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Posted: 2016-06-24T01:13:54Z | Updated: 2016-06-24T01:13:54Z The Consequences of Convenience | HuffPost

The Consequences of Convenience

The Consequences of Convenience
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Everything's a click away—except what matters most. 

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Lincoln Place Apartment Homes in Venice, California

I live in an apartment complex. I’m 26. I’m bisexual. I’m Jewish. Do you have an image of me yet? I like to think I’m extraordinary, and I might be in some ways, but I’m ordinary too. There are millions and millions of girls like me.

 My apartment complex is owned by Apartment Investment and Management Co. (AIMCO). It’s one of the largest owners of apartments in the United States housing almost 250,000 residents across 23 states.

The units where I live, AIMCO’s Venice, California property, take up 35 suburban acres—rectangular building after building in muted peach and grey with white slats in the windows; perfectly trimmed green lawns; and smooth grey sidewalks. I can just see the corporate architect who presented the plan in a sterile boardroom to some Brooks Brothers suits at AIMCO with a plastic model of cookie cutter condos. They never built this place for real people.

Real people. Homo sapiens who evolved roughly 200,000 years to thrive with one another in a community and to reproduce before we’ve got all “figured out” because no one does, no one ever has, and no one ever will.

Women wanted rights. But equality doesn’t mean feeling obligated to do everything women and men have historically done. Equality means women can do what men do and men can do what women do. As if. Somehow most young bachelors seem to have missed the “learn how to cook for yourself” memo even as women started joining them at universities and in the workplace. The Pew Research Center is now estimating that 25 percent of millennials may never get married . Hmm...I wonder why?

Sure, we’re disillusioned. (Almost 50 percent of our parents have gotten divorced). But we’re also working all the time. Thanks to the American ethos which measures a person’s value by what they do (what do you dooooo?) and the current economy men, women, and every gender in-between are focused on their careers. By the time we get home, we’re too tired to do anything other than recharge and repeat. Cue: Uber , Postmates, Tinder, and all the other apps that promise to deliver everything a human could ever possibly need to their doorstep with the click of a button. Does this sound healthy to you? It’s no wonder depression and loneliness are epidemics in the 21 century.

We were not made to live this way—hunched like early hominids over our screens, eating foods our digestive system can’t process well, living apart from our families in an attempt to prove self-sufficiency.

We’re not doing well.

Passion might be the remedy, but how to find hope amid the inundation of headlines that reinforce the idea that nothing changes? I have a lot of intelligent friends who now refuse to read the news. Old conflicts, new names. Everyone knows Washington’s corrupt and we’ve lost faith in the political process . Cue: the Donald Trump / Bernie Sanders phenomenon—“authentic” candidates who “tell it like it is.”

I’ll tell you how it is. It sucks. We were not made to live this way—hunched like early hominids over our screens, eating foods our digestive system can’t process well, living apart from our families in an attempt to prove self-sufficiency. We need to go back and not to “make American great again.”

We need to go back, back, back to the basics, the most fundamental aspects of who we are.

We are living beings. That means we need to breathe, eat, and sleep . Regularly.

We are human beings. That means we need to create, love, and believe in something greater than ourselves.

It doesn’t matter what you believe. Whether you’re looking to psychology research, western religions, or eastern philosophies, it’s undeniable that our minds and bodies are inextricably tied. If we do not take care of our minds (whether it be through meditation, prayer, journaling, or some other therapy), our bodies will feel restless. If we do not take care of our bodies by having sex, eating well, sleeping, and exercising, our minds will drive us mad.

How can we get better? By remembering who we are. First, we’ll need the radical support of a society and economy that’s not designed for our wellbeing. I could provide you with statistics on how employee happiness improves productivity or I could remind you that Americans get less vacation than almost every other developed nation, but that’s not the point. Our generation must commit to creating a new culture— a culture where family comes before friends, life comes before work, and compassion comes before selfishness. And don’t come at me with accusations of idealism or an analysis of the holes in my argument. It intuitively makes sense to start caring for ourselves and one another, and to push back against the apathy that’s perpetuating lives of convenient unhappiness. And it’s up to us, the next generation, to make it happen. Who’s in?

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