By Misbah Rehmat
We wanted everything to be easy. Now we are.
We wanted food in 10 minutes, answers in 3 seconds, and directions without asking anyone. And we got it. Our phones remember for us, maps think for us, and AI writes for us. Life has never been smoother. But smoothness has a cost. The more we remove friction from life, the more we remove ourselves from it. We stopped waiting, so we lost patience. We stopped getting lost, so we lost curiosity. We stopped struggling with a problem, so we lost the joy of solving it.
Convenience gave us time, but we filled that time with scrolling. It gave us tools, but we forgot how to use our own minds. Maybe the question is not how to make life easier. Maybe the question is: what should we keep doing the hard way, just to stay human?
There is no denying what we have gained. A student in Chitral today can sit in her room and learn coding from the same teacher as a student in London. Information that once took days to find now comes in a second. The physical work that took our parents hours going to the bank, the market, the library now takes us minutes on a phone. Convenience has given us access, speed, and comfort that no generation before us had. It has connected villages to the world and put entire libraries in our pockets. For that, we should be grateful.
But with all this gaining, we have also been losing, quietly. We have lost patience. If a video buffers for 5 seconds we scroll. If an essay feels hard we ask AI to write it. We are training our brains to quit the moment something requires effort.
So what now? The answer is not to throw away our phones or go back 50 years. That is not logical and not possible. The answer is balance and choice. We have to decide what we will keep doing ourselves, even if a machine can do it faster. Walk to a place without maps once in a while. Write the bad first draft before asking for help. Sit with a problem for 10 minutes before googling the answer. Keep one hour a day with no screen. These small acts of friction are not a waste of time. They are how we stay human. Technology is not the villain. Mindless dependence is.
Convenience was meant to serve us, not replace us. A life with zero struggle is a life with zero story. And a person who never struggles never grows.
So let’s use the tools, but let’s not let the tools use us. Let’s get lost sometimes. Let’s wait. Let’s think. Let’s be bored.
Because the most interesting people are not the ones who had the easiest life. They are the ones who did hard things and became more because of it.
“Don’t let convenience make you forget who you are without it.”
Misbah Rehmat is a student at AKHSS Kuragh from Sonoghur, Upper Chitral. A young writer interested in the changing relationship between technology, society, and everyday life, Misbah writes with a particular focus on issues that matter to young people in the digital age.
