The Power of Inconvenience: Lessons from Israel
Like many children, I once fantasized about robots doing all my chores. Today, technology has delivered on that promise in ways I never imagined—yet the price we’re paying in loneliness, meaninglessness, and fragility is only now becoming clear. One nation, however, seems strangely immune.
Childhood Robots
I must have been ten or so when I started dreaming of robots. They were shiny metallic boxes with wires instead of appendages, bleeping and whirring — a cross between tin men and a 2025 washing machine. They would do all the things I hated: washing dishes, tying shoelaces, doing homework and of course, making my bed. I never once considered that in the glorious technological future, robots would do anything less than make my life more convenient.
Convenience Arrives
Fast forward 45 years and lo and behold, my life is, in many respects, much more streamlined. I no longer spend half a day dealing with lines and rude clerks for passports and taxes. My doctor has conveniently shape-shifted into an icon on my health fund app, magically sending me documents on my phone. The tin man may not be part of my household, but a number of wildly more sophisticated appliances are — predicting, quantifying and commodifying my entire existence.
Get a time machine, teleport your average Joe from the seventies into the year 2025 and watch him gape at the capacities of our technologies. But then he’ll take a closer glance — he’ll see the depression, the loneliness, the addictions, the fractured existence — and odds are he’ll hop right back in and set the machine to return to where he came from, toute de suite.
We Made a Critical Mistake
Robots were supposed to help us do the things we didn’t like doing. But we failed to ask ourselves what the purpose of human existence is. The dialogue was backwards: design clever robots first, think about humanity later. It was just plain laziness — something we seem to excel at.
The Price Is Coming Due
And now, like with everything in life, the loan sharks are demanding their dues. The first installment is uncomfortable. But it’s going to get a hell of a lot worse, my friends.
Since we prefer shopping in our pajamas, our malls and stores will close down, one by one. At first, we might not miss our friendly interactions with shop workers and cashiers, our impromptu chats with old friends we bump into on the escalator. Many large stores in our mall are boarded up now. Who can afford to compete with Shein? After all, it’s the same junk everywhere.
We like cheap transportation through apps and AI, so our local taxi driver will, if he’s lucky, go into early retirement. We’ll miss him.
Nowadays, chatting online with a bevvy of “fans” is so much fun that the sticky stuff of navigating real friendships is assiduously avoided. Why bother to talk when an emoji can do the job for you? When things get too uncomfortable (since it is real humans, not AIs, that hold a mirror to your flaws) ghosting has become the new normal. Why ever explain what makes you uncomfortable when you can avoid it entirely?
Convenience Is Killing Effort
Nobody likes waiting for their food to be prepared, let alone preparing it themselves, so now we have the luxury of dying at a young age, poisoned by UPFs (ultra-processed foods).
Furthermore, why should we work hard to save up for the coveted jacket on display when we can get an identical one (well, on the tiny phone screen it looks pretty similar) for ten dollars? When our dryer starts rattling, why should we call a handyman (yet another human being we have to talk to) when we can simply order a new one to be delivered in a day or two, and pay in easy interest-free payments?
Counting calories and saying no when our salivating mouth and brain say otherwise is just plain tedious. It is surely preferable to take a pill that reduces our appetite to that of a small slug. Yes, it’s a drug — but so what? Everyone takes drugs, don’t they?
Worst of all, we’ve discovered a shortcut for our own identities. Radicalism, identity politics, fundamentalism and conspiracy theorizing provide ready-made, easily digestible answers to complex problems. Nuanced geopolitics need to be studied deeply to be understood. In order to form balanced views, both sides of an argument have to be meticulously examined. It appears, however, that the average uninformed consumer is too busy on TikTok for any of the hard work required to research issues such as vaccines, gender reassignment and the Gazan War via balanced sources. It’s all just too hard.
Even Relationships Aren’t Safe
And I haven’t even started with relationships. Call me old-fashioned, but courtship rituals have been replaced by apps such as Tinder, thus turning the magic of love and intimacy into a consumer product. In 2025, sex is easily accessible with no apparent strings attached — yet according to statistics, fewer people are having it. We need to ask ourselves why.
Kids Are the Ultimate Inconvenience
Raising kids is the hardest job there is—and yes, it’s far more expensive today than in the past, with childcare costs, housing crises, and college debts that our ancestors never faced. But somehow, for thousands of years, people brought children into the world without running endless spreadsheet projections on ROI until graduation. They accepted the uncertainty, the effort, the inconvenience—because family was woven into the fabric of meaning, community, and continuity. Opting out now might feel like a rational shortcut to personal fulfillment, but try telling that to a cancer patient in an understaffed hospice with nobody by her bedside.
Humans Weren’t Built for This
But even if robots were designed for us, we weren’t designed for this. We were supposed to wear clothes, walk on two legs, eat fresh food, talk to one another and think about things. Shopping used to be a social activity; now it looks more like an online poker game. Our nourishment was never supposed to magically appear in thermal bags and plastic containers, clutched by a harried young man muttering into a headpiece under his helmet.
We were designed to do things that are often tedious and repetitive, and to do them together in real time. We were designed to work hard. To strive. To deal with frustration. To get up and fall down. Again and again.
Our bodies perform wonderfully when we move them regularly. Our systems work fine if we exercise even a little restraint in what we eat. Our relationships work well as long as we put our heart and soul into maintaining them. Children give our lives meaning and continuity.
Spending our hours reading, writing and contemplating is the only cure for brain rot. Deep focus will keep depression at bay. Ideas come to us in the midst of intense boredom, not while binging on incessant AI slop. Our personal fulfillment comes from living a life of intention and meaning. It is communities, not AI companions, that combat loneliness.
There is no shortcut to a meaningful life. The secret of true and lasting happiness will never be accidentally discovered via an instantly forgettable TikTok reel. A meaningful life is built from the ground up, starting with the foundations.
We need the hard work of living: of arguing about whose turn it is to take out the garbage, of cooking real meals, of family time, of trying to make sense of the world we inhabit.
We cannot live our lives as full-HD Netflix movies, with picture-perfect houses and wine at dinner, skipping boredom for a slop-feed dose of dopamine.
Time to Go Back to Work
What will we do when AI finally throws hundreds of thousands of inconvenient jobs onto the dust heap? What will we do when the only survival skill we’ll ever need is knowing how to give the right prompt? What will we do when things that once took weeks and months are done in hours?
We will have to go back to work. We will have to start doing hard things. We’ll start gardening, building furniture, knitting, embroidering, folding sourdough and biking. Yes, we’ll still shop online — crawling second-hand outlets for vintage hand looms or a paper press. We’ll learn how to build cars from scratch. We will practice mindfulness like it’s a full-time job and we’ll teach it to our children, too.
We will spend our hours repairing broken relationships in real time. We’ll put our AI slop aside and start really listening to those who feel the most alone in the world. We’ll leave our electric cars at home and take mindful walks instead.
We will cease to outsource our existence in the name of convenience.
Enter Israel
In my tiny country, we suffer from all the aforementioned afflictions and more, but somehow there is still hope. Yes, our malls are shutting down and Wolt is doing a brisk trade. TikTok has sadly not yet been banned. But at the same time, babies are born, wedding halls are booked solid from one year to the next, and people smile and laugh in the face of extreme adversity.
Compulsory Effort Builds Identity
But why? I posit that this is because in Israel, people can’t run away from hard things. All Israelis, rich and poor alike, serve two to three years of compulsory military service at eighteen — and many of them continue returning for miluim, the annual reserve duty that pulls them back into uniform well into their forties, leaving their families and jobs to answer the country’s call. While certain positions are more glamorous than others, for most, the military years, albeit unforgettable ones, are no picnic. Both my daughters spent long hours working in warehouses. They don’t regret their years of service. And active fighting isn’t just a possibility — it is usually an eventuality.
Our parched country of mountains, sea and deserts is a tough place to live. We are the descendants of the oppressed. We nonetheless put in the work and know nothing comes for free. We are irritatingly optimistic.
A Culture Shaped by Friction
As they say, one Jew, two opinions. Arguments and friction shape our daily lives, whether it’s a driver who cut you off or the latest judicial reform proposals. We nonetheless have a strong community and family ethic. Friction doesn’t fragment us or turn our people into a sea of lonely individuals. Our festivals are one giant marathon of food and family (don’t ever try to do a shop in a supermarket the day before the High Holidays). Jews not only pay taxes and school fees, but willingly contribute hefty sums for the building of a synagogue or a community center.
Our identities are built, not ready-made or conveniently supplied to us via armies of influencers. We may try to run from our DNA, but someone, somewhere will remind us of it eventually. Then we are left to fill in the blanks. Just ask the lone soldiers who willingly abandoned their lives in Texas or Johannesburg to serve in the IDF.
I’m not saying we are better. We just don’t have the luxury of any religious, spiritual or national convenience. Now more than ever, being Israeli or Jewish is highly inconvenient.
Despite our fair share of wars, terror and hardship, we are the eighth happiest nation on earth. I think this is a better accomplishment than coming second in the Eurovision, to be honest.
Yes, we are the outliers — with the highest birth rate in the OECD.
I’m not bragging. This essay could happily turn into a ten-page rant on all of our country’s failings, but perhaps, folks, it’s time to take a page or two out of our playbook. Because the inconvenient truth of Israel may not be easy for everyone to swallow.
The Future Demands a Return to Effort
It is too late to turn back the clock on what we have created. The powerful technology at our disposal could be a monster or a messiah. It’s up to us. AI might turn us into the worst version of ourselves — but that choice is entirely ours. For our own survival, however, we must go back to work: on our bodies, our relationships, our communities, our identities and our very souls.
And here’s a hot tip: if you have extra money for a plane ticket and an overpriced hotel, I do recommend you come to Israel to see a work in progress — the building and rebuilding of a nation, the hope and hard work, despite the pain and ongoing suffering. And while you’re at it, come pick some cherry tomatoes — a wonderful Israeli invention. You might sweat a bit, but they’re worth the effort.
