Has hyper-convenience gone too far? As the line between self-care and self-sabotage thins, we ask: Are we in the economy of laziness?
Adnaan Hirani believes that people are forgetting the joys of doing something with your hand in their pursuit of convenience. PIC/SATEJ SHINDE
Five years ago, if you asked a lifestyle guru how to turn your life around, the answers were predictable: “Wake up at 4 am.” “The grind never stops.” “Optimise every second.” The books that flew off shelves echoed this discipline-first ethos — Robin Sharma’s The 5 AM Club and Jay Shetty’s Think Like a Monk.
Fast forward to today, and life advice has softened. We’re all about “giving ourselves grace” and “holding space for each other”. The shift is visible on bestseller lists too: The Time Energy Toolkit by Apekshit Khare, 108 Ways to Live Your Best Life by Shoba Narayan, Shoo the Noises by Anamika Mishra, and the South Korean hit I Am Not Lazy, I’m on Energy Saving Mode by Dancing Snail — all these books share one core belief: self-improvement shouldn’t come with self-flagellation. They acknowledge that failure is inevitable and instead of shaming readers, they allow for stumbles along the way.
Few of the most popular self-help titles take a kind approach towards readers
Right now, we stand at an intriguing crossroads. Do we continue to push ourselves with rigour and routine, or lean fully into kindness at the risk of growing lazy? Where is the balance?
For author Apekshit Khare, the hustler mindset is simply not sustainable. He believes that people have finally realised that long working hours don’t necessarily mean more productivity. “Hustle is an efficiency metric. Do more and you’ll get more, right? But kindness culture is an effectiveness metric. You work less but you get more done. That shift is happening in the world, and so we are seeing it in our books as well,” he says.
Apekshit Khare, author of The Time Energy Toolkit
According to Khare, a big trigger for this is the pandemic. “Experiencing how resting can recharge your batteries really changed people’s perspectives.” The pandemic was the first time in a very long time when people had no choice but to skip work, that too at a stretch for months.
For author Shoba Narayan too, the transition from “discipline to compassion”, as she puts it, is triggered by an overall exhaustion from the toil and labour of surviving. “There’s a yearning to go back to the way our ancestors did. They walked to the river and lived a much slower life.”
Tired as we are, the urge to simplify life is perhaps the most human instinct of all. A 10-minute grocery delivery can sometimes be the difference between a sulking mother and a smiling one. Our modern conveniences are so extreme they’d probably send a Victorian child into a coma. Isn’t it remarkable that we can outsource the drudgery — to AI that drafts our emails, or a nutritionist who decides our meals? Even Fleabag longed for someone to tell her what to wear. It may sound trivial, but decision-making is exhausting. The thousands of tiny choices we juggle each day don’t just add up — they wear us down.
For Paromita Mitra, who is a 38-year-old artist, reading is a hobby close to her heart. As the years go by though, time becomes scarce. That’s when she started listening to audiobooks. The reader community has long debated whether listening to audiobooks is “real” reading or not. After all, the perceived romance of it lies in holding a paperback in one hand and a warm beverage in another. “I think it takes a lot of concentration to read physically. And also there’s a storage problem; where do I keep all the physical copies?!” she exclaims.
Paromita Mitra believes that listening to audiobooks saves her time and space. PIC/NIMESH DAVE
Modern problems do need modern solutions. This is Mumbai, and space is luxury. Not everyone can have libraries in their homes. The switch to audiobooks, then, isn’t out of laziness. The romance of reading isn’t lost on Mitra either, “I would love to hold a book and read it if I had that much time.” In the modern world, time too is a luxury, one that most can’t afford. It helps then, if you can club your hobbies with your chores, like washing the dishes as you read a book.
Reflecting on her own habit, Mitra says, “Too much convenience is ruining us. We are forgetting how to write because we always type — either on the phone or a laptop. Similarly, listening to audiobooks is definitely affecting my patience to read physically because I can’t skip ahead or make it faster.” Mitra brings forward a very important question — how much convenience is too much? When does choosing a shortcut turn into a deal with the devil?
Adnaan Hirani, 35, knew it was too much with quick commerce. Around a year ago, he discovered a feature in one of these apps — type out the dish’s name and they’ll give you a package of ingredients. “The only thing left for them to do is come and make the dish also for us,” he laughs. It’s no longer a joke, though, because now there are apps which do that, too.
“Too much convenience takes the joy out of your hobby,” he says. “I’m not that into cooking but if I was, there would be no fun left for me because of this feature.” Hirani himself is a content creator and he made a reel about this very feature. “My passion is creating content and I would never take a shortcut there. What’s even the point of doing it then?”
Hirani shares that instead of agreeing with him, most respondents to his reel were actually excited to try the feature. “We’re an inherently lazy people. It’s the ultimate dream to sit back, relax, and do nothing,” he hypothesises. “I think it started with Uber, but now there really is an app for every convenience. AI is the biggest example. I find myself using ChatGPT as a search engine, instead of Googling.” He even shares an anecdote where his air-conditioner was not working and so he clicked a picture and put it in ChatGPT. Within seconds, the bot was able to tell him how to fix it.
Hirani reflects, “I think ultimately too much convenience will make us anti-social.” If everything can be delivered at home, and we can work from home, and we can gym at home, why would we ever go out? Maybe the only real workout left is walking to answer the doorbell. He also muses, “People are forgetting the joy of doing something by hand. Yes, it’s hard but it brings you so much happiness. People will forget these simple delights.”
A content creator with 16 lakh followers, Ash Ambawat believes that convenience is currency. “People are willing to pay for whatever makes their lives easier. When it comes to social media, convenience has become a part of the content itself — tutorials, life hacks, shortcuts are the most popular genres. With decreasing attention spans, people want content fast, so reels under 30 seconds are the sweet spot. Now to create that at a faster pace, we [creators] rely on convenience tools [editing apps, templates, AI captions, scheduling platforms] to speed up production,” she says. “I think this convenience culture is making the human race lazy. We are becoming less patient, more lethargic. If I use ChatGPT for everything, outsource my thinking, I am going to stop using my brain and become a robot. One should be mindful about this, channelise this in the right direction.”
In her own content creation journey, Ash Ambawat has found that if you don’t use shortcuts, you can’t compete
Not just drafting work emails, people are going as far as giving all their personal chats to bots, asking them for replies for partners; even seeking therapy from them. Sanjeev NC, creator of AI bot Suprememe.ai (an AI bot that makes memes), tells us, “The line between efficiency and laziness depends on how the tool is being used. For example, a social media marketer might use Supermeme.ai to make their job more efficient by posting more quality memes. If they blindly post the output that AI generates, it’s laziness. If they actually use it as a starting point and iterate over the results, it’s quicker than if they’d have done it manually. It’s efficiency.”
To those who criticise AI for killing creativity, Sanjeev says, “AI can never replace creativity, it can only stimulate it. For example, think of AI tools as writing prompts. A writing prompt is designed to get writers out of writer’s block; it doesn’t replace creativity, it simply stimulates it by giving the writer a starting point. If you’re not a creative person yourself, the prompts are almost useless. Similarly, with AI tools, your output is only as creative as the input prompt you give it and how you iterate it.”
Shoba Narayan, author of 108 Ways to Live Your Best Life; Sanjeev NC, founder of Suprememe.ai; Shirin Kapadia, online trainer
Perhaps the biggest battle with laziness comes when we need to go to the gym. We all know that working out is good for us, but gosh is it hard! How to make it convenient? For Shirin Kapadia, online classes are the answer. With 19 years of experience as a fitness coach, Kapadia believes that health is just not at the top of most people’s minds — you have to give them that push.
“I want to make them fall in love with movement. It’s the initial push that is the hardest. When people start seeing results they want to stick to it,” she says, “Once they fall in love with moving their body, they will stick.”
Kapadia believes that giving people ready-made workout and diet plans isn’t spoon-feeding: those who might need these aren’t necessarily lazy, they just need some guidance and accountability.
To go easy on yourself is to recognise that you are human — fallible, tired, stretched thin — and to forgive yourself for it. It keeps us from collapsing under the weight of impossible expectations. But tip too far, and what begins as self-care can turn into self-sabotage. How do we find the balance?
Khare asks us to look inward. “Know who you are and where you want to go from there. Once you have clarity of purpose, every micro decision becomes easier. It won’t feel like this massive pile on your head.”
Narayan says a good rule to stick by is never try a shortcut in personal relationships. “AI can’t call your mother for you,” she jokes. “You can use food delivery service to send a cake to your friend on their birthday, but if you never go to see your friend yourself, there is no meaning to that cake.”
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