Facility or contempt for dignity

In today’s world we have gone beyond breaking barriers from difficulty to a massification of ease. Human beings needed, and need, to make some tasks easier to make several of their objectives and projects possible. The wheel, for example, made it possible to move large weights from one place to another. Much of human history has been the struggle to facilitate processes. The bad thing is that this ended up generating an army of facilitators.

First there was the industrial revolution and then the information revolution. Both phenomena made everyday life much faster for human beings. In other words, they managed to minimize the effort to carry out many daily activities that previously required more energy and more time. For example, get informed. Voice-to-voice was replaced by the mainstream press and then by real-time information on the Internet.

It might be worth asking if all 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 increasing in incidence. At the same time, facilism has been established as a means to deal with this complexity.

From ease to ease

The purpose of industrialization and computing has not exactly been to make life easier for human beings. Its objective The last thing is to make production faster and easier. In this way it has also ended up simplifying many tasks of daily life, but in essence it was not aimed at that. 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 this principle of everything working 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, complexity and slowness are defects. That way of thinking is the substrate of facilism.

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 speeding up tasks, such as washing clothes quickly or transporting very heavy objects more comfortably, we would all have more time available to dedicate ourselves to more praiseworthy tasks, which would fulfill 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 in 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 getting frustrated because the day does not come when the problems disappear. The great paradox is that never before have we 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, facilism can have two sides. On the one hand, it would be a defensive response to what is experienced as an accumulation of problems that cannot be resolved. 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, as when he or she 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 search, 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, Facility only accumulates and increases problems. It also deprives you of the possibility of proving yourselfto measure yourself and thus increase confidence in your own abilities.

It also prevents you from enjoying one of the plenitudes of life: feeling worthy of who you are, what you have and what you are capable of doing. Surely there are difficulties that are impossible to solve, such as world hunger. But there are also many others that are solvable. What is missing is self-confidence. Or self love. Or both.

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Images courtesy of Tatsuya Tanaka, John Holcroft