Minor Inconvenience Quotes

It is the right of a traveller to vent their frustration at every minor inconvenience by writing of it to their friends.

If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.

Ninth grade is a minor inconvenience to him. A zit-cream commercial before the Feature Film of Life.

The relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.

Do you have to sound so damned indifferent to it all? Here we are talking about how we're likely to be dead in a few hours and you're acting like it's only a minor inconvenience. ~"Spirey & the Queen

Even the most minor inconvenience, Chrysippus suggested, had been carefully designed by God for our benefit.

I was alone, without a single cent, in an unknown country. If I'd learned anything from last year's ill-fated adventures, though, it was not to get overwhelmed by minor inconveniences.

Citizens are urged to tolerate cheerfully any minor inconvenience this may cause them; your right of privacy will be respected in every way possible; your right of free movement may be interrupted temporarily, but full economic restitution will be made.

I hope you will write occasionally? Some token of your impressions?” “Oh! I shall not spare you. It is the right of a traveller to vent their frustration at every minor inconvenience by writing of it to their friends. Expect long descriptions of everything.

Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or circles under the eyes. It is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor is it a trivial inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but (frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a “point of view” that some people with soft skins find “ offensive. ” It is the deep and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth and human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from even the possibility of wholeness or internal integrity. Inferiority puts rightful self-love beyond reach, a dream fragmented by insult into a perpetually recurring nightmare; inferiority creates a person broken and humiliated inside. The fragments— scattered pieces and sharp slivers of someone who can never be made whole—are then taken to be the standard of what is normal in her kind: women are like that. The insult that hurt her—inferiority as an assault, ongoing since birth—is seen as a consequence, not a cause, of her so-called nature, an inferior nature. In English, a graceful language, she is even called a piece. It is likely to be her personal experience that she is insufficiently loved. Her subjectivity itself is second-class, her experiences and perceptions inferior in the world as she is inferior in the world. Her experience is recast into a psychologically pejorative judgment: she is never loved enough because she is needy, neurotic, the insufficiency of love she feels being in and of itself evidence of a deep-seated and natural dependency. Her personal experiences or perceptions are never credited as having a hard core of reality to them. She is, however, never loved enough. In truth; in point of fact; objectively: she is never loved enough. As Konrad Lorenz wrote: “ I doubt if it is possible to feel real affection for anybody who is in every respect one’s inferior. ” 1 There are so many dirty names for her that one rarely learns them all, even in one’s native language.

Not every minor inconvenience leads to a major catastrophe.

For nothing is more suitable to persons of gravity and decorum than to endure minor inconvenience with constancy

Oh! I shall not spare you. It is the right of a traveller to vent their frustration at every minor inconvenience by writing of it to their friends. Expect long descriptions of everything.

[...]he also had a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million "pages" could be summoned at a moment's notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words Don't Panic printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitch hiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.

External conflicts we can avoid, resolve, or manage. But, when it comes to internal conflicts, there is only one viable option: resolve. Whatever internal conflict, major or minor, we don't resolve will grate within us nonstop. Fortunately, we can resolve all our internal conflicts with one simple strategy: Act the way it feels right, no matter how inconvenient the consequences are.

the Greek gods reflect what happens to humans when we see only ourselves and our own needs. The great gods have such infinite power and resources that they have forgotten what it’s like to want, to suffer, to show empathy, to face all of life’s minor inconveniences. They have forgotten what it’s like to be told no, and it has turned them into monsters, obsessed with dominance and hierarchy, always trying to claw a little higher. The frightening thing is how real this phenomenon is. I see the gods as a cautionary tale.

That some advantages might have resulted from such a precaution [of supermajority rule], cannot be denied,” he writes. “It might have been an additional shield to some particular interests, and another obstacle generally to hasty and partial measures.” But then Madison proceeds to explain why “these considerations are outweighed by the inconveniences in the opposite scale.” If a minority was allowed to block a majority, he writes, then “in all cases where justice or the general good might require new laws to be passed, or active measures to be pursued, the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed. It would be no longer the majority that would rule; the power would be transferred to the minority

Hale is about to snap. All the telltale signs are there. Teeth? Grinding. Fists? Clenched. Creepy throat tendon? Bulging creepily. Logan knows this version of Hale. She knows the way a minor inconvenience can become a catastrophe in Hale’s mind, and how a small mistake can avalanche into a spiral of panic. Every misstep is a fuckup, and every fuckup is a sign of a great moral failing.

It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON’T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.

Keepers and Seekers were not permitted to do more than trim their hair to elbow length. Ashyn said they ought to be grateful they weren't like the spirit talkers, who weren't ever allowed to cut their hair or their nails. Personally, Moria would be more concerned with the "eyes plucked out, tongue cut off, and nostrils seared" part of being a spirit talker, but she could see that the uncut nails might be inconvenient as well.

When Sarah finally got pregnant, she was determined to be ruthlessly positive about it. She would not jinx her twins by complaining about minor inconveniences. No, she would remain sunny. She read all the feel-good books she could find on pregnancy and child-rearing, blocking out dark thoughts by force of will. But as the days wore on and her nausea went from bad to worse, one book kept bobbing up in Sarah’s consciousness: Rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin’s tale about Satan’s mother. Rosemary had had morning sickness too, right?   47

In a true democracy, leaders respect the will of the majority but also the rights of the minority—one without the other is not enough. This means that constitutional protections for the individual must be defended, even when those protections become inconvenient to the party on top.

In the nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology and an early pioneer of the social sciences, ran a thought experiment in one of his books: What if there were no crime? What if there emerged a society where everyone was perfectly respectful and nonviolent and everyone was equal? What if no one lied or hurt each other? What if corruption did not exist? What would happen? Would conflict cease? Would stress evaporate? Would everyone frolic in fields picking daises and singing the "Hallelujah" chorus from Handel's Messiah? Durkheim said no, that in fact the opposite would happen. He suggested that the more comfortable and ethical a society became, the more that small indiscretions would become magnified in our minds. If everyone stopped killing each other, we wouldn't necessarily feel good about it. We'd just get equally upset about the more minor stuff. Developmental psychology has long argued something similar: that protecting people from problems or adversity doesn't make them happier or more secure; it makes them more easily insecure. A young person who has been sheltered form dealing with any challenges or injustices growing up will come to find the slightest inconveniences of adult life intolerable, and will have the childish public meltdown to prove it.

It is tragic, too, that students now describe themselves as mentally ill when facing what are the routine demands of student life and independent living. The NUS survey reports that students' feelings of crippling mental distress are primarily course-related and due to academic pressure. In 2013, in response to that year's NUS mental health survey, an article cheerily entitled 'Feeling worthless, hopeless ... who'd be a university student in Britain?' listed one young writer's anxiety-inducing student woes that span the whole length of her course: 'Grueling interview processes are not unusual, especially for courses like medicine, dentistry, and veterinary science, or for institutions like Oxbridge'. And then: 'Deadlines come thick and fast for first-year students, and for their final-year counterparts, the recession beckons'. Effectively, the very requirements of just being a student are typified as inducing mental illness. It can be hard to have sympathy with such youthful wimpishness. But I actually don't doubt the sincerity of these 'severe' symptoms experienced by stressed-out students. That is what is most worrying--they really are feeling over-anxious about minor inconveniences and quite proper academic pressure.

could be summoned at a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON’T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.

had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million “pages” could be summoned at a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON’T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.

According to Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project, for example, one’s “cultural worldview”—that would be political leanings or ideological outlook to the rest of us—explains “individuals’ beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any other individual characteristic.”16 More powerfully, that is, than age, ethnicity, education, or party affiliation. The Yale researchers explain that people with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality, and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Conversely, those with strong “hierarchical” and “individualistic” worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry, and a belief that we all pretty much get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.17 The evidence is striking. Among the segment of the U.S. population that displays the strongest “hierarchical” views, only 11 percent rate climate change as a “high risk,” compared with 69 percent of the segment displaying the strongest “egalitarian” views.18 Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes the tight correlation between “worldview” and acceptance of climate science to “cultural cognition,” the process by which all of us—regardless of political leanings—filter new information in ways that will protect our “preferred vision of the good society.” If new information seems to confirm that vision, we welcome it and integrate it easily. If it poses a threat to our belief system, then our brain immediately gets to work producing intellectual antibodies designed to repel the unwelcome invasion.19 As Kahan explained in Nature, “People find it disconcerting to believe that behavior that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behavior that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.” In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today. Furthermore, leftists are equally capable of denying inconvenient scientific evidence. If conservatives are inherent system justifiers, and therefore bridle before facts that call the dominant economic system into question, then most leftists are inherent system questioners, and therefore prone to skepticism about facts that come from corporations and government. This can lapse into the kind of fact resistance we see among those who are convinced that multinational drug companies have covered up the link between childhood vaccines and autism. No matter what evidence is marshaled to disprove their theories, it doesn’t matter to these crusaders—it’s just the system covering up for itself.20 This kind of defensive reasoning helps explain the rise of emotional intensity that surrounds the climate issue today. As

A True Story Let me tell you about Wendy. For more than ten years, Wendy struggled unsuccessfully with ulcerative colitis. A thirty-six-year-old grade school teacher and mother of three, she lived with constant cramping, diarrhea, and frequent bleeding, necessitating occasional blood transfusions. She endured several colonoscopies and required the use of three prescription medications to manage her disease, including the highly toxic methotrexate, a drug also used in cancer treatment and medical abortions. I met Wendy for an unrelated minor complaint of heart palpitations that proved to be benign, requiring no specific treatment. However, she told me that, because her ulcerative colitis was failing to respond to medications, her gastroenterologist advised colon removal with creation of an ileostomy. This is an artificial orifice for the small intestine (ileum) at the abdominal surface, the sort to which you affix a bag to catch the continually emptying stool. After hearing Wendy’s medical history, I urged her to try wheat elimination. “I really don’t know if it’s going to work,” I told her, “but since you’re facing colon removal and ileostomy, I think you should give it a try.” “But why?” she asked. “I’ve already been tested for celiac and my doctor said I don’t have it.” “Yes, I know. But you’ve got nothing to lose. Try it for four weeks. You’ll know if you’re responding.” Wendy was skeptical but agreed to try. She returned to my office three months later, no ileostomy bag in sight. “What happened?” I asked. “Well, first I lost thirty-eight pounds.” She ran her hand over her abdomen to show me. “And my ulcerative colitis is nearly gone. No more cramps or diarrhea. I’m off everything except my Asacol.” (Asacol is a derivative of aspirin often used to treat ulcerative colitis.) “I really feel great.” In the year since, Wendy has meticulously avoided wheat and gluten and has also eliminated the Asacol, with no return of symptoms. Cured. Yes, cured. No diarrhea, no bleeding, no cramps, no anemia, no more drugs, no ileostomy. So if Wendy’s colitis tested negative for celiac antibodies, but responded to—indeed, was cured by—wheat gluten elimination, what should we label it? Should we call it antibody-negative celiac disease? Antibody-negative wheat intolerance? There is great hazard in trying to pigeonhole conditions such as Wendy’s into something like celiac disease. It nearly caused her to lose her colon and suffer the lifelong health difficulties associated with colon removal, not to mention the embarrassment and inconvenience of wearing an ileostomy bag. There is not yet any neat name to fit conditions such as Wendy’s, despite its extraordinary response to the elimination of wheat gluten. Wendy’s experience highlights the many unknowns in this world of wheat sensitivities, many of which are as devastating as the cure is simple.

guiding users through a process quickly and easily is good for business, because the fewer people who get frustrated or confused, the more sales or sign-ups are completed. The problem, though, is that making interactions feel smooth and simple sounds nice, but it starts to fail as soon as you’re asking users for messy, complicated information. And as you’ll see in this chapter, all kinds of everyday questions can be messy and complicated—often in ways designers haven’t predicted. NAMING THE PROBLEM Sara Ann Marie Wachter-Boettcher. That’s how my birth certificate reads: five names, one hyphen, and a whole lot of consonant clusters (thanks, Mom and Dad!). I was used to it being misspelled. I was used to it being pronounced all sorts of ways. I was even used to everyone who looks at my driver’s license commenting that it takes up two whole lines. But I didn’t expect my name to cause me so many problems online. As it turns out, tons of services haven’t thought much about the wide range of names out there. So, on Twitter I forgo spaces to fit my professional name in: SaraWachterBoettcher. On online bill pay, they’ve truncated it for me: Sara Wachter-Boettch. In my airline’s online check-in system, hyphens straight up don’t exist. The list goes on. It’s irritating. It takes some extra time (do I enter a space between my last names, or just squish them together?). I see more error messages than I’d like. But it’s still a minor inconvenience, compared to what other people experience.

have had tenants ruin ovens when cleaning them, shatter shower doors, and even break windows with odd objects. Even with this litany of dings and cracks, when I step back and look at the cost of repairing one window, replacing a few boards on a fence, or even losing a used oven, keeping the good tenant long term is usually worth it. The lifetime value of a customer, especially one writing a four-figure check like clockwork every month for several years, far outweighs the cost or inconvenience of the minor repair.

Already in the preliminary interview one may get an impression of the patient's hopelessness. He will be unwilling to make the smallest sacrifice, to undergo even a minor inconvenience, to take the slightest risk. He may give the appearance then of being too self-indulgent. But the fact is that he sees no compelling reason to make sacrifices when he expects to gain nothing from them. Similar attitudes can be seen outside analysis. People remain in thoroughly unsatisfactory situations which with a bit of effort and initiative could be bettered. But a person may be so completely paralyzed by his hopelessness that moderate difficulties seem to him insurmountable obstacles.

But let us relive . . . a little of those glorious days when reading was the thing and life was only a minor inconvenience.

EACH FOLLOWING DAY (or every two to three days): Increase the time by thirty to sixty seconds, up to ten minutes, without increasing the speed. ♦ When you get to ten minutes, drop the time down to three to four minutes and increase the speed one setting. Increase the time at this new speed following the same guidelines as above. ♦ As you gradually increase the speed, one setting at a time, follow this same pattern of increasing the amount of time day by day. Continue to drop the time back down when you increase the speed setting. Troubleshooting ♦ If you feel worse in the twenty-four hours after your vibration session, try less time and/or frequency the next time. You can even rest a day and only vibrate two to three times per week. Another good way to slow down is to just sit next to the machine and put only your feet on the vibrating plate. ♦ It is common to experience itching in some areas of the body, such as ears, nose, or feet, while vibrating. This may be due to increased circulation in that area, a release of toxins, or possibly some energy phenomenon. While this itching can be irritating, as long as it stops shortly after vibrating, it is harmless—a minor inconvenience in the process of healing. ♦ It is also highly recommended to incorporate a healthy diet and natural supplements to help lower inflammation levels in your body. See the detoxification section in chapter 7 and the troubleshooting section in chapter 2.

To someone who doesn't experience it, stop-and-search might seem like a minor inconvenience. But if you have to live with it every day, it starts to color your view of the police and your place in society. It's unfair. Unfairness breeds suspicion, and suspicion breeds resentment.

We have it so deeply engrained in us that any kind of hardship shouldn’t last more than a couple of months, at most. Anything more than that is considered malingering. As though the loss of someone you love were just a temporary inconvenience, something minor, and surely not something to stay upset over.

The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends on public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper of the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.

We’re the largest personal security company in this part of the world, and someone has been hacking into our systems for months, making us look like morons. You consider that a minor inconvenience?

It takes a plastic bag over one hundred years to break down, and it takes me only one minor inconvenience.

Even the most minor inconvenience, Chrysippus suggested, had been carefully designed by God for our benefit. God had created bedbugs to ‘awaken us out of our sleep’ and mice to encourage humans to be tidy.

isn’t just a minor inconvenience.

Colds and flu are not just inconveniences; they are alarm bells telling us that all is not well. While seen as a minor illness, each cold does permanent damage to the body, causing us to age prematurely. Yet millions of Americans suffer four to six colds per year, sometimes taking weeks to resolve. Healthy people do not get infections, and, if they do, they recover from them very quickly.

TURNING AWAY FROM ANGER My dear brothers and sisters, always be willing to listen and slow to speak. Do not become angry easily, because anger will not help you live the right kind of life God wants. James 1:19-20 NCV Perhaps God gave each of us one mouth and two ears in order that we might listen twice as much as we speak. Unfortunately, many of us do otherwise, especially when we become angry. Anger is a natural human emotion that is sometimes necessary and appropriate. Even Jesus Himself became angered when He confronted the moneychangers in the temple. But, more often than not, our frustrations are of the more mundane variety. When you are tempted to lose your temper over the minor inconveniences of life, don’t. Turn away from anger, and turn instead to God. When the winds are cold, and the days are long, / And thy soul from care would hide, / Fly back, fly back, to thy Father then, / And beneath His wings abide. Fanny Crosby Anger is the fluid that love bleeds when you cut it. C. S. Lewis A TIMELY TIP When you lose your temper . . . you lose.

At the heart of each of these mass atrocities, he argues, was a state-building project in which traitorous inconvenient minorities were perceived as a threat and ultimately were destroyed.

Well, then you get the whole deal,” Justineau says. “If I was back in Beacon, maybe I could look the other way. If you keep me here, you have to put up with minor inconveniences like me having a conscience.” Caldwell’s

When Ottaline Gambol commandeered a Muggle train to serve as the new mode of transport for Hogwarts students, she also had constructed a small station in the wizarding village of Hogsmeade: a necessary adjunct to the train. The Ministry of Magic felt strongly, however, that to construct an additional wizarding station in the middle of London would stretch even the Muggles’ notorious determination not to notice magic when it was exploding in front of their faces. It was Evangeline Orpington, Minister from 1849–1855, who hit upon the solution of adding a concealed platform at the newly (Muggle) built King’s Cross station, which would be accessible only to witches and wizards. On the whole, this has worked well, although there have been minor problems over the ensuing years, such as witches and wizards who have dropped suitcases full of biting spellbooks or newt spleens all over the polished station floor, or else disappeared through the solid barrier a little too loudly. There are usually a number of plain-clothed Ministry of Magic employees on hand to deal with any inconvenient Muggle

Tom smiles. It's all so domestic. I want to have a domestic life. I want all our minor inconveniences to orbit around a meaningful axis. I want the petty feuds and the awkward silences. Suddenly I don't feel anxious.

Of all the odd demands that modern life makes on humanity, the most difficult may be not only its insistence that we comfortably spend our adult lives going from one situation of serial monogamy to another, but its expectation that we get along, maintain friendships, share parental duties, and in cases even attend the second and third weddings of our exes. It asks that we pretend that heartbreak is a minor inconvenience that can be overcome with just the right amount of psycholanguage, with just a few repetitions of the mantra for the sake of the children.

You will invariably face jobs that are associated with uncomfortable feelings, ranging from relatively minor annoyance (e.g., taking out the garbage in the rain) to more persistent and recurring feelings of stress and discomfort (e.g., dissertation, organizing income taxes) that activate your procrastination script. Even a minimal degree of stress or inconvenience (what we have come to describe as the feeling of “Ugh”) can be potent enough to make you delay action. Think about some of the mundane examples of procrastination, such as watching a boring television show because the remote control is out of reach (e.g., “It’s ALL THE WAY over there.”) or exercise (e.g., “I’m TOO TIRED to change into my workout clothes.”). The use of capital letters is meant to illustrate the tone of voice of your selftalk, which serves to exaggerate and convince you of the difficulty of what you want to do. You are capable to perform the action, but your thoughts and feelings (including feeling tired or “low energy”) makes you conclude that you are not at your best and therefore cannot and will not follow through (for seemingly justifiable reasons). You might think, “I have to be in the mood to do some things.” But, how often are any of us in the mood to do many of the tasks on which we end up procrastinating? The very fact that we have to plan them indicates that these tasks require some targeted planning and effort. When facing emotional discomfort, ADHD adults are particularly at risk for bolting to pleasant, easy, and yet often unsatisfying activities, such as eating junk food, watching television, social networking, surfing the Internet, etc. In fact, sometimes you may escape from stressful tasks by performing other, lower priority errands or chores. Thus, you rationalize violating your high-priority project plan in order to run out to fill your car with gas. This strategy can be seen as a form of “plea bargaining”—“I will do something productive in order to justify not doing the higher priority but less appealing task.” Moreover, these errands are often more discrete and time limited than the task you are putting off (i.e., “If I start mowing the lawn now, I will be done in 1 hour. I don’t know how long taxes will take me.”), which is often their appeal—even though they are low priority, you are more confident you will get them done. You need not be “in the mood” for a task in order to perform it. A useful reframe is the reminder that you have “enough” energy to get started and recall that once you get started on the first step, you usually feel better and more engaged. Breaking the task down into its discrete steps and setting an end time help you to reframe the plan (e.g., “I’m tired, but I have enough energy to do this task for 15 minutes.”). Rather than setting up the unrealistic expectation that you must be stress-free and 100% energized before you can do tasks, the notion of acceptance of discomfort is a useful mindset to adopt and practice.

I am disturbed by people's willingness to stroll through death's door just to avoid some minor inconvenience.

I don’t let him finish. “You are so full of yourself. Can you even hear what you’re saying? Cash, I can assure you, you have had exactly zero impact on my life except for some minor inconveniences and a firm belief that money can’t buy sense, tact, or common decency.

Indeed, in the truth which God is, no suffering which befalls us is so minor, whether it be a kind of discomfort or inconvenience, that it does not touch God infinitely more than ourselves and does not happen to him more than to us in so far as we place it in God. But if God endures it for the sake of the benefit for you which he has foreseen in it, and if you are willing to suffer what he suffers and what passes through him to you, then it takes on the colour of God, and shame becomes honour, bitterness is sweetness and the deepest darkness becomes the clearest light. Then everything takes its flavour from God and becomes divine, for everything conforms itself to God, whatever befalls us, if we intend only him and nothing else is pleasing to us. Thus we shall grasp God in all bitterness as well as in the greatest sweetness.

The most common response to these complications is to suggest modest hacks and tips. Perhaps if you observe a digital Sabbath, or keep your phone away from your bed at night, or turn off notifications and resolve to be more mindful, you can keep all the good things that attracted you to these new technologies in the first place while still minimizing their worst impacts. I understand the appeal of this moderate approach because it relieves you of the need to make hard decisions about your digital life—you don’t have to quit anything, miss out on any benefits, annoy any friends, or suffer any serious inconveniences. But as is becoming increasingly clear to those who have attempted these types of minor corrections, willpower, tips, and vague resolutions are not sufficient by themselves to tame the ability of new technologies to invade your cognitive landscape—the addictiveness of their design and the strength of the cultural pressures supporting them are too strong for an ad hoc approach to succeed. In my work on this topic, I’ve become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.

If you experience adversity -- something pretty potent -- that you overcome on your own during your youth, you develop a different way of dealing with adversity later on. It's important that the adversity be pretty potent. Because those brain areas really have to wire together in some fashion, and that doesn't happen with just minor inconveniences.

The original Romeo, Coby Reid, had driven his car into a tree only a few hours earlier, though no one was sure if it was on purpose or not, and no one seemed interested in knowing for certain. Since Coby was not dead but merely in the hospital with a broken collarbone and a collapsed lung and spectacular damage to his wonderful smile, the cast and crew decided that the show need not be canceled but rather recast. That Buster, the stage manager, had memorized every line of the entire play seemed to make the decision fairly obvious. That his sister, two years his senior and in her final performance as a high school student, would be playing the role of Juliet was seen as only a minor inconvenience.

I'm hardly looking to marry an automaton." "But it would be convenient, wouldn't it?" Cassandra mused, coming to stand just a foot or two away from him. "A mechanical wife would never annoy or inconvenience you," she continued. "No love required on either side. And even with the expense of minor repairs and maintenance, she would be quite cost-effective.

Consistently in implementing the war on drugs, police agencies have made clear that “you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince” – very large numbers of traffic stops would have to occur before an officer might interdict a significant drug shipment (see Webb 2007). Unstated in that calculation was that many Americans would be subjected to police investigations so that a small number could be searched or arrested in the hope of finding a large cache of drugs. Those who were momentarily detained were said by the Court to have suffered only a trivial inconvenience. The key element in this targeting, which kept it hidden for so long from those who might have objected, was that middle-class Americans were largely exempt from its consequences. On the other hand, members of minority groups, especially young men, were subjected to a lot more than just an occasional trivial inconvenience. Police routinely targeted poor neighborhoods, individuals with certain forms of dress, males rather than females, younger people rather than older ones, and minorities rather than whites.

Government agencies were weakened and science discredited. Individualism had become prized above all, resulting in a false conflation of freedom with a lack of civic duty and a refusal to bear minor inconvenience

The show brilliantly depicts how the default Whiteness of tech development, a superficial corporate diversity ethos, and the prioritization of efficiency over equity work together to ensure that innovation produces social containment.5 The fact that Black employees are unable to use the elevators, doors, and water fountains or turn the lights on is treated as a minor inconvenience in service to a greater good. The absurdity goes further when, rather than removing the sensors, the company “blithely installs separate, manually operated drinking fountains for the convenience of the black employees,”6 an incisive illustration of the New Jim Code wherein tech advancement, posed as a solution, conjures a prior racial regime in the form of separate water fountains.

Biblically, the failure to remember is not always a minor oversight or inconvenience. It is often a sin. While this might sound odd to our ears, one of the chief sins of Israel was that they so often forgot God.

Minor inconveniences are just that, and nothing more.

Such perverse incentives for waste permeate the economy. Most sanitation systems charge homeowners the same rate for large amounts of trash rolled to the curb as they do for small amounts - one flat fee for all, whether your neighbor makes half the trash you do, or twice as much. But some communities use a "pay as you throw" model: make less waste to be hauled away, use a smaller size bin at the curb, and you pay less each month. Bigger trash bins receive bigger bills because there's more to haul - an eminently fair setup. With that model, an incentive to be wasteful is replaced by an incentive to be thrifty. Give each homeowner a recycling bin and make hauling its contents free regardless of the amount of recyclables inside, and another incentive is born: an economic incentive to sort trash properly (which a surprising number of people resist under the what's in it for me? objection to the minor inconvenience of sorting).

In his book White Flights, the writer Jess Row says that “America’s great and possibly catastrophic failure is its failure to imagine what it means to live together.” Row contextualizes this insight by reflecting on white postwar novelists who erased their settings of “inconveniently different faces” so that their white characters could achieve their own “imaginative selfhood” without complication.

Shifting demographics are cited as evidence of the continued dimishment of white thriving. The arrival of minorities where they haven't been permitted or expected before--in the White House, on television, in literary journals, at book award ceremonies--are framed as coming at the expense of white achievement. But the losses of one white person, or even of several white people, don't represent the losses of all white people. To see evidence of a systemic conspiracy in a person of color's asecnsion to any position once held exclusively by white people, exclusively for white people, is to mistake the outlier for the system. Rather than acknowledging my experiences of racist abuse or anyone else's rather than confronting the real threats people of color in this country face daily, the claim to reverse racism creates a false equivalency between subjugation and inconvenience.

Although it can and at times almost certainly should be, compassion need not be synonymous with what might generally be considered agreeableness, rather the compassion being referred to here more suggests a sympathetic understanding of others’ lack of agreeableness. An awareness serving to help calibrate our easily incited impatience or anger or finger-pointing or disdain towards others over mostly nothing, or things that we can’t really know or understand. There is a suffering and confusion a part of existence that we all know and feel yet seem to so often struggle to grant others. To not see the so obviously unobvious thing behind everything. To hate. To seek vengeance. To frequently act on anger. To declare certainty in almost anything. All contradict the very struggle and confusion of life that we feel such a pain over in the first place. How often do we turn minor inconveniences into major ones over this lack of consideration? Or worse yet, turn tragedies of random circumstance into tragedies of hatred? It’s not that if one is annoyed by or disagrees with another person or group, they shouldn’t. Nor should they not try to work for what they believe in or against what they disagree with. But it is perhaps worth approaching all instances as often as we can. With the awareness that the ignorance and annoyance and sometimes cruelty we find in others is sometimes found by others in us. Sometimes at the same time and with equally valid reasons. Who is right in such cases? Perhaps in some of them, no one is. And perhaps not even the person who thinks they’ve trumped such an occurrence by realizing it’s happening and determining that they are superior to both parties by realizing how foolish both are. Even here, if one acts in such a way, one is exhibiting a conceit and smugness over others by thinking that they have superiorly realized the foolishness of being conceited and smug. Everyone is absurd in their attempt to trump their own absurd relationship with everything. And everyone is more the more so when they do not realize that they, even here, are also a part of everyone.

Max was wrong, Aderastos could stop death. With a flick of his wrist and the ever increasing concentration on the innermost layers of the human machine, Aderastos held the DNA strands in grasping fingers. There… a chain meant to degrade over time… a minor mutation. As the Asset held Max Allard’s stunned body in ‘its’ arms, the eventualities splayed out in sheets of potentials. A single twist, measure and modification. Mortality was an inconvenient mistake. “Pryvit, Aderastos.” The sound of artificial birdsong lingered in Max Allard’s ear canals, as the bliss of his healing made him succumb to unconsciousness the moment a NEO-N caught his body in her purple silk clad arms. “Hush, Max. Mother’s got you.

One of his first acts, however, was virtually to convert that democracy into a dictatorship! Granted that he still was responsible to a Parliament, and granted that he still formed part of a Cabinet; yet his personality was such, and the power he acquired adequate, to place him in a position where both parliament and Cabinet were only minor inconveniences to be humoured occasionally, but which he held in the palm of his hand, able to swing both of them at his pleasure.