After reading The Comfort Crisis By Michael Easter a few years ago I’ve come to the conclusion that in order to feel human you must be annoyed from time to time. I’ve touched on this indirectly without realizing it a few times before in The Fun People Are In The Middle Seat and Why Do Actual Things When I Can Experience It Through Video Online. Both of the feelings of loneliness and isolation come in part from not being annoyed enough. While being annoyed enough is subjective and can change over time, everyone can find where they are the most annoyed and lean into it. The annoyance is the entry fee. What you actually get on the other side is people.

For Lent this year I gave up being able to use drive-throughs. I still went to fast food plenty of times but I had to park, get out of my car, and manually order. When it was possible I also tried to skip the kiosks and went directly to a cashier. After the success of last year’s Lent I felt confident that I’d be able to persevere through it. It’s been a few weeks since Easter and I’ve decided to continue to opt for the slower pace of skipping the drive-through. I noticed immediately that by default I was treated like a second class customer compared to both the drive-through and the mobile app customers. The system is now built around the people who didn’t want to be there. Though I found that when I did interact with staff it was usually a delight and more personal than using a drive-through speaker or app.

The same thing happened at the bank today as I went to deposit some cash and went into the bank instead of using the drive-through ATM. The teller immediately greeted me and was very kind and bubbly. Unfortunately I was not much in a talking mood today but I noticed the customer next to me small talking with the other teller, and he seemed to be having a good time. Looking back at the past decade or two I normally would have used the drive-through ATM to deposit the cash and go about my day, none the wiser. I’d missed out on hundreds of interactions.

The math is bleak when I actually do it. A decade or two of ATMs, self-checkouts, kiosks, and mobile orders is thousands of small human moments I traded away for ninety seconds saved. That’s loneliness compounding quietly underneath, and I’m not interested in letting it keep running. I’d rather compound connection, no matter how small or insignificant it might seem.