Convenience Is The Culture-Killer
Despite having everything we could ever want at our finger tips, our culture is rotting from the inside.
Two hundred years ago, Abraham Lincoln would walk 50 miles just to borrow a book he hadn’t read yet.
Imagine how grateful he was for every single word on those pages.
Today, people yell at drive-thru employees if their Big Mac takes too long, utterly disconnected from what they’re shoving in their mouths while mindlessly entranced by their phones.
Having everything handed to us—delivered, automated, instantly available—is killing us.
Almost half of people in the U.S. under the age of 45 report persistent feelings of depression and hopelessness.
One in four Americans is on medication for their mental health—a figure that doesn’t include the millions more self-medicating with alcohol or illicit substances.
This is the cost of convenience.
Despite the promise of a technological utopia fueled by progress, efficiency, and convenience, our “advanced” culture has devolved into a spiritual dumpster fire—and it’s only getting worse.
We’ve been sold a false Eden—a paradise where we’ll never have to lift a finger again.
Modern life has tricked us into thinking that buying more stuff will solve our deepest problems.
But the cancer plaguing our culture can’t be cured by AI, politicians, corporations, or capitalistic ideology.
It’s an illness of the soul.
And curing it requires we begin to ask questions that don’t fit in with the cultural narrative.
Modernity fights against living with real purpose, connection, and achievement.
It was built to destroy our soul, not nurture it.
And if we want to live a life of meaning, where we aren’t just another pill-popping zombie enduring life until we die, we need to understand what actually makes life worth living.
But first, we need to understand how we got here.
Let’s dive in.
MODERNITY WAS BUILT TO RETARD YOU
Modern society was built to make us useless cogs in a machine. The system functions better when we’re docile, dependent, and dumbed down.
We’ve been reduced to hairless apes who stare into glass, tap on aluminum, and act like subservient, domesticated animals entertained by flashing lights and sound.
The new religion of humanity, scientism, wants us to believe we live in a lifeless, inanimate world that is simply a bunch of atoms, minerals, and quarks.
This view of the world is a massive departure from how our ancestors saw the world and is completely foreign to our soul, spirit, and body.
Until recent times, there was no question that the entire world is alive—a living, breathing organism that has feelings and consciousness.
Every rock, tree, and creature has a sacred purpose.
When you know the name of everything and understand its place in the greater fractal, a shallow, irreverent life is impossible. This ancient understanding of the world birthed a deep resonance and respect for all of creation.
We understood where we belonged in the great web of life. We saw ourselves as another animal. There was no distinction. No separation.
You cannot cultivate this type of depth and connection with the world in a mass-produced, cookie-cutter, convenience-oriented society.
When you reduce life as a problem to be solved to further the agenda of a single species, you sever our connection to the beauty and the mystery of life.
A one-way relationship based on extracting as much as we can while leaving nothing in exchange for our greed demands we close our hearts to the world.
It demands we shield our eyes. It demands our numbness and ignorance.
Real connection, reverence, and reciprocity don’t fit into the never-ending push for progress.
Instead, it requires slowing down. It requires being in constant, sometimes challenging conversation.
It requires radical honesty, humility, and acknowledgment of our impact. To hold complexity and understand that the world isn’t black and white.
To confront the sobering reality of how we treat the planet. Saying no to a life of shallow convenience, progress, efficiency, and extractive economic theories.
It is an often lonely and painful path, but the reward is a vast, deep, and rich connection with ourselves and all of creation.
By taking this step, we awaken to the truth that we are not mere bystanders in the unfolding mythos of the world but integral protagonists, each fulfilling a unique and irreplaceable role in this grand, ever-evolving story of the universe.
So, if this is the wild and rich experience you want of the world, where do you begin?
HANDWORK IS SOUL WORK
When is the last time you've put in dozens or hundreds of hours to intentionally craft something with your own hands?
A craft that required all of you—your creativity, your problem solving, your physicality, and your concentration?
Martin Prechtel, who spent years living with the Tzutujil Maya in Guatemala, often talks about how everything people in the village did—whether weaving, farming, cooking, or storytelling—was infused with ritual and spiritual meaning.
"The Tzutujil didn’t think of their skills as something separate from their spirituality. To plant a crop, to build a roof, to weave a cloth—these were sacred acts, ways of thanking the earth and sky, of participating in the dance of life that made everything possible. Their hands carried the prayers of their hearts into the world."
Everyone in the community could do every task, not because they needed to, but because having a breadth of abilities was a way of showing gratitude for life and ensured one could fully contribute to the community’s well-being.
In a hyper-commodified culture fixated on specialization, the only question modern people ask is: “Is it cheaper to do this myself or to pay someone else?”
This is the wrong question to ask if you actually want your life to mean anything.
Farmer/philosopher Wendell Berry put it perfectly:
“Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato.”
Our lives will never have real meaning if every choice we make is just about money, because money has no heart or soul.
For the past several years, I’ve traveled across the U.S. attending gatherings where I study skills that most people today would view as redundant: making friction fires, building natural shelters, brain-tanning animal hides, and mastering other essential crafts our ancestors relied on for survival for hundreds of thousands of years.
These skills are hard to learn. They require patience, time, and have a steep learning curve.
Mastering one skill often requires proficiency in a stack of prerequisites.
Take building a friction fire, for example. Lighting a fire with friction is radically inefficient compared to using a lighter or matches.
We all know how to flick a lighter or strike a match.
But to light a fire with friction, you must:
Identify and harvest the right materials.
Have sufficient knife skills to shape the materials into each component.
Understand which tinder works best for ignition, how to build a tinder nest, and how to coax a coal into flame.
Even with the tools and knowledge, learning the proper technique required to produce a coal takes days, if not weeks, to learn.
The more that I practice these skills, the more I understand why our ancient ancestors had a god for every element and force of nature.
It wasn’t because people were uneducated or didn’t understand how the world works (hint: nobody does).
To them, fire wasn’t something you could purchase at a convenience store. It was a gift from the gods who blessed you with the wisdom, tools, and good fortune to control it.
When survival depends on conditions outside your control such as the weather, you bet your ass you would pray to whatever God will increase your chances of success because the ability to feed your family, forge tools, and stay warm and alive depends on it.
Thus, rituals were born—not for fun, but because our survival depended on it.
When things are hard to come by, we approach them with reverence because we see success as a blessing, not something we’re entitled to. Reverence and ritual imbue everything with meaning and bring the sacred into our hearts.
But modern people see even the most minor inconvenience as an annoyance. They immediately go to blaming themselves, someone else, or the world.
Creating your first coal from a friction fire set you built yourself is an unforgettable moment that changes your relationship to the elements forever.
Everything that was required of you—the connection with the materials of the Earth, using your own hands, and apprenticing to the element of fire itself—fundamentally shifts your sense of belonging in the world.
This is the foundational way humans made meaning of their lives for 99% of our existence.
We used our hands to make the world more beautiful. We tried new things, failed a lot, and got help from our community. We also prayed to a higher power to guide us.
Nothing we did was wasted because it was all for the people who would come after us.
AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
“The soul’s purpose is rarely convenient or easy to integrate into the norms of the dominant culture. But it is essential—without it, we are lost, and so is the world.”
—Bill Plotkin
For 300,000 years, our ancestors made art with their lives. The sacred was woven into all they did. Even the language we use to describe this connection—woven—reflects a tactile way of living in the world.
Our culture is built on endless consumption, leaving many wondering why they feel useless—because, in many ways, they are.
We’ve become a society of utter incompetence, relying on others to do everything for us.
It’s not that you need to grow all your own food, carve your own utensils, do your own car repairs, and live in a debris hut.
But when we create art and beauty with our lives, we reopen the portal to a lineage that truly knew the value of the world and everything within it—the materials, the effort, and the sacrifice required.
To create with your hands is inherently inefficient. It is not productive. It does not scale, and there is no guarantee that what you’re making will be beautiful or useful.
But I guarantee you will feel more belonging in this world by growing your own potatoes, even if the crop fails, than by going to the store and buying a bag of them grown by a corporate farmer 3,000 miles away.
In a culture obsessed with ascension and overcoming what makes us human, it’s time to collectively descend back to the terrain of the soul.
Soul is not a concept we think about; it’s a place we embody.
We can’t breathe, meditate, or journal our way to the soul.
It requires our hands, our commitment, and our direct participation with the natural world.
It requires touching the earth, working with it, and knowing it intimately.
To live from the soul is to live in reverent reciprocity with Earth.
A life of rich meaning is right here, beneath our feet.
Human life is meaningless without a rootedness in the wild, rugged terrain of the soul—in the watershed, trees, rocks, crows, and creatures around us.
If you want to experience the richness of this planet, to walk it in thanks, gratitude, and eternal reverence, choose the path of inconvenience.
The path that requires getting to know one tree from another, our observation, listening, and curiosity about creation itself.
Because to choose the longer, harder, inconvenient way is to say yes to the sacred.
It’s to invite soul to the dinner table.
It’s to live in reverence for the ancestors who valued patience, hard work, prayer, and held immense respect for themselves, their people, this planet, and the web that ties all of it together.
If we want real meaning, real depth, real connection, and real wisdom, the only option is to choose inconvenience and reclaim our sacred place in the world.