It's Hard To Be Easy!

Via Opinion Journal, a brilliant, must-read, meditation on why technological advances can't free us from life's "hassle quota."

The author, Cameron Stracher, writes very perceptively:

Life, it turns out, has a certain minimum hassle quota. As in physics, matter can never be destroyed--it can just be transformed. If we speed up the time it takes to go through the toll booth, we slow down time somewhere else. If we ease access to our bank account, we complicate access to bankers. If we free the ties to the workplace, we tighten them to the home.

Also:

And don't even start about cell phones, voice mail, email, BlackBerrys and all the other modern forms of communication. Yes, they have untethered us from the office, freeing us from the boundaries that used to divide work from home. But does anyone really think that's an entirely good thing? Worse, the devices have created the expectation of constant contact, which results in interrupted vacations to check the office voice-mail and email systems. It is the brave road warrior, indeed, who can ignore the constant bleating of the cellphone/voice-mail indicator. Most of us curse the day Marconi transmitted his first wireless signal.

This last bit resonates big time with this blogger who, much to the astonishment of everyone he knows, does not own or use a mobile phone!! [He does confess to owning mobile phone stocks -- but that is capitalism!!!]