Convenience Is Stealing Our Community (And We’re Letting It)

I’ve been thinking a lot about how easily we let other people do life for us.

Not just cook for us - do life for us.

Restaurants now survive, as Derek Thompson pointed out, not because we’re all sitting in rooms together breaking bread, but because they’ve adapted to a culture that eats alone, on the couch, while doom-scrolling. Delivery didn’t just save restaurants - it saved us from showing up. And like Ellen Cushing writes, that has a cost: the more a restaurant becomes a take-out window, the less it’s a third place. The less we’re in rooms together, the more our lives flatten.

Swap “restaurant” for “community” and you have exactly what we’re fighting with Get Out.

The trade we keep making

We keep telling ourselves we’re too tired, too busy, too far away - so we pay for convenience. We order in. We watch online. We like the post instead of going to the thing. And the platforms cheer us on: “We’ve made it so easy!”

But convenience, at scale, is rarely neutral.

• It de-skills us: we stop doing the hard, small, social work of arranging our own lives.

• It de-ritualises us: Friday drinks become Friday Uber Eats.

• It de-socialises us: we get the service, not the serendipity.

And then we look up, two years later, and ask, “Why does everything feel thinner?”

The queer layer no one says out loud

For queer people - especially those outside capital-C Community cities - convenience is seductive because it gives us access. We can watch a talk from Qtopia Sydney from Hobart. We can join a WhatsApp group in Meanjin (Brisbane) from Wynyard. We can consume queer culture without having to navigate a bar, a stare, or a train fare.

That’s good.

But the shadow side is this: the more we consume community, the less we practice making it. We become expert downloaders of queer content and beginner-level conveners of queer spaces.

That matters, because belonging is a skill. Hosting is a skill. Inviting is a skill. Making a queer room safe for a kid with ADHD and a 53-year-old lesbian migrant and a 20-something non-binary person new to town is a skill. And we’re outsourcing it to platforms whose entire business model is “don’t make the user work.”

But community requires work.

Tech that outgrows us

The articles about restaurant delivery and de-skilling all land in the same place: once a tool makes life easier, we forget how to do it the old way. You can see it in hospitality, but also in learning, in driving, in reading, in - yes - dating.

• We used to go to restaurants. Now the restaurant comes to us.

• We used to go to the queer bar. Now the queer bar goes on Instagram.

• We used to go to the meetup. Now the meetup is a Discord you can mute.

Every time the system removes friction, we lose practice. And then when something requires effort - to show up in person, to stay for two hours, to talk to strangers - it feels harder than it actually is, because we’re out of shape.

Convenience made us socially unfit.

“But I’m tired”

Me too. I work. I train. I volunteer. I write these articles. I don’t want to go out every night either.

This isn’t about never choosing a delivery. It’s about noticing how often we default to not being seen.

Because here’s the thing nobody admits: friction is often the doorway to connection.

• You get dressed → you feel better.

• You drive across town → you feel invested.

• You talk to the bar staff → they remember you.

• You see the same faces → a group forms.

Remove that, and everything becomes content - consumed, not inhabited.

Why this matters to Get Out

Get Out was never meant to be another frictionless, scroll-and-forget tool. It was built to lower the search cost of connection - not to remove the commitment cost.

We’ll show you what’s on.
We’ll map the queer week.
We’ll connect you with community organisations that match your skills and interests,
We’ll tell you who’s doing craft in Toowoomba and drag in Perth.

But we can’t go for you. And the moment we pretend we can, we’ve become the thing we’re trying to counter.

That’s why I’m wary of people asking, “Can you just make it all online?”
We can host online. We can connect you digitally. But the loneliness research - and frankly, lived queer experience - is brutally clear: there is no substitute for repeated, in-person, low-stakes contact. Not with an AI friend. Not with an IG Live. Not with an always-on Discord.

The bigger cultural question

The restaurant pieces I’ve been reading make another point I can’t shake: whole industries have re-engineered themselves around our loneliness. They didn’t cause all of it - but they learned to profit from it. Delivery companies, dating apps, social platforms, even some mental-health tech - they all make more money when we stay home and stay hooked.

That should make us suspicious.

Because if the system wins when we’re isolated, then building queer, local, recurring, in-person gatherings is quietly radical. It’s anti-extraction. It keeps money, attention, and care in the community instead of sending it up the chain to a platform that wants to see you stay single.

So, what do we do?

Let’s make this practical, because I know people like that.

1. Re-introduce friction on purpose.
Pick one thing this week you could DoorDash or stream and instead: go. Sit in the room. Talk to one human. That’s it.

2. Protect hard skills.
Keep planning dinners. Keep running/attending queer sport. Keep learning to host. These are community skills - if we don’t use them, we lose them.

3. Choose rooms over feeds.
If you have 60 minutes: 10 minutes to check the Get Out calendar, 50 minutes to attend something. Reverse the ratio.

4. Build for participation, not perfection.
Our events don’t have to be flawless. They have to be happening. People don’t bond over spotless execution; they bond over shared experience.

5. Keep tech in its lane.
Use AI, delivery and dating platforms to support connection, not replace it. If the tool makes you lonelier, it’s the wrong tool.

Where I land

We don’t need to become Luddites. We do need to become choosy.

Because the question isn’t “Is delivery bad?” or “Is AI bad?” or “Is online community bad?” The question is: What kind of human does this habit make me? Am I more connected, more practiced, more useful to my community - or more isolated, more passive, more entertained?

Convenience will always say, “Stay home, we’ve got it.”
Community will always whisper, “Come anyway, we need you.”

I know which voice I want Get Out to amplify.