This is a bit out of topic for me and this site but I've recently been thinking about this and wanted to share my view on it.
1. How our system is changing towards convenience & instant gratification over quality
Since around 80 years ago, our society has started to shift its main focus to convenience over everything else. Supermarkets, food delivery, social media, AI and a lot more are some of the results of that change. They make acquiring food extremely easy, make you connect with people and build fame one click away. And now with AI even make searching for and processing information require zero effort. They are all designed to off-load thinking from your brain to the companies.
Before that, for example, acquiring food meant having your own sources - gardens, hunting, going to the local bazaar to get seasonal food and nothing else. Getting famous also required a lot more effort than just laying in your bed and being able to post content. Food delivery transforms getting dinner from a chore to being one-click away, and the algorithms in all of these (yes even supermarkets have physical ones) are designed to make you think less and just indulge and let the system choose for you.
2. Why this makes it harder to instill change
The more our current late-stage capitalism develops, be it slowly and with ulterior motives, the less likely a systematic change can occur. That is because people's lives are overall getting a lot easier, everything you can ever want is at your fingertips, and requires less and less thinking to achieve or get. And the more we get used to that, the less likely we want to make a change a.k.a "use our brain" to bring difference. Also since people want everything to happen instantly, and have lost most of their patience due to this system, and the exploitative companies reinforcing it, people value short-term reward over long-term progress. Meaning if we make a real change, it will most obviously require a lot of effort and will, for a while, lower our quality of life (example: communist revolution of 1917 in Russia). And we aren't even to blame for our unwillingness to go through that - this is how our brains are wired by design and companies are just using it to exploit us.
3. Examples
As seen with previous calls to action for change, people are more willing to continue their way of life, even if it is not the best it can be, instead of commit to a change that will give them a higher quality of life later on. One example is several people I know from my home country - they absolutely hate it, but for them moving abroad is stressful because it requires a lot of steps that are currently not known to them, and they see that as having to put it extra effort to learn that compared to them just continuing to live their current lives. Another thing is risk - the "abroad" is unknown - from culture, to language, to geographical information and overall just lack of familiarity. All of those factors make moving seem extremely unstable since there is a very real risk of not being able to integrate into the country and become homeless or result in a lower quality of life.
Another example is changing your consumption habits from a fast-food unhealthy diet to a healthy one. Ultra-processed, fried, easy to make foods have become the epicenter of convenience, from acquiring them at fast food chains to even the supermarket. They are designed to remove a lot of the thinking required for you to make a choice, and make it more desirable since it is either ready-to-eat or extremely easy to prepare. They are also stuffed with chemicals to make it more tasty and even sometimes addictive. Most people are aware that these foods are extremely unhealthy. Still, a lot cannot switch to a better diet. Either because healthier options are expensive (fast food is made as cheaply as possible on purpose), harder to acquire, require more thought to prepare into dishes and overall taste worse. They are LESS CONVENIENT.
4. How we might be able to change this
We need a way to slowly phase out the use of these services, either by actively looking for a change and doing our best to replace them with something better. Surprisingly, that is becoming easier and easier as time goes on, as the quality of these services is degrading little by little - fast food is getting more expensive, with the quality of ingredients becoming worse, social media is starting to get full of bots and companies, which makes it less desirable to use and more people are becoming aware and starting to put in effort to get away from this lifestyle. A more concrete solution in my opinion would be to force the companies themselves to either change or outright cease function. This would be easier because it wouldn't put the responsibility of stopping the usage in the hands of the users but the providers themselves.
