Make Things Easy, Or Devalue Dignity

In today’s world, we have broken many adversity barriers to create a common culture to make things easy. Man has needed, and still needs, to make some tasks easier to achieve goals. The wheel, for example, made it possible to move large masses of weight from one place to another. A good portion of human history has revolved around the struggle to facilitate processes. The downside is that this ends up generating an army of people taking shortcuts.

First was the industrial revolution and then the IT revolution. Both phenomena helped to make things easier for people. In other words, they minimize their effort to perform many daily activities that would previously require more use of time and energy. For example, to inform oneself. The word of mouth has been replaced by news agencies and by real-time information on the internet.

It is worth considering whether all this makes life easier. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is now faster and requires less investment of physical force. Existence , on the other hand, has become more complex, to the point where mental disorders have become increasingly common. At the same time, making things easy has become established as a way of dealing with this complexity.

The simplicity of making things easy

The purpose of industrialization and information technology has not exactly been to make things easier for people. Its ultimate goal is to make production faster and easier. It simplifies many everyday tasks, but in essence this was not the plan. Many of these advances are the result of the concept of money rather than welfare.

Be that as it may, the truth is that this principle that everything should work with simplicity, has in various ways leaked into our consciousness. The worst part of this is that it makes us believe that easily and quickly are desirable attributes. In contrast, are complex and slow defects. This way of thinking is the foundation of our need to simplify things.

In its most positive and beneficial expression, science and technology have wanted to free us from mechanistic tasks and the tasks that require raw power. By making tasks faster, such as washing clothes quickly or being able to more comfortably transport very heavy loads, we believe that we all have more time available to dedicate ourselves to more commendable tasks that will give us more. This is not true, or has only partially worked, and only for some. What has spread is a holding of contempt for effort.

Simplicity and dignity

A false ideal has been created – eliminate problems. The idea that there is nothing positive about problems was popularized. And even worse, many imagine that life can really exist without difficulty, a world without obstacles.

They believe it up to the point where they end up frustrated because the day does not come where all their problems disappear. The great paradox is that we have never before had the feeling of having to encounter so many problems. Almost everything has become difficult. Eat a lot or a little. Have a job or not. Build a relationship or not. And so on, and so on.

From the psychological point of view, simplicity can have two sides. On the one hand, there is a defensive response to what is a cluster of problems that can not be solved. On the other hand, it can be a childish attitude, where the person wants to remain in a state that does not require obligations, effort or responsibility, just like when they were children.

What these positions do not admit is the fact that reality and difficulty go hand in hand. Nor do they understand that it is precisely the existence of the difficult that allows a person and humanity itself to seek, find and develop. Even the invention of fire was an initiative to try to solve a problem. By resolving it, they lay the foundations for a definitive step towards homo sapiens.

In general, making things easy does nothing more than accumulate and increase problems. It also deprives you of the opportunity to try, to measure yourself and thus increase the confidence of your own abilities.

It also prevents you from appreciating one of the world’s riches – feeling dignified about who you are, what you have and what you are capable of doing. By all means, there are difficulties that are impossible to solve, such as hunger in the world, but there are many other problems that can be solved. What is missing is self-confidence. Or self-love. Or both.