Author’s Note
This post is, again, part of the Tools series—an ongoing exploration of the instruments that shape modern life. Some tools carve with intent: law, media, policy. Others, like this one, work slowly and softly, until you no longer remember what life felt like without them.
This is the tool of cultivated appetite—generated demand mistaken for desire. It doesn’t meet your needs; it defines them—by what exists in the catalog, by what is surfaced in your feed, by what the algorithm predicts you’ll accept rather than resist.
Its genius is in the slope. Each step feels harmless: a meal delivered, a playlist served, a decision waived. But friction is not the enemy of freedom. It is often the last thing that reminds us we are choosing at all.
Convenience, when refined to its final form, doesn’t satisfy—it replaces. It grows like an invasive weed, crowding out slower, stranger, more intentional ways of living. It makes albums unviable, cinemas irrelevant, books unread, silence unbearable. It doesn’t kill alternatives outright. It simply makes them impractical, unfindable, or laughably slow.
This piece is about that drift. About the algorithmic suggestion dressed as autonomy. About the psychological sleight-of-hand that transforms habit into dependency. About what we lose when we accept every shortcut without asking what path it erased.
About all of your preferences that ever arrived pre-installed just before you recognized them.
—Dom
The traveler found the lamp buried beneath wind‑scoured concrete, not desert sand—half‑hidden in the rubble of a shuttered strip mall, its bronze glint dulled by decades of exhaust and algorithmic dust. When he brushed the soot away, smoke coiled upward, tasting faintly of toasted plastic and cinnamon‑scented vape clouds. A figure condensed in the fumes: eyes like OLED screens, voice like a push notification.
“Three wishes, mortal,” it purred. “Speak.”
The traveler’s hunger wasn’t for gold or kingdoms; the twenty‑first century breeds subtler cravings.
“I wish for food without effort.”
“Granted.”
The neighborhood grocer shuttered overnight. In its place appeared a constellation of ghost kitchens and driverless delivery pods. Every evening a branded sack arrived on the doorstep—hot, cheap, and blandly identical. The traveler’s stove gathered dust; the garden shriveled from neglect.
“I wish for happiness and entertainment, always.”
“Granted.”
Every wall became a screen, every idle second a seamless scroll. The traveler forgot the taste of silence, the shape of a thought uninterrupted.
“I wish to be unburdened of choice.”
The Djinn smiled wider than reality should allow. A final whisper slid between them: “As you wish.”
Dawn arrived with nothing to decide. Clothes selected themselves. Music auto‑played. Routes re‑routed. Friends pinged or vanished per predictive score. Uncertainty collapsed into a feed of frictionless yes’s that required no voice—only compliant thumbs.
At first, the traveler rejoiced. Then, one bland meal melted into the next. A thousand videos later, he could not recall a single scene. He missed hunger, missed boredom, missed the simple thrill of selecting a spice and discovering its potential in the pan. But the lamp sat silent; the smoke had settled. Three wishes spend quickly. Consequences linger.
We have all stroked that lamp. We, too, asked for ease, abundance, and the erasure of indecision. The market—our modern Djinn—granted the wishes, literally and to the letter. And beneath the velvet glow of convenience, a cage welded itself shut around us, slowly, bar by bar.
Here, we’ll draw a map of that cage: how algorithms learned to grant what we wanted before we knew to ask, how the frictionless path sanded down the soul’s calluses, and how the softest tool of all—convenience—became a subtle tyranny. It is a fable, a diagnosis, and, with some luck, a pry bar.
Recommended Listening:
The Djinn of the Algorithm
The original Djinn were neither cartoon wish‑granters nor moral teachers; they were spirits bound by literalism, responding to requests with merciless precision. Today’s algorithmic engines inherit that lineage. They listen, count, correlate, and comply—granting exactly what patterns predict we will click. They do not inquire whether the click nourishes or numbs. They cannot. Literalism is the only morality they know.
When Netflix autoplays the next episode before your dopamine can dip, it is the Djinn whispering, “Granted.”
When TikTok loops a ten‑second dance until your evening dissolves, it is the Djinn grinning, “Another? As you wish.”
Push notifications, default settings, one‑click buys—signed with a finger, paid for in agency. We asked for speed; we got immediacy. We asked for relevance; we got surveillance. We asked for frictionless choice; we got the death of surprise.
“Grant Me What I Will Want Tomorrow”
The algorithm’s genius is not prediction; it is cultivation. Recommendations do not reflect taste—they shape it. A teenager who streams lo‑fi while studying will find lo‑fi saturating every suggestion, narrowing sonic possibility until novelty feels dissonant. The absence of effort becomes the absence of alternatives. The wish for ease—never to search, only to receive—engineers a palette incapable of wandering.
That is the first soft chain: convenience that trains desire to fit the feed that feeds desire. Like the Djinn, the system answers the letter of the wish, not the spirit. We asked to skip the search; we lost the adventure.
Wish One – Food Without Effort
Fast food was once a roadside novelty, a greasy rite of the interstate. Today, delivery apps turn dinner into an “ETA 12 min” badge floating on glass. Home kitchens shrink; dining tables become laptop stands. The algorithm routes riders, optimizes wait‑times, and nudges restaurants toward menus that travel well—even if that means paring spices, ditching fresh herbs, standardizing sauce viscosity to survive the commute.
The traveler’s branded sack is ours: uniform calories, engineered bliss points, little need for plates or conversation. What vanished is harder to quantify: the collective memory of dough under fingernails, the apprenticeship of flavor that begins with burnt garlic and ends—years later—in intuitive seasoning. Skill atrophies when not summoned. Culture, too.
The Hollowing of the Communal Bowl
Cooking bound families to hearth and heritage. Regional cuisines encoded climate, soil, migration, history. Delivery unthreads that tapestry, weaving a new one stitched by venture capital and heat‑retention packaging. We traded lineage for logistics—accepting the Djinn’s promise that hunger deserves no patience. But a meal devoured in twelve scrolling minutes cannot carry the heft of a recipe that simmered all afternoon, absorbing stories told between stirs.
Wish Two – Entertainment, Always
Entertainment once demanded intent: selecting a vinyl, queuing for tickets, browsing a library shelf. Each step injected friction—moments where curiosity could pivot. Now streams cascade endlessly. The “Up Next” bar counts down like a fuse. Boredom, that fertile vacuum where imagination germinates, is now patched with autoplay.
The traveler’s screen-lined walls echo the smartphone portals in our pockets. We gorge on content yet starve for context. What is lost is not merely attention span, but attentional depth—the capacity to dwell. To wrestle a challenging book, to savor negative space in a song, to hold a note of uncertainty without racing for the next distraction.
The Algorithmic Editor
Curation, once a craft of librarians, editors, DJs, gave us vantage: a chance to ascend the hill of another mind’s judgment. Algorithms replaced vantage with a mirror—flattering but myopic. We glance up and see only ourselves, iterated. Surprise becomes statistical outlier; risk becomes click‑through drop. The wish for endless entertainment is granted as a narcotic drip: pleasing, predictable, and numbing enough that the world outside the screen feels oddly grainy, too slow, unbearably analog.
Wish Three – Freedom From Choice
Choice overload is real. But our response—delegating decision to code—carries greater danger than the paradox it solves. Default settings steer billions: whether messages disappear, whether location is tracked, whether bias is amplified. Opt‑out forms masquerade as consent. We asked to be unburdened; the Djinn happily obliged, embedding values we never examined into the substrate of daily life.
The Quiet Colonization of Will
When playlists auto‑generate, menus prioritize “Most Popular,” and newsfeeds rank stories by predicted outrage, the terrain of possibility tilts. Soon we forget the slope. Children growing up in this ecology may never realize certain mountains exist to climb: the labyrinth of physical bookstores, the patience of assembling a model kit, the thrill of building a website from blank HTML instead of renting space on a social silo. Their map arrives pre‑cropped, paths paved in recommendations. Exploration contracts to a guided tour.
The Feedback Loop – Demand Designed, Supply Obeys
Classical economics imagined supply & demand as separate forces. In the age of predictive analytics, supply designs demand. Netflix greenlights programming based on query logs before the pilot is written. Spotify nudges emerging genres into virality by seeding editorial playlists, then cites rising streams as proof of public appetite. Fast‑food chains test AI‑generated flavor profiles in limited markets, analyze uptake, then mass‑produce “trending tastes” that did not exist until the test.
The loop is elegant, lucrative—and culturally corrosive. It inverts authorship. Instead of art provoking desire, data sculpts both the product and the consumer who will adore it. The boundary between preference and programming blurs into irrelevance. We do not choose the future; we beta‑test it.
How Ease Weakens the Edge
Stoic philosophers treated hardship as whetstone. Muscles grow by resistance; so does character. When every friction point is sanded—from parallel parking to remembering birthdays—our adaptive capacity dulls. Creativity thrives under constraint; remove constraint and invention atrophies.
The algorithm cares nothing for your potential; its KPI is retention. The smoother the path, the longer you glide—never noticing the downward grade. A society optimized for convenience drifts toward passivity, mistaking service for sovereignty. The Djinn, after all, keeps no ledger of wasted evenings or watered‑down skills. The lamp’s glow feels benign even as the room grows smaller.
The death of friction isn’t free. Every second spent scrolling funds someone else’s future. Every decision you delegate becomes profit, not freedom.
Reclaiming the Unwished Life
Salvation is not a Luddite retreat but a recalibration of intent. Keep the map apps, but hike a trail without them. Stream music, but schedule deliberate detours into genres un‑thumbed. Grow a tomato. Bake bread slowly enough that yeast becomes a tutor in patience. Host a dinner where phones sleep in another room and conversation stumbles, then soars, on the shaky wings of actual presence.
Design friction. Court boredom. Treat algorithms as advisors, never as authors. Ask of every new convenience: Does this tool expand my agency or outsource it? Does it sharpen judgment or sedate it? If the answer narrows you, step back.
The Practice of Intentional Inconvenience
- Journal by hand once a week—ink drags, thought lingers.
- Walk to something five minutes farther than necessary.
- Resist “Up Next”; let silence settle, see what thought surfaces.
- Cook a recipe that scares you. Fail. Taste the humility that failure salts into the dish.
These are small rebellions, but rebellion rarely begins with trumpets. It starts with the quiet refusal to wish for shortcuts.
Sharpening the Blade Again
Someday a traveler will find the lamp again, buried beneath unopened parcels and the hum of always‑on screens. Smoke will spiral, familiar and foreboding.
“And what will you wish for now?” the Djinn will ask.
The traveler may answer: “To remember hunger, so that food is appreciated and shared. To invite silence, so that thought has a place between messages. To choose—even when choice is heavy, so that my life is once again my own.”
The Djinn will shrug; power respects precision. Wishes can be rewritten, but only by the wisher.
“Very well. But it will hurt,” he will answer “Granted.”
So it is with us. Convenience is not evil. Autoplay is not a curse. GPS is not a tether. They become curses when accepted unwittingly, when each moment trimmed becomes a sliver of sovereignty lost. If a tool removes effort, test whether it also removes ownership. If it saves time, spend that time on something worthy, not another scroll.
Gratitude for ease need not preclude the discipline of difficulty. The blade of agency dulls in its scabbard; draw it against resistance and it gleams. The lamp still waits on every homescreen, every checkout, every comfort‑colored button begging to be tapped.
Rub it, if you must—but read the fine print written in smoke. And remember: this Djinn, and the algorithm, interprets literally.
Wish wisely, or be prepared to pry open the bars you forged from ease.
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