitate processes. The bad thing is that this ended up generating an army of facilistas.
First it was the industrial revolution and then the computer revolution. Both phenomena made everyday life much faster for human beings. In other words, they managed to minimize the effort to perform many daily activities that previously required more energy and more time. For example, get informed. Voice-to-speech was replaced by the big press and then by real-time information from the Internet.
It might be worth wondering if all of this really made life easier. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is now faster and requires less investment of physical energy. But existence has become more complex to the point that mental illnesses are the most and are increasing their incidence. At the same time, ease has been established as a means to deal with this complexity.
From ease to ease
The purpose of industrialization and information technology has not exactly been to make life easier for human beings. Its ultimate goal is to make production faster and easier. In this way, he has also ended up simplifying many tasks of daily life, but in essence he was not oriented to it. A good part of these advances are explained more by the concept of money than by that of well-being.
Be that as it may, the truth is that the principle that everything works easily has been seeping into our consciousness in different ways. The worst of them is the one that aims to make us believe that easy and fast are desirable attributes. On the other hand, the complex and slow are defects. That way of thinking is the substrate of ease.
In its most positive and beneficial expression, science and technology have wanted to free us from mechanical tasks and those that require brute force. It is assumed that by streamlining tasks, such as washing clothes quickly or transporting very heavy objects with greater comfort, we would all have more time available to dedicate ourselves to more commendable tasks, which would fill us more. But this has not been fulfilled, or it has only been done in part and for a few. What has spread is an attitude of contempt for effort.
Ease and dignity
A false ideal has been constructed: eliminate problems. The idea that there is nothing positive about them became popular. And worse still, many imagine that there really is a life without difficulties, a world without obstacles.
They believe it to the point where they end up frustrated because the day does not come when the problems disappear. The great paradox is that we have never before had the feeling of facing so many problems. Almost everything has become a difficulty. Eat a lot or a little. Having a job and not having it. Build a couple and don’t do it. And a very long etcetera.
From a psychological point of view, ease can have two faces. On the one hand, it would be a defensive response to what is experienced as a series of problems that cannot be solved. On the other hand, it could also be a childish attitude, in which the individual wishes to remain in a condition that does not require commitments, efforts or responsibilities, such as when he was a baby.
What these types of positions do not admit is the fact that reality and difficulty go hand in hand. But they also do not understand that it is precisely the existence of difficulty that allows a person and humanity itself to seek, find and evolve. Even the invention of fire responded to an initiative that sought to solve a problem. By solving it, they laid the foundations for a definitive step towards homo sapiens.
In general, the easy way does nothing more than accumulate and exacerbate problems. It also deprives you of the possibility of testing yourself, of measuring yourself and thus increasing your confidence in your own abilities.
It also prevents you from enjoying one of the fullness of life: feeling worthy of who you are, what you have, and what you are capable of doing. Sure there are difficulties that are impossible to solve, such as world hunger. But there are also many others that can be solved. What is lacking is self-confidence. Or self-love. Or both.
Images courtesy of Tatsuya Tanaka, John Holcroft
