What's at Stake with Convenience?

Convenience purifies pleasure

As effort drops toward zero, enjoyment may not increase in intensity, but it does minimize distractions and interference.

At the Grand Canyon, the IMAX theater doesn’t only promise an experience of the geography, it also helps maintain focus on the natural wonder by guaranteeing “a temperature controlled environment that will keep all guests comfortable.”

On Tinder, distractions and interferences recede as potential partners unsuited to the users' desires are filtered out, and as the big data churning relentlessly finds better possibilities in still closer geographic range.

Convenience accelerates pleasures

Tinder generates an efficiency benefit that could be measured as the number of others someone swipes or meets in a month, as compared to life without the application. Tinder speeds experience, it presses more enjoyment into the same number of hours.

Stated inversely, convenience is a time fabricator: more time exists to do other things when some are dispatched quickly.

Convenience multiplies kinds of pleasure: Tinder as pleasure engine

Tinder is a pleasure engine in the sense that it generates different types of enjoyments. On the theoretical level this is true by definition. Innovative conveniences necessarily allow us to imagine at least one new way of living (life with the convenience, as opposed to without). From there, more concrete and innovative kinds of pleasures emerge. Tinder inaugurates the enjoyments of:

• Hilarity and anxiety mixed at Tinder: Live
• Satirical message exchanges by users who aren’t really seeking matches
• Cluster courting: a guy supported by his friends messaging on one side, against a woman and her friends.

Some convenience engines will prove more potent than others, but any time new scenes of pleasure enter experience, there’s palpable value, something worth having.

Convenience and the happinesses of happiness

One of the virtues of happiness is that everyone agrees it's worth having: it's valuable intrinsically.

Where people disagree: What counts as happiness? How do we know when we have it?

Two mainstream possibilities:

• The hedonistic pleasure model roots in our bodies, and finds inspiration in what feels good. This is the laughter encountered at Tinder: Live, and the fleshy sensations found by some Tinder users. Certainly happiness is not limited to carnal pleasure, but that's the baseline, and the reference.
• The idealistic approach begins with our minds, and conceives happiness as intellectual satisfaction. These are the human insights pried open at Tinder: Live, and the analytic curiosities of big data's application to social media platforms. Certainly there's more to it than cognitive fulfillment or cerebral appreciation, but that's the core experience.

Convenience can serve both styles of happiness, and does at Tinder: Live where you get frequent chuckles, and occasional human truths.