Opinion: Your life should be harder

During Grinnell’s recent bout of extreme cold, I happened to find myself working at a HSSC table near the building’s front door. Every couple minutes, as the automatic doors hissed their mechanical hiss, I would brace myself for the frigid gust. By my count, more than half of the students entering the building pushed that button. I shuddered every time.

The problem of the doors seems, at first, to be a minor environmental one. The point of a vestibule — to prevent the loss of heat to the outdoors — is negated by the prolonged opening of both sets of doors at once. A building’s heating system is thus required to counteract that loss by using more energy. A lot of energy is wasted. That is bad. Stop it. Op-ed over.

And yet … the problem of the doors lingers on my mind. Sure, campus doors are heavy, but they’re not that heavy. At best, you save yourself a couple of calories. So why press the button? Why come to a full stop and wait for the doors to open, forcing those already inside the vestibule to halt their own march forward in the process?

Yes, some people need that function — if that is you, push that button. But many don’t. Most push it because it is easier. It is a default to effortlessness which, as the end of my four years here draws nearer, nests in my mind. It is our paradigm of passivity that alarms me.

Modern prosperity has granted us — at Grinnell, in America, etc. — access to near-endless comfort. There are more and more ways to achieve that precious instant gratification. Indeed, it is harder to eat healthily now than to subsist on cheap junk food. It is harder to pay attention in class than to mindlessly browse Amazon or watch a sports match, and it is harder to maintain an active social life than to sit alone in your bed, ensconced in a world of digital stimulation. So why would we?

With so much access to easy passivity, America has crowned mindless rest the king of pastimes. Social studies majors may be familiar with “Bowling Alone,” Robert Putnam’s famous diagnosis of the decline of American sociality. But in the decades since its publication in 2000, we have only sunken deeper into our frictionless atomization, insulating ourselves with physical ease and social isolation.

The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson recently called this “The Anti-Social Century,” drawing a causal line from our optimization of technology for physical comfort to the widespread loneliness that the U.S. Surgeon General recently called an epidemic. Suburban sprawl, followed by the television, the iPhone, social media and a spate of friction-reducing innovations like DoorDash, created a social infrastructure that prioritizes easy comforts over community, melding the alleviation of minor inconvenience with an avoidance of the messiness of casual sociality.

Grinnell is no exception. Within us, as within everyone, are two — the monkey, animalistic, desiring ease and satiation, and the higher mind, representing sociality, morality and the creation of meaning. These days, as I watch us scroll throughout our classes — still in our pajamas — gorge on D-hall desserts and lock ourselves in our rooms to placate our social needs with Instagram Reels and video games, I can’t help but think that the monkeys have won, that for all of Grinnellians’ ostensible wits, we have surrendered our willpower in exchange for mere sloth.

I have lived this, dear reader — I have fed the monkey. I know the comfort of laying back and doing only what is comfortable. So believe me when I say, the point of your life is not the alleviation of inconvenience. A world — or a campus — whose highest aspiration is inaction would be a miserable one to inhabit.

Learning is hard. Building community is hard. Staying healthy is hard. And later in life, you may find that marriage too is hard, that child-rearing is hard, that being happy — not just placated — is hard. You will find that all of these require action. You will find your paradigm of passivity incompatible with the creation of meaning because creation is an active verb. 

“But wait,” you say, “those are all big things. Does opening one automatic door really matter?” No, if you don’t care about energy waste, I suppose it doesn’t. It’s just a little thing — and I know, you’re tired. I am too. But then, we are the product of our habits. The only way out of a “Wall-E”-esque future is the de-prioritization of convenience. The more we feed the monkeys inside us, the weaker our higher minds become. We’ll quit Instagram Reels next week. We’ll go to the gym next semester. We’ll go out next weekend. We’ll open the next door. Yes, I’m sure we will. 

Fight the monkey. Open the door.