We live in the golden age of seamless living. Maybe it will get better and better. The solar lights switch on automatically when the sun sets and darkness sets in.
Seamless living refers to a lifestyle where technology, design, and daily routines are perfectly integrated to eliminate friction, stress, and unnecessary effort. The goal is to make your day-to-day experiences fluid, automated, and intuitive.
Does your home have lights, a thermostat, security systems, and appliances that talk to each other and adapt to your habits automatically? There are pillows that have memory. There is voice and sensor control that manages your home environment without needing to flip switches or manually adjust settings.
Last week, at the Oman Climate Week, I had an opportunity to hear experts talk about sustainability. In many ways, the concept of sustainability is directly linked to our lives.
Algorithms anticipate our preferences, and they want to know more and more about what we like and don't. Meanwhile, seamless living ensures cars heat our seats before we sit down, and groceries appear at our doorstep without us ever exchanging a glance with another human. A friend ordered groceries, and in the list she did not realise she had ordered sugar twice, and now she has 10 kg of sugar in her kitchen.
With our latest facilities, we do not have to walk around and choose and weigh groceries and wait in line to pay or have the trouble of finding parking to begin with. Comfort has never been more accessible — or more mind-numbingly dull.
Let us explore comfort and friction.
Comfort offers safety, but friction offers character. When every experience is smoothed out, optimised, and predictable, life flattens. This is probably why most teenagers are bored. Life got too easy.
Look back — when are the times when you are most excited and have lots to say?
The most memorable moments of your life almost certainly involved a minor disaster: getting lost in a city where you didn’t speak the language, a disastrous first meeting that turned into a four-hour talk, or an outdoor trip ruined by sudden rain.
Why were they interesting?
They were unpredictable.
When you spend extra money or time buying total comfort, you are often paying to eliminate the very unpredictability that makes an experience worth remembering. It is so smooth that somewhere along boredom settles in and at times even motivation.
The Hedonic Treadmill of Ease: Comfort loses its novelty fast. The first time you get food delivered in 20 minutes, it feels like magic; the tenth time, it’s just Tuesday.
Imagine if you had gone to the restaurant, there are sights and sounds to entertain you. Incidents that make us reflect and think. Someone to irritate you because he/she honked just before it turned green. Maybe you might have even debated who is a better driver — men or women?
At the restaurant, the lighting had an influence on you; the ambience made you smile and relax. The aroma of the food turned out to be an appetiser.
The "Memory Dividend": Smooth, comfortable days blur together into a single, forgotten blur. Discomfort acts as an anchor in time — it creates a sharp memory you can revisit for years.
It is not a mere coincidence that you remember the first day in the boarding school so vividly.
I remember mine so clearly even today. I dreamt that I was at home and my grandfather had come to wake me up. I wondered why he was using a bell. Woke up to find the warden waiting for us to rise and shine. The choke in the throat was so painful that it was tough to produce a 'good morning' greeting. The warden, the teacher within days, turned out to be a wonderful mentor. She was strict but was a person who took time to explain why the rules were set in place.
A good life is not just a series of pleasant sensations. It requires contrast. You cannot truly appreciate a hot shower or a warm bed until you’ve been freezing and exhausted. Imagine if we did not have mountains or slopes.
For one, we would not have quotes on mountains: "Life's a bit like mountaineering — never look 'down,' Edmund Hillary.
Would you deliberately choose the slightly less convenient path this week? When I first started driving in Oman, I used to dread the slope road that starts while exiting Wadi Kabir and goes on with the waterfall on the right. And that very day I had to drive that route, it began to rain. I cribbed and complained to myself, but I did it — I drove and reached my destination. And it is a memory and joke for the family.
So these are some suggestions to be tried out — how about taking the scenic route without GPS, sitting at the counter of a restaurant alone, or saying yes to an invitation that makes you a little nervous? Both are easy, but rough edges give life its texture.
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