Convenience

Life is not convenient. It is arduous and messy for the vast majority of human beings on the planet. Life, as portrayed on commercial television in the U.S., is fiction, peppered with commercials selling convenience.

The point of living with a scientific mind is to minimize the unnecessary suffering of life, which brings inevitable inconveniences. Approaching life rationally and utilizing scientific knowledge about health and efficiencies make life much more manageable, but still not convenient.

The measure of a life is not the number of inconveniences in it. The measure of a life is what we do with those inconveniences. Do we learn from them? Do we help others who share them? Do we accept responsibility for working through them without inconveniencing others unnecessarily?

Maintaining our precious planet entails dealing with many inconveniences. Waste disposal is messy and inconvenient, when done appropriately. Maintaining property without using pesticides is inconvenient. Growing healthy food without chemicals is inconvenient. Walking and taking public transit are less convenient than driving.

The ultimate inconvenience is death. How we approach our own mortality in the end depends largely on how we have approached life's inconveniences throughout.