Societal DoorDash Death Spiral
Is convenience another word for fear?
A little experiment for you: the next time you decide to order food via a delivery app, ask yourself why. Is it that you are lazy, or tired, or that you believe the experience will bring you joy? Or is there something else going on? Do you, for example, become filled with dread at the prospect of the human interaction necessary to go to a restaurant, or even to pick up the phone and call an order in? Are ease and convenience misnomers for anxiety and fear?
These are important questions to ask, because we as a society are becoming severely addicted to not leaving the house.
Some depressing stats: Nearly three out of every four restaurant orders in 2024 were eaten not in an actual restaurant. Food delivery has doubled since 2019, according to the National Restaurant Association. One-third of Americans use delivery apps for food at least once a week.
“I am so burned out and tired, I would rather just throw my credit card at the problem and delay that unhappiness until the bill comes,” one delivery app super-user who is spending $700 a week on food delivery told The New York Times.
“I still have friends here, but I don’t go out anymore,” another super user in Los Angeles told the Times. “So I randomly see people, and they’re like, ‘I didn’t know you were back!’”
What’s striking about the people interviewed in that Times piece is that nearly all of them seem aware there’s a problem with what they’re doing—that it’s disconnecting them from friends, draining their bank accounts, de-skilling them to the point that they no longer know how to cook or even grocery shop effectively. And yet they, and so many of us, keep relying on these apps.
It is easy to blame the delivery apps themselves, and every technology of convenience that’s been developed in the last decade or two—social media, ride hailing services—for addicting us to lives of sedentary ease. And they, of course, do deserve much of the blame: these massive tech companies use casino-like tactics of dopaminergic reward to trap us within their ecosystems.
But not everyone who goes to a casino gets addicted to gambling. Not everyone who uses drugs grows to need them.
To understand why someone is prone to any addiction—whether that thing is gambling or a drug or a lifestyle that’s bad for them—it’s helpful to understand what pain they’re trying to ameliorate, or what feature of their lives or their psyches they’re attempting to avoid dealing with.