Americans love convenience. We have establishments that we call convenience stores. Our culture is built around convenience.

I bet most of us cannot go one day without eating something pre-packaged. A few years ago, drive-thrus flooded the nation, and the concept of ordering food at a restaurant without getting out of your car was a novelty.

Nowadays, forget about even getting into the car in the first place. Order takeout on your phone, and a Doordasher or Ubereats driver will have it to your house within half an hour.

Takeout should be called take-in, because that’s all you have to do when it’s dropped on your doorstep.

Forget about grocery shopping, walking your dog or mowing the lawn. We have people for that. Don’t want to go to school? Take online classes.

Italy, as an example, doesn’t use disposable cups for coffee, but the concept of sitting down in a coffee shop every morning rather than grabbing your mobile pickup order at Starbucks is foreign for most Americans.

Amazon, Walmart and Target, the corporate giants that are hurting the environment and small businesses, model their businesses around convenience.

Employees will shop for you and bring your orders out to your cars, and Amazon next-day delivery and its supply chain methodology transformed the shipping industry. Our economy is built around novelties that can make our lives easier, but it’s making us lazier in the process.

In April of 2023, assistant opinion editor Ben Powers wrote an article titled, “Gas stations: a staple of America.” In it, he wrote that “Gas stations are an undeniable cultural touchstone that stop at nothing to sell you everything, which, to me, is beautiful.”

He argues that there is merit in the ability to stop in a gas station at 2 a.m. and purchase a Snickers bar, and he scorns those who buy produce from convenience stores rather than frozen pizzas.

We seem to be terrified of wasting time. But I wonder if we are already misusing time by placing so much value on convenience.

The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases states that more than one in three men are overweight, and more than one in four women are overweight. “The prevalence of obesity and severe obesity increased significantly among adult men and women between 1999–2000 and 2017–2018,” it wrote, and the same trends can be seen in the U.S. youth demographic.

Our bodies were not made to be sedentary, and through technological revolution, jobs have shifted away from manual labor as our world automates basic processes.

Hence, our definition of productivity has shifted to activities involving technology (as I sit here typing this article on my laptop). Thus, wasting time mowing the lawn is not truly a waste of time health-wise, but productivity-wise, it may be.

Conversing in a coffee shop is not a waste of time; we often get too little face-to-face interaction, yet it is not convenient for us to make time for these mundane moments.

Cooking is too much effort, so we turn to packaged foods that have expiration dates disturbingly far in the future. We flood our bodies with chemicals and blue light and wonder why our health is declining.

I, like Ben, will reach for that gas station Snickers (I’ve never been one to turn down a sweet treat). But I think caring for our bodies and minds in old-school ways is the only way to combat the trend of convenience that is harming Americans.

Wasted time is not a waste if it involves something other than sedentary scrolling. This week, do something that feeds the soul.