The most recent god to emerge from sheets of cardboard on our cutting table is ‘Convenience’ – a concept inspired by a random conversation with an American lady complaining about its dominance in our lives today. 

In making new gods out of cardboard, it’s not the case of thinking about an abstract concept and then illustrating it. Instead, it’s letting a previously unknown god emerge through drawing, cutting up cardboard and browsing magazines for words and images which happen to call out for some reason.  Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “dialogism” in art shows how meaning is never fixed but in constant flow through context, interaction and exchange. This, for me, captures how it feels when creating one of our conceptual gods. It certainly feels like a dialogue. 

This a post-hoc narrative but hopefully captures something of the random walk which gave rise to this particular instantiation of a god of convenience! There will be others as we unpeel this concept further. 

Somehow, Convenience’s head emerged as one very large and very shiny push button – his instant access to an entire world of information, news, ideas, relationships, meetings, everyday tools or a fresh pizza delivered to his door or flowers to a friend. As long as he puts his tie on, he can even conduct work meetings from the comfort of his chair. 

As his character emerged, it became clear that the big pulls this god exercises over us are: independence, control, choice and the promise of an everyday life which is easy, simple, low effort (both physically and cognitively) and time saving.  

But, Convenience surprised me by revealing himself as possibly our first ‘fake god’. Unlike some of our other handmade gods: Death, Growth, Justice. Luck, Nuance, it’s only the relentless adverts selling Convenience’s values via endless consumer products and services that give this god the extraordinary power over our thinking and behaviour which he now exercises. 

And the adverts hide the effects of our subservience to Convenience that we often fail to recognise. 

We aren’t independent, instead we are ever more heavily dependent on the ever growing complexity of systems which are outside our control.

Lack of activity leads to the atrophying of both muscle and brain activity and their embodied skills.  Are we also missing out on art, individuality, creativity and quality – things that can’t be either simplified or speeded up. 

And as to the time saved, what are we actually spending that saved time on – is it time that enriches ours or others lives?

Finally, the convenience myth fails to recognise all the major aspects of life that will always be messy and never reliably convenient or controllable… relationships, emotions, other people, climatic forces and, of course, our physical bodies.