I love technology. I love the fact that I can work from almost anywhere, speak to somebody hundreds of miles away without travelling for hours, order something I need without going to the shops (I also love going to shops), manage my banking from the sofa, and find the answer to almost any question within seconds.
I use online meetings. I use self-service checkouts. I use AI. I shop online. I work from home when it makes sense. I appreciate all the convenience that modern life has given us. This isn’t going to be one of those pieces that says everything was better in the old days. It wasn’t. But I have started wondering about something.
In our determination to remove friction from everyday life, have we inadvertently removed some of the joy as well? Think about just how many small human interactions we have designed out of an ordinary day.
You can buy petrol without speaking to anyone. Order lunch on an app. Scan your own shopping. Work for an entire day without leaving the house. Attend five meetings without actually being in a room with another person. Watch a film without going to the cinema. Bank without visiting a bank, book a holiday without speaking to a travel agent and have practically anything delivered to your front door.
Individually, each of those things is brilliantly convenient. Taken together, though, they create a rather different sort of life. And I wonder if we have underestimated the value of all those tiny encounters that used to sit in between the things we thought were important.
The chat while you waited for a meeting to start. The person behind the counter who remembered you. Somebody making an observation in the queue at the supermarket. The conversation in the car on the way to an event. Running into somebody you hadn’t seen for years. The colleague who appeared at your office door and caused you to stop what you were doing for 10 minutes. None of those things looked particularly productive. Perhaps that was precisely the point.
What happened around the meeting mattered too.
I’ve written recently about our collective relationship with online meetings. Six years after the pandemic made them an essential part of working life, I think many of us have realised that something gets lost when almost every encounter becomes a rectangle in a diary and a face on a screen.
Online meetings are extraordinarily useful. I certainly don’t want to return to driving halfway across the country, or suffering torturous train journeys, early starts or late finishes, for a conversation that could perfectly well have taken 30 minutes on Teams. But I increasingly think we made a mistake in believing the meeting itself was the only valuable part of the experience.
There was the walk from reception. The cup of coffee beforehand. The conversation with someone you hadn’t expected to see. The five minutes after everybody else left when somebody said, “While you’re here, can I just ask you something?” Those moments aren’t on the agenda. They don’t appear in the minutes. Nobody puts them in the evaluation form. And yet they are often where relationships are built, ideas emerge, problems surface and, sometimes, where the joy is found.
We eliminated the journey and congratulated ourselves on winning back two hours. Perhaps we didn’t notice everything else that disappeared with it.
We have become very good at not needing one another.
There’s a bigger thought here. Modern life has become extraordinarily good at allowing us not to need other people. An app can answer the question. An algorithm can recommend the programme. A machine can take the payment. A website can make the booking. AI can increasingly help us write the document, plan the journey, generate the ideas and organise the day.
Again, I am not against any of this. Far from it. Used well, these things free us from repetitive tasks and give us opportunities previous generations could scarcely have imagined. But human beings are not simply units of productivity. We need usefulness, but we also need belonging. We need other people.
That was reinforced for me recently through some of our work on Parent Champions at Coram. The model is beautifully simple: parents talking to other parents, sharing information, building confidence and helping families connect with services. Our recent material describes peer-to-peer connection as something that builds trust and shared community understanding, particularly for families who might otherwise remain isolated. There is something incredibly powerful in that simplicity. Sometimes the answer isn’t another portal, campaign, system or process. Sometimes the answer is another person.
The joy was hiding in the gaps.
That’s where I come back to Find Joy in the Middle. For me, finding joy in the middle has never meant pursuing some permanently happy life. Real life doesn’t work like that. It contains frustration, grief, worry, difficult Mondays, tedious jobs and days when everything seems harder than it should. It is about noticing what is happening while we are busy heading towards the next thing. We tend to think of joy as the destination. The holiday. The celebration. The achievement. The new job. The big birthday. The finished project. But so much of it is actually hiding in the gaps.
It is laughing with somebody when you weren’t expecting to. Hearing a story. Sharing an observation. Helping a stranger. Somebody recognising you. Discovering that you have something in common with the person sitting next to you. The ordinary stuff.
And increasingly I wonder whether some of the ‘friction’ we have spent years removing was actually where some of that ordinary human connection lived.
Perhaps efficiency isn’t everything.
We have become obsessed with saving time, and I include myself in that. We want the fastest journey, shortest queue, quickest transaction and most efficient meeting. Technology promises to give time back to us, and often it genuinely does.
But there is an interesting question to ask ourselves: what are we saving all this time for? Because if the hours we save by not commuting, shopping, talking, browsing, queueing or wandering simply become more hours staring at another screen, we haven’t necessarily made life richer. We have just made it more efficient. And efficiency is a strange measure for a human life. Friendship is inefficient. Families are spectacularly inefficient. Community is inefficient. Conversation is inefficient. Sitting around a table long after the plates should have been cleared is inefficient. Walking somewhere when you could drive is inefficient. Stopping to talk when you are supposed to be somewhere else is inefficient. And thank goodness for all of it.
So I don’t want to turn back the clock.
This isn’t an argument for abandoning Teams, smashing up the self-service tills or deleting every app from our phones. I’m not swapping my smartphone for a landline anytime soon. What I think we need instead is to become more deliberate about putting human contact back into our lives. Go into the office sometimes even when you don’t absolutely have to. Meet someone for coffee rather than arranging another online call. Use the independent shop. Say hello. Leave five minutes at the beginning of a meeting for people to talk to one another rather than launching immediately into item one. Take the slightly longer route occasionally. Phone rather than message. Sit at the table. Put the screen away. Stay for another cup of tea. None of that is revolutionary.
Maybe that’s why it matters. Because perhaps our response to a world that is becoming more automated, more digital and more efficient doesn’t have to be dramatic. We don’t need to reject progress. We just need to become better at protecting the wonderfully inefficient human stuff alongside it.
Technology should remove the things that get in the way of life. It shouldn’t remove life itself. A colleague said to me today: “AI is that person I used to sit next to in the office who checked my explanations and use of language to help make sure things were understandable to everyone and not just me!”
So perhaps the question isn’t whether we have designed the joy out of everyday life. Perhaps the more hopeful question is whether we can consciously design some of it back in. I think we can. And it may begin with something wonderfully ordinary: looking up, slowing down, and talking to the person next to us. Because very often, that’s where the joy has been waiting all along.
