We have spent the last few hundred years trying to remove inconvenience from our lives. And now we have reached a point where we can order almost anything we want with a few taps on a glowing rectangle, have it delivered to our front door within days, sometimes hours, and if it takes longer than expected we feel like civilisation itself has collapsed.
Convenience is wonderful. I am not pretending I want to go back to a world without electricity, medicine, refrigeration or the ability to send a message to someone on the other side of the planet. I enjoy illustrating on my iPad. I enjoy having information available instantly. I enjoy the fact that my family can live on a rural property in South Australia and still be connected to the wider world.
What would you change about modern society?
I wonder if somewhere along the way we started believing that anything inconvenient was automatically bad. Maybe inconvenience is not always a problem to solve. Maybe sometimes it is the thing that reminds us there is a human being on the other side.
I’ve been working on the shop feature on my website and thought it might be a great idea to completely self sabotage my art business by creating an inconvenient gift shop. Not inconvenient because I want to make things difficult for people. Not inconvenient because I enjoy making customers wait around wondering where their order is. Inconvenient because I want the thing they receive to have a story.
The idea is that when someone buys something from me, it is not simply a product that appears from some mysterious warehouse after travelling through a giant machine of logistics. It is something I have made.
A linocut print. A handmade piece of artwork. Something printed by hand, packed by hand and posted by a person who knows exactly what it is because they created it.
Of course, I am not there yet. I still need to learn the skills. I need to learn proper linocut techniques, screen printing and all the practical things involved in making physical artwork. Which is part of the point. The process takes time. And perhaps that is something we have forgotten how to value.
We have become surrounded by things that are instant. Instant entertainment. Instant communication. Instant purchases. Instant answers. But nature does not work that way. A tree takes decades. Soil takes centuries. A painting takes however long it takes. A relationship takes years of tiny moments. A person becoming who they are takes an entire lifetime. Nothing important seems to happen instantly.
I think about my own animals here on the property. The chickens do not rush around trying to optimise their productivity. The goats are not attending online courses about becoming more efficient goats. The sheep are not worried they are falling behind compared to the sheep next door. They move at the speed of being alive.
Humans, however, have built an entire culture around saving time, then somehow filling that saved time with more things to do. It is almost impressive. We invented machines to give us more free time, then created a world where everyone feels like they have less of it. Maybe the problem is not convenience itself. Maybe the problem is when convenience disconnects us from the process.
When we buy a cheap item online, we often never think about the person who designed it, the person who made it, the resources taken from the Earth to create it or where it ends up when we no longer want it. The distance between creation and consumption has become enormous. And when there is distance, responsibility becomes easier to ignore. One of the reasons I love making art is because it closes that distance again.
There is something different about holding something made by someone else’s hands. You can feel the small imperfections. You can see the evidence of the person who made it. A handmade print is not better because it is expensive or exclusive. It is valuable because it contains time. And time is the one thing none of us can make more of.
This connects back to something I find fascinating about life. Growth often comes from resistance. Our bodies become stronger because they experience stress. Muscles grow because they are challenged. Bones respond to pressure. The immune system learns through exposure.
Remove every challenge and the body adapts by becoming less prepared. The same seems true for many parts of life. A person who never struggles with anything does not necessarily become stronger. A creative person who never makes mistakes does not become better. An artist who never shows their work because they are waiting for perfection never learns what happens when their ideas meet the real world.
Some discomfort is part of becoming capable. I think we have confused comfort with happiness. We have built incredible systems to protect ourselves from discomfort, but maybe a meaningful life was never meant to be completely comfortable.
Growing food is inconvenient. Looking after animals is inconvenient. Making something by hand is inconvenient. Learning a difficult skill is inconvenient. But those inconveniences connect us back to reality. They remind us that we are not just consumers floating through a digital shopping catalogue. We are creatures who make things, fix things, care for things and participate in the world around us.
So maybe my future gift shop will be a small act of rebellion against the idea that everything needs to be instant. Maybe someone will order a print and have to wait because I am carving the block, mixing the ink, pressing the paper and packing it myself. Maybe that is not a flaw. Maybe that is the whole point. In a world obsessed with making everything faster, perhaps there is something quietly radical about saying: No, this one takes time. Because someone made it.
Andy C Marshall 