My friend felt vaguely bad, but I wondered aloud if he might, in a grander sense, be doing the kid a favor. It’s easy, especially if you live a certain type of middle-class striver lifestyle in a city like New York, for each day to become a series of frictionless conveniences sliding into each other uninterrupted, everything constantly available, delivered contactless, hands-free, on-demand — it’s easy to forget (because you are willed to forget) the vast chains of human labour that go into producing everything you consume. You lose sight of what you’re paying for and why you’re paying for it, aside from a nebulous feeling of want and the acquiescence to the cultural maxim that paying is what you do when you want something. When objects are inert and opaque, appearing magically in front of you with no conceived connection to resources or labour or production, it becomes impossible to solidify any concept of their value (why shouldn’t a knit sweater be $35 instead of $175 once the object sits in the store, de…