I recently took my kids to a local ice cream shop called The Baked Bear, the kind of place where the smell of fresh-baked cookies and brownies will make your mouth water. It was a Thursday evening, cooler than usual for Oklahoma in late April, so I wasn’t surprised we were the only ones in the store. What did catch my attention, aside from the smell of those cookies, was the sight of three food delivery service drivers who came and went during the twenty minutes my kids took to finish their dessert. Three separate orders. Picked up and out the door.

Someone, somewhere nearby, had used an app to order a dessert that cost roughly $10 per person in the store and likely paid double that, with fees and tip, to have it delivered. I wasn’t being judgmental of the people ordering it. I was curious about what it represented. We have built a world so optimized for convenience that we no longer have to expend even the minimal effort of driving somewhere, walking in, and ordering something. And there are costs to living this frictionless life that don’t show up on the credit card transaction.

Technology has made life so frictionless that we’ve quietly engineered out many of the small physical efforts that used to be inherent parts of daily life. Driving to a restaurant, walking in, and standing in line are not workouts, but they are movement. The same applies to shopping for groceries, books, and even cars. Almost anything we want can be purchased and delivered without leaving home. And when technology removes even those micro-efforts at scale, across millions of people making hundreds of small decisions every day, the cumulative impact on our health is significant.

This isn’t necessarily a new problem, but it’s accelerating faster than ever before. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, there has been a progressive deployment of labor-saving technology that has quietly reduced our physical output. Washing machines, automobiles, elevators, drive-throughs, and yes, food delivery apps have each removed a small pocket of physical effort from daily life. None of them, in isolation, were consequential. Collectively, they reshaped how much, or how little, we move.

The urge to resist these conveniences is difficult because it’s more than fighting a bad habit. We are fighting our own evolution. For most of human history, conserving energy was the key to survival. Every calorie saved today was a calorie available tomorrow when food might be scarce. The drive to minimize effort and maximize caloric intake wasn’t a bug. It was the feature that kept our ancestors alive. Journalist and author Michael Easter refers to this as the “scarcity brain”. Our ancient hardwiring to constantly seek and consume, built for a world where food and energy were scarce. The problem, as Easter puts it, is evolutionary mismatch: the environment changed, but the software didn’t. Food is no longer scarce, and energy conservation is no longer needed for survival. But the drive remains, and a multi-billion dollar delivery industry has been built specifically to serve it. The person ordering dessert to their door doesn’t necessarily lack willpower. Their operating system is simply running in a world it was never designed for.

The research is clear about the health consequences of this pattern. According to a 2024 NIH review, increased mechanization and technological advances have simplified our lives but have also increased sedentary behaviors, which is considered a leading cause of major chronic health problems worldwide. A CDC study found that 1 in 4 Americans sit for more than 8 hours a day. And the American College of Lifestyle Medicine reported in 2024 that physical inactivity among children and youth has remained “unacceptably high” for a decade, earning a D- grade for two consecutive years.

The delivery driver picking up that ice cream order isn’t the problem. Neither is the app. The problem is the pattern; the snowball effect of thousands of small friction-removal decisions that, together, have produced a population that is less physically active, consuming a larger calorie surplus, than at any point in human history. The consequences of this combination are an epidemic of chronic disease.

Consider the numbers for a dinner with dessert. The average American dinner at a restaurant contains between 1,200 and 1,500 calories according to a multi-city study published in the Annals of the Academy of Medicine. Add a dessert from The Baked Bear, conservatively another 700 calories, and you’re looking at a single evening meal that exceeds what many adults need for an entire day. Delivered, so that even the calories burned walking to the car are spared.

The solution isn’t to abstain from technology or to feel guilty about convenience. It’s to see it clearly — and to make intentional choices about where to reintroduce friction. Not all friction is bad. Some of it is the mechanism by which we stay healthy, capable, and fully alive.

Three questions worth sitting with this week:

Three things worth your time this week:

📚  Read

Scarcity Brain by Michael Easter — a compelling explanation of why convenience is so hard to resist. Easter’s “evolutionary mismatch” framework is the scientific backbone of this issue. We are hardwired to conserve energy and seek calories — and modern technology exploits that wiring at scale. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why the frictionless life feels so natural and costs so much.

🧠  Concept worth knowing

NEAT — Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. The energy your body expends doing everything that isn’t formal exercise — walking to the car, carrying groceries, standing in line. Research shows NEAT can vary by up to 2,000 calories per day between individuals and is one of the most significant factors in long-term weight management. Every delivery eliminates a small piece of it.

📊  Stat worth sharing

According to the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, physical inactivity in the U.S. has remained “unacceptably high” for over a decade — and the growing prevalence now threatens U.S. national security, affecting military recruitment eligibility and active-duty readiness. The convenience trap isn’t just a personal health issue. It’s a national one.

Zoom out. See what’s possible.

— Chuck

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SOURCES

Sedentarism and chronic disease — NIH 2024 review: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Physical inactivity — American College of Lifestyle Medicine 2024: lifestylemedicine.org
Restaurant meal calorie study — Annals of the Academy of Medicine: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
NEAT research — verify 2,000 calorie variance figure with a primary source before publishing.
Scarcity Brain by Michael Easter: amazon.com