Against Convenience: Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease

by Gabe Bullard

From seasoned journalist and critic Gabe Bullard, a provocative exploration of modern “convenience culture” – and how we can resist and reclaim our time, resilience, and happiness, for fans of How to Do Nothing and The Courage to Be Disliked.

We live in a world addicted to convenience. Countless tools and innovations fill our daily lives, allowing us to swipe, tap, click, and subscribe without a second ordering groceries to your door, calling an Uber for a ride up the block, or scrolling the endless songs and TV shows at our fingertips. In theory, convenience can leave us with more energy and time to do what we want to do, save us resources, and complete tasks with less effort than before.

But what if we aren’t actually accomplishing any of those things?

Expert journalist Gabe Bullard reveals an entire hidden architecture behind the ubiquitous modern-day services and technologies that allegedly make our lives easier. At best, many of them aren’t actually convenient at all, and at their worst, they compromise our physical and mental well-being and lead to shallower relationships, lower quality life and art, and a degraded planet.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Genres: Nonfiction, Audiobook, Technology, Politics

Audible Audio

First published September 10, 2026

Reviews

[Suzanne thebookblondie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The grim thing about seeing people be nostalgic for a past you remember is realizing that soon people will be nostalgic for the time we're in now."

What an interesting take on how society relies on convenience in today's day. At the root of this is the concept of technology, but the commentary is less about the machines and more about how people have grown so accustomed to the "easy way" of doing things.
This was a quick read, and I highly recommend the audiobook because Gabe Bullard narrates his own book and makes the whole thing feel like a podcast. Enjoy!

“Technology has provided new ways to connect to and disconnect from more people at greater speed and with less effort."

[Corinne’s Chapter Chatter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was really thought-provoking. The title of the book tells you what you need to know about its contents, or so I thought.

What I appreciated most about this author’s “take” was that it wasn’t someone waxing poetic about the downfall of society or how convenience is killing us. Instead, he explores the drawbacks, pitfalls, and ways things aren’t always as they seem, while also acknowledging that he himself actively uses many of these same items.

Rather than telling the reader what they should or shouldn’t use, the book lays out the information so you can become educated on the topic and make decisions based on your own personal situation. Many books of this type can end up being an ableist mess, but this one does not. I appreciated that Bullard makes it clear from near the beginning that it isn’t an all-or-nothing situation and that people use things for different reasons. Most importantly, what is one person’s “convenience” is literally another person’s necessity.

He doesn’t dismiss how technology and various products have completely changed the lives of disabled individuals, or suggest that access should be taken away under the guise of some campaign to save the earth.

Instead, the focus is on personal decision-making and sorting through how different things work, planned obsolescence, and how to figure out whether you actually need something or whether it’s genuinely making your life easier. It also looks at the impact those choices can have on the environment and society.

There isn’t one right answer, and I think that’s what this book does such a great job of acknowledging. It opens the conversation and gives you the information to think critically about your choices, while ultimately leaving you to take personal responsibility for what you consume.

I read this as an immersion read with an early finished copy provided by Hanover Square Press as well as the audio ALC from Harper Audio via NetGalley. It was narrated by the author who did a great job!

[Melody Rowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smart and thought-provoking— my copy is full of underlines and notes. Most important, Bullard presents the data and his arguments without coming across as a scold. We’ve been sold so many lies about conveniences, and this book will make you pause and ask yourself, is it worth it?

[Claire ♡ · Rating 5 out of 5]

*Thank you to Libro.FM for the ALC!*

This book was a very timely read for me. I've read many books about the negative effects that social media has had on mental health, children's development, social skills, and society as a whole. Bullard's analysis of convenience reaches far beyond social media, including the ways we shop, use transportation, order food, and communicate in the twenty-first century. I felt very overdue for a meaningful look at my consumption habits, materially and digitally.

A society centered around maximizing consumer convenience ultimately serves to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. People of the lowest socioeconomic status have their humanity stripped away through consumers' willful ignorance and corporations' greed in the name of ease and maximum profit. Technological advancements increasingly serve to fix the problems of other technologies we've come to believe we need and keep us further from face-to-face interactions rather than make truly meaningful contributions to quality of life.

A life centered around doing everything from your device to avoid the inconvenience of an actual conversation or human interaction is not the sign of a technological utopia. Neither is using AI chatbots to create art, facilitate connection, or communicate. No matter how much we think we may need a convenience to keep ourselves afloat, there's a good chance that that very convenience is keeping us from meaningful connection and thought on the other side.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

It Has Been A While Since I've Seen Someone Actively Praise Luddites. Until Now. Seriously, the title of this review pretty well sums up most of what you need to know about this book... that you could likely have figured out the gist of just from the title, subtitle, and description - at least as they exist roughly a month or so before publication, as I write this review.

Even from a - wildly - "left of center" (at least in US politics) approach, this book actually does a rather remarkable job of being a polemic without feeling like one. It is absolutely a polemic in that the entire purpose of this *really* extended essay is to specifically attack what Bullard calls "conveniences" but are more accurately "technology companies making decisions and becoming too popular to easily find another alternative". But it is also a polemic that openly questions even itself at times.

While still openly praising Luddism.

Go figure.

From a documentation side, this clocks in at a solid 30% of the overall text - meeting the Sagan Standard (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence), which likely does apply here. Perhaps cherry picked a touch, again, this is also one text where perhaps the evidence cited doesn't always make Bullard's case as strongly as he claims it does.

Ultimately this book absolutely reads more as an invitation to personal consideration than a hellfire sermon. It is going to ask you to consider the things it labels as conveniences and whether those things are truly worth it to you. Some of those things - electronic medical records that make every doc you use (so long as they use the same systems) able to see your entire medical history at a glance - are absolutely worth it and literally saved my wife's life just a couple of months ago. Perhaps others - the social media I actively declared my independence from a month ago and now that a certain couple of important-to-me events are concluded I am more pro-actively leaving - will be less so. The physical eBooks (because *all* books are nothing more than a collection of electrons arranged in a particular pattern and I refuse to slaughter forests for my personal amusement or education) that can carry more volumes than the Library at Alexandria in the palm of my hand? Bullard will argue that they are soulless and are causing the downfall of humanity. I will tell you that I've read more books *because* of these devices than I ever read back in my "dead tree era", *and* that the average price per book I've paid over literally thousands of such transactions over the last 15 years is a small fraction of what I would have had to pay - both monetarily and in regards to environmental degradation - to get those same volumes on the carcasses of murdered trees.

Regardless, Bullard does a pretty solid job here of exploring some of the contours of what a lot of this could look like, even if from a certain exacting perspective. Yet at the end of the day, while Bullard perhaps gives a voice to some of what some are thinking that maybe didn't have that voice - which alone is useful - this really comes down to Bullard actively writing a book that, well, very nearly anyone could have. But he actively did, and did a pretty solid amount of research to back his arguments, so if you're inclined to read such a polemic... well, this one will be available for all in and after mid September 2026.

To be clear, the star deduction here is specifically because of the distinction between "convenience" and "agency". Bullard's entire thesis, he claims, is about "convenience", except that it really isn't. It is about *agency* and being able to more easily make the active choice to use technology or not. This distinction is key, and that he misses it informs quite a bit of the rest of the slant to this entire text. Still, because Bullard does such a good job of being more of an exploration and a question rather than a dictum and exclamation, the key miss at the central thesis doesn't hurt as much as it could have and still results in a thoughtful, if misguided, examination that invites the reader to reflect for themselves on their own lives and priorities.

Very much recommended.

[notreallyacat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Going in to this book, I was skeptical. Frankly, I just...enjoy convenience. I already feel that there aren't enough hours in a day, so why not embrace measures that let us make the most of them?

Basically, part of me was pouting as I started reading. I was going to read this, but I wasn't going to like it.

Well, uh. Instead, I loved it.

I found myself not wanting to put this book down, devouring it like I would fiction. I cornered my partner and made him listen to me talk about it. I told strangers about certain concepts. While I read nonfiction pretty much constantly, it's rare for me to read a book that actively changes my thinking and behavior while I'm reading it, but Against Convenience already been reshaping my life. I'm already planning a reread.

Obviously, this book might not hit the same way for you that it did for me. My experience with the content was probably largely a case of right-book-for-me, right time. You may already be familiar with many of the ideas from this book, or you may disagree with some of the suggestions proposed. But it's a timely, quick read, so why not find out?

In spite of the title, this is not really a philosophical or sociological exploration of convenience itself as a concept, but more so a commentary on the effects of specific conveniences (largely tied to corporations/capitalism, though Bullard doesn't say so in as many words). Bullard says that a convenience is something that "saves (or purports to save) time, effort, money, or some combination of the three," which is absolutely a fair definition, but the definition—or at least, the focus—actually used in the book is much narrower than that. I'd say his thesis really comes in his next paragraph: "These savings come from somewhere, or from someone. It's sort of like the law of conservation of energy in physics—time, effort, and money aren't created or destroyed, only moved and converted. Every convenience has a cost—if we don't pay it, someone else will." While every convenience may have a cost, some are certainly larger or easier to observe than others, and it's those large, easy(ish) to observe costs that Bullard focuses on. Surprisingly, the book ends up feeling as if it would make a great companion read to Cory Doctorow's Enshittification, as the two feature similar explorations of individual choice in our age of modern tech.

I do want to flag that the book's title (or rather, its tagline? sub-subtitle? it doesn't appear on the book's cover or, from what I can tell, in the book itself) appears to be one of the most egregious examples of keyword-stuffing I've seen in recent memory. This book is absolutely not a self-help guide to digital detox and mindfulness, and if you go into it expecting those thing—or even, in general, expecting a book that is at all along those lines—then you'll find yourself sorely disappointed. This book clearly proposes a problem and then, yes, does propose some solutions to that problem, but expect something more polemic than personal growth. If you go into the book expecting it to give you a 10-step process to quit the easy life, you'll probably be disappointed (though I would hope you'd keep reading anyway). Go in with accurate expectations instead! Personally, I'm glad the book doesn't match that tagline, so if you share that view, please don't let the tagline prevent you from reading.

I read this in audiobook format, read by the author. While author-read books can be hit-or-miss, Bullard's reading was polished and professional and added a great personal touch to the book that made it feel like a conversation, not a lecture. Ideally, when listening to an author-read book you know the narrator is the author but feel as if they're a trained narrator, and that felt like the case here! I usually give feedback on a book's references section when reviewing nonfiction, but because I reviewed this in audiobook ARC format, I haven't been able to check out the references yet. The final audiobook will have a supplemental PDF that will, I assume, contain the references! Personally, I'm looking forward to checking out the references once I get a print copy—which I plan to do as soon as I can once this releases.

(Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the audiobook copy! All opinions are, of course, my own. Since I read an ARC, the quotes I shared may not perfectly match the final text, but I did check them against the Amazon sample!)

[Logan Kedzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the spirit of the book, this review is written in a font that makes it 13% harder to read.

This book is a polemic that suggests the problem with our current society is that we have made it too convenient. Enabled, but not created, by contemporary technology, society chooses designs that provide, or aim to provide, solutions for ‘pain points.’ But doing this leaves us worse off and less happy.

It references Bullshit Jobs more than once, , and feels like a spiritual successor. It is unapologetic. The idea is 'truthy,' something generally acknowledged that is accurate but also hard to define. It is a solid essay that an author extended to book length, occasionally suffering for it.

The biggest Bullshit Jobs connection amounts to the future not being what it was made out to be. Technology continues to improve, but it feels like there was some broken promise. The conditions that did not improve feel material and the ones that it did feel fleeting. What happened?

For me, the answer is expressed the best by XKCD. Rephrased, I am sorry that cannot give you a flying car. I am too busy flying a manned mission around the moon.

In Bullshit Jobs, the act is the creation of the eponymous jobs in some sort of pseduo-sinecure or moral justification. In this book, it is the catalog of changes that are labeled as improvements, but create wholly different problems: Time Square Red, Time Square Blue, but like for groceries.

There are a few things that elevate this book other “X is leading us astray” books.

The first is that it is scrumptiously sourced. The evidence may not line up, but the data is there for you to compare.

The second is its sense of humility. An easy solution would contravene the message of the book against easy solutions. The author is expert in refuting his own arguments, and routinely would address my compliant about some point in the text, usually to realize the problems of the observation. This works well because the reader gets both the polemical argument and the drawing of the sting from it.

There are points where the author loses the thread, mostly in the more filler-like sections. There are some odd targets at points (lofi hip-hop radio: beats to relax/study to is a moral failing?). There is a deep myopia to the book, almost an ego-centrism. Nostalgia is a slippery slope, and you can always allow for a further step back as when the real good times were, where as this book tends to take it to somewhere around 1980 and let it stand. There is a singularly bad section at the end where the author slips into an Atlantic article, a Brooksian fugue of the amazing experience that he has when he eschews convenience. I will spare the specifics here, but my first thought about his story of was “this is a man who has never ended up on the smoking car on the L.”

I was leading into a criticism of the book based on the distinction between some convenience not being present and someone not using some convenience that is there. I think about it as the BookTok argument. I am content with my social media usage, because I avoid some and others I highly curate, so my experience is pretty delightful. I know what I get something from and what I do not. People forget you need to put in the work.

But that criticism is as much where the book shines, because this is not, for instance, a moral panic book. The internet is not uniquely brain breaking. Rather it enables a set of preexisting tendencies. The answer is not to revert to the past, however recent, but to consider.

It is the best book I have read this year so far. It has answers, but it knows the limits of those answers. Even where I think it gets it wrong, I find myself still thinking about it, to the point of changing my behavior. That is meaningful.

I think that there is a growing consensus around...something. It amounts to what I wrote above: you have to do the work. But I think about this book, and The Boring Internet, and Chokepoint Capitalism, and Despotification. It is one of the reflections of that XKCD comment, where something about the ease or lack of novelty makes us lose track of the incredible effort involved, or what even takes effort. And of all possible tangents, I think about Jimmy Carter.

If I did put in the work, I think that I would come to that grander synthesis there about taking back agency. I think that the author is wrong to label this convenience. Convenience as a concept picks up too many errant pieces and makes contentious things that ought not to be. But this book remains one of the better aggregations of that something, full of useful provocations that can help you as part of your daily experience.

My thanks to the author, Gabe Bullard, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Harlequin Trade Publishing, for making the ARC available to me.

[brook.talks.books · Rating 5 out of 5]

《 ARC REVIEW 》

☆☆☆☆.5

"Convenience isn’t the cause of all our problems. It’s not the solution, either. Giving up a few of the more harmful conveniences won’t fix the world. But embracing friction, or at least trying to see its value, is a type of progress."

I just finished reading Against Convenience: Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease by Gabe Bullard. While I typically have a hard time rating nonfiction books, this one was solid and I really enjoyed it.

I feel like I learned so much while reading it, and it made me question my own habits and the conveniences I use on a daily basis. I've been trying to be more mindful of the hours that I spend looking at a screen every single day. It's easy to get sucked into the doomscroll, and miss everything going on around us. I go from looking at my phone, to my work computer, to my computer for school, to my TV, to my phone again. Throw my kindle in there, and I'm looking at a screen for most of my waking hours.

I picked this book up because I wanted a hard lesson about "embracing friction" and reshaping my own life to not rely on conveniences. Not only have the screens become a problem for me, but the apps that have been created to keep us on the screens and away from interacting with other people. Bullard's interviews with people gave insight into large corporations, and how the massive technological advances have limited human connection, and we, as humans, are struggling because of it. For instance: an app with endless customizations for a coffee which takes away from the simple process of asking a barista for a coffee, or another app to have someone bring said coffee to you with no social interactions needed.

I took a long, hard look at the conveniences that I used frequently, sometimes on a daily basis, and started to change the way I looked at things. I found out that I like chatting with my local barista and looked forward to getting my coffee from a place that knows my name and order, and that I missed going to a grocery store to peruse the aisles and find new things. Grocery delivery and someone bringing me my coffee wasn't helping me be more productive like I assumed, it was instead allowing me to burn myself out because I was trying to do more without slowing down.

Overall, this book really opened my eyes to the things I was doing under the guise of convenience, and I'm so glad I picked it up! I took my time reading it because I wanted to savor the process. Rome wasn't built in a day and I know I'm not going to change my habits that fast either, but I'm happy to have a starting point.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC. These are my honest thoughts and opinions.

[mood_reading_maya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to Harlequin Audio for the ALC.

Everyone should read this book. EVERYONE.

Gabe Bullard examines how our current age of "modern conveniences" is impacting us as a society. Approachably written and with immense clarity, Against Convenience asks its readers to examine how our consumption has escalated, our social behaviors have changed, what is driving these changes, and how it is fundamentally contributing to climate change and media illiteracy - all while eroding our capacity for empathy.

Walking through examples of technological improvements, such as the development of the smartphone, it asks the questions that many of us seem to overlook each time a new device is released: What is fundamentally different or better about this item? And perhaps more importantly, why do I need it? Tech companies thrive on planned obsolescence and pump marketing dollars into campaigns designed to capitalize on our "fear of missing out." There may be an app for just about everything, but does there need to be? How has our fascination with ease and offloading labor through these same applications changed our ability to read the world around us (ie. social cues, communication, disagreement)?

The chapters on self-checkouts and the gig economy, for example, break down how companies positioned implementing these services: faster, easier, money and time saving. That last one being key. We all understand that time is a finite resource, and in a capitalist economy that values productivity-maxxing, of course we want to make the absolute most of the time we do have each day. Where is that labor shifting? What work is being delegated? Who is taking on this work? Are the conditions of that work fair and well compensated? All of this ease and convenience comes with an inevitable cost. For the tech companies providing the means of facilitating all of it, it's your data. Which, of course, is being mined, parsed, and sold to other tech companies so they can keep selling frictionless experiences.

But this lack of friction is actively hurting real creativity, innovation, and critical thinking. And while Bullard is asking the hard questions and drawing clear connections, there is less emphasis on what the "right" response is to the convenience economy. Bullard notes that there are abundant articles and books addressing solutions, which is an invitation to the reader to dive deeper after this thoughtful introduction.

[Lupita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gracias a Netgalley y Harper Collins por el e-arc.

Me parecieron reflexiones fascinantes y aterrizadas sobre el problema de denominar "inevitable progreso" a cada nueva app, tecnología y servicio que hace nuestra vida supuestamente más cómoda, pero en realidad limita las interacciones humanas, la organización y nos separa de las comunidades físicas a cambio de reducir las "fricciones" que vienen con la vida en sociedad.

Aborda aspectos ambientales, sociales, políticos e incluso de salud mental, todas estas facturas que pagamos por productos que supuestamente mejoran nuestra vida y se terminan convirtiendo en necesidades inventadas que adoptamos para no quedarnos obsoletos, pero que nos restan humanidad y calidad de vida.

Los servicios de streaming, las apps de compras de todo tipo de productos, los cajeros automáticos, el self checkout en el mercado, la IA, las apps de entrega de comida, de productos, de viaje... todas ellas han hecho mella en la forma en que interactuamos con los demás y no sólo eso, han llenado los bolsillos de inversionistas y dueños de negocios a través de la precarización de trabajadores y el traslado de trabajo a los usuarios, que además pagan tarifas por usar estas interfaces o dispositivos.

Es un excelente libro para reflexionar sobre la forma en que se ha transformado nuestra vida y nuestro entorno en las últimas décadas debido al avance tecnológico y a la ambición de un puñado de personas que no experimentarán las consecuencias más devastadoras de estos cambios (cambio climático, aumento de la brecha económica, desaparición de empleos, disminución de recursos naturales, etc.).

[Lovelymisanthrope · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received an Audiobook ARC of this novel in thanks to NetGalley.
"Against Convenience" is a novel that explores how our modern-day world has become more convenient than ever, but that might not be the great thing we believe it to be.
This novel really forced me to reframe my perspective on connivence and the modern amenities I choose to utilize every day. One of these things that really stuck out to me was the exploration of Starbucks. With mobile ordering you barely need to go into the cafe at all anymore, and that means you are missing out on an entire experience. Cafes were designed to be warm and inviting, a place to decompress, and that afternoon coffee pick me up was designed to give you a quick break in the day. But now, you can mobile order and "efficiently" pick up your beverage while hardly stepping away from your work. Maybe my day would be a little better if I chose to take a true break and go into a cafe to drink my beverage.
This is one of those novels that at its core I think everyone could benefit from reading. I do think there is some circular logic and some repetition of ideas, so the book could be a little shorter.
The audiobook was very well produced and I FLEW through it. I just wanted to hear all of the ideas and I was heavily invested in what ideas would be presented next.
I think this novel presents crucial insights that we should all pay more attention to.

[Ro U]

I ordered dinner off an app while reading this book, which is either irony or exactly the kind of thing Bullard is trying to get me to notice.

His central claim is one I hadn't quite put words to before: a lot of what we call convenience isn't actually less effort, it's just effort that's been hidden or outsourced somewhere we don't see it. Ordering food doesn't eliminate cooking, it moves the labor onto someone else and charges you a fee for the privilege of not having to think about it. Once that framing clicked for me, I started noticing it everywhere.

The chapters on "lean back" content and second screen culture hit close to home too. I don't love admitting how much of my evening scrolling is just filler I'll forget by morning, and Bullard's argument that we're trading depth for endless frictionless options landed harder than I expected from a book with such a breezy premise.

Where I wanted more was in the solutions section. The friction-maxxing suggestions, cooking from scratch, handwriting letters, actually talking to your cashier, are good, but they felt a little thin compared to the sharper cultural diagnosis earlier in the book. I wanted more of a road map and got more of a permission slip. Still, this gave me a genuinely useful new lens for looking at my daily choices, and I've already started making a few small swaps because of it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Hanover Square Press for the ARC.

[Madison ✨ (mad.lyreading) · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible listen that will make you think deeply about your own life and relationship to the world around you.

I remember when I went from a fully WFH job to a hybrid job in 2023 how much joy I got from the small interactions I had in my commute. That was when I first started thinking about how technology had been isolating me from the world, and I was so excited to think more about this by picking up this book.

This book pairs well with the book Enshittification by Cory Doctorow (the book is cited in Against Convenience) but instead of focusing on the wrong the companies are doing, it turns the issue to "how are we enabling this?" Now, that sounds like it is putting the onus on the individual rather than these multi-million/billion dollar companies. However, Bullard explicitly says this is not what he is doing -- he just acknowledges that the only control we have is over our own choices. And this isn't just to make the world around us a better place, but to make our own interactions and relationships with the world better.

I absolutely loved this book, and I will likely be listening to it again in the future. Highly recommend.

Thank you to Harlequin Audio and Netgalley for an audio ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Ginger Hudock · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is primarily about the technological changes in our society may not be always good. He wonders if our convenience society may be increasing anxiety for many people. This has been a thesis of many recent books. The author suggests that readers examine their habits and choose analog instead of digital more often. These include buying records/CDs instead of online music; buying newspapers/magazines instead of online news; going in person to the store/coffee shop instead of ordering delivery through an app.
As a Baby Boomer, I grew up without these technologies. During my childhood, I would read the hardbound World Book Encyclopedia for fun, instead of looking up information online. To chat with a friend, you could not text, instead you called them on their landline phone. It was not convenient compared with today. There are pluses and minuses to both. If you are feeling overwhelmed or anxious and don't know why, then this book may help you identify one source. Then you can make a choice when and how to use the less convenient option.
I received a complementary copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

[Addison Dean · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title of this book will likely attract the proverbial choir one preaches to, but frankly, this should be required reading for a huge swath of consumers, especially in the US and similar economies. The author examines a wide range of today’s conveniences, with a heavy emphasis on the technologies we’ve all gotten used to in the past decade or so, including on-demand delivery apps, streaming services, and social media. The ultimate question he poses when it comes to any modern convenience is: is the tradeoff worth it? We may be saving time when we choose a convenient option, but at the same time we may be losing something else (privacy or human connection, for example) or causing harm to others or to our planet.

The author did a great job with the narration, and you could get a sense of his depth of knowledge and passion for the topic throughout the book. Definitely recommend the audio experience!

Many thanks to NetGalley and Harlequin Audio for the opportunity to listen to this ALC and share my honest feedback!

[Grace (alatteofliterature) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Harlequin Audio | Hanover Square Press for the ALC through NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Against Convenience challenges the notions of conveniences as purely positive and discusses the hidden downsides such as the cost of connection, wasted resources, poorer performance hidden as efficiency, etc.

Not once did this book feel patronizing or political, a tightrope walked that feels impressive in its focus. Gabe Bullard solely questions the norms we’ve accepted and whether or not they’ve truly improved our lives individually or societally.

Bullard narrates his own work, and does a great job of it! Will be recommending this audiobook widely.

[Laurel Zeisler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I heard about this book on a youtube video from Naughty Dog Books last month. When she mentioned self checkouts, I knew I had to read it. I don't usually read nonfiction, but this was an interesting fast paced book. 25% of it is the endnotes research. I learned some things, still won't use self checkouts, and definitely recommend this book.

[Ladybug Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important overview of what our convenience driven world has done to us and our society. The author makes a good point that the myriad of services that were supposed to make our lives better have increased isolation & loneliness and contributed to environmental change. It did feel like an overview and less an original work hence the 4 (and not 5 stars).

[Tori (EighthHouseBooks) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a really great read. It makes you look at your own part in all this *gestures wildly* and think about the small changes you can make to actually make a change. Well written and thought provoking, I highly encourage you to give it a read!