Sealed Wisdom

Tearing into Enlightenment

Winston Churchill said a man is only as big as the things that make him angry.

If that's true, then I'm about as big as a packet of ketchup. Or a tub of salad. Or a screw-top lid.

Is food packaging getting harder to open or do I just notice it more? I suspect it’s the latter. The price I pay for progress is an ever growing expectation of convenience.

But instead of striving to design flawed food packaging out of our lives altogether, we should hope to encounter it from time to time—and even cherish it when we do.

Few things disabuse a man of his intelligent view of himself more than an obstinate bag of nuts—and the humour of watching someone lose that battle stems from the fact they're a normal person suddenly being thrust into an abnormal situation.

When I go toe-to-toe with a sac of ketchup, I wish I had the awareness to stand back and appreciate the impossibly long and extraordinarily intricate supply chains that have been established just so I can have what I want.

I don’t think it’s reaching too far to suggest that packaging tussles are opportunities to practise some delayed gratification; to cultivate more anticipation and salivation for the food I'm about to yam down so fast I barely taste it!

A food packaging faux pas could be viewed as a tamper-proof seal on our mindless consumerism. I can easily imagine artists and rebels making packaging more impenetrable to forcibly free us from capitalism’s grip. Maybe the most delicious products should be the hardest to open of all.

Unyielding products invite us to develop more agency by understanding them better. Japanese hand tools, for example, are not designed to be ergonomic; we must adapt to them instead of adapting them to us. This is the wisdom not of usability, but of discoverability.

As we make things easier to open and use, we lose knowledge of how they're made and how to fix them when they fail. Every time I think "fuck it" and give up on having ketchup on my chips—even though it’d only take me two seconds to fetch a pair of scissors—I'm submitting to the learned helplessness that comes with convenience.

Life has been much more interesting and rewarding when I've risen to the challenge of overcoming barriers. If this is true at the macro scale of work and personal development, then why wouldn't it also be true at the scale of a packet of ketchup?

A stubborn ketchup packet is a palate-cleanser for the soul.

---

Thank you Andrew Printer, Tommy Dixon, Diana-Maria Demco, Priya Nain, Victoria Shillingford, Vincent Tam, Manu Kumar, Alec McNayr, Linart Seprioto, Andrew Bertodatti, Paudan Jain, Lavinia Iosub and the whole team at Write of Passage for reading drafts and helping me with this piece.

---

💡 Never miss an idea like this; subscribe for free or become a paid subscriber for access to the exclusive Ideas I Didn’t Date series. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Another idea you might like: when principles come before friendships →

---