I noticed a blender pitcher in the trash on my street the other week. It had a lightweight plastic body, with a permanently built-in blade and o-ring assembly. The idea is that all you ever have to do is rinse out the pitcher: no unscrewing the bottom piece, separating the blade, pulling out the o-ring, washing and drying everything, remembering to put the o-ring in the right spot (does it go above or below the blade, you somehow wonder every time).
It turns out the problem with these one-piece blenders is that the seals fail, and can’t be replaced or fixed; the pitcher leaks, and you have to replace the whole pitcher instead of a cheap rubber ring.
Somehow, just rinsing out a plastic pitcher after using the blender feels like a bit of a letdown. Even, or especially, if this all-in-one design did work well, it would seem too easy; it would strike me almost as “cheating”; there’s some part of me that feels like the difficulty of a thing is part of what it is, part of the point of doing it. Maybe this is a strange echo of my Catholic faith; an abstraction of sacramentalism, the idea that a process must be rendered in or mediated through the physical world. The all-in-one blender is, in this secular sacramental view, a kind of secular Protestantism.
I’m not sure how many people would think of it quite like this. But I am sure I’m not alone in experiencing a tension between making things easier and feeling like effort is worthwhile in and of itself; that part of the merit of doing a thing is struggling just a bit with it. Once familiar, this friction somehow becomes moralized in our minds. We have trouble distinguishing genuinely worthwhile difficulty from adversity we have merely come to tolerate or even in a strange way embrace.
Along similar lines, I’ve been thinking lately about my college and grad school years, and how so much of what makes that time special is the proximity of everything to everything else. Someone put it really well on social media: distance is a tax. This is a subtle but very important insight.
Proximity makes things easy. We associate that kind of breezy proximity with a transitional phase in our lives, when we are still growing up. And I think to some extent, we grown-ups—especially suburbanites—see the friction of everyday adult life as evidence of our effort, of our maturity, of our having grown up. My daily life requires a constant background effort that it didn’t used to; this must mean I’ve made it.
Perhaps this all sounds like something more appropriate to a therapist’s office than to a newsletter about urbanism and land use. But this doesn’t just live in our heads. It is almost certainly an undercurrent in political and policy debates, where dry concepts like supply, demand, and price are seen through these ideas of effort and value.
This is, I think, an undercurrent in the debates over “abundance,” the term of art for a politics of supply-side reforms and regulatory pruning, which in many ways arose as an abstraction of the YIMBY approach to housing. Some of the controversy over abundance comes from