Allow Friction Into Your Life

The case for making some things less efficient

Hi Friends,

In last week’s post, I wrote about how we’ve shifted from having a scarcity of mental health awareness and resources to having an excess of them. This traps us in a vicious cycle of ‘too much’ that backfires and ends up increasing our misery. I go on to argue that one way to disrupt this vicious cycle is to pick just one helpful thing and then do it.

In today’s post I make the case for, perhaps counterintuitively, allowing more friction into our lives. By friction I mean things that require us to slow down and put in effort, or that aren’t particularly smooth or efficient, but reflect our values. Doing this ‘just one thing’ can help us step off the self-betterment hamster wheel and build more enduring happiness and satisfaction in our lives.

Enjoy!

Warmest Regards,

Tracy

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What were the last three things you did that truly delighted you, that gave you a deep sense of pleasure?

Take a minute to think about it and notice what populates your list: Was it binge watching your favorite streaming show? Doing a week’s worth of shopping online? Getting something done faster or easier?

I bet not. I would wager that the things that leapt to mind were things that were more time consuming, more effortful, and more emotionally uneven with both ups and downs - like creative acts, relationships, time-consuming or challenging activities, and obstacles surmounted.

It’s the hike you went on with friends last weekend, when it rained the whole time but you made it to the top anyway, and laughed at being covered with so much mud. It’s that tough day you spent with your child, when they cried on your shoulder and nothing got better, but you were in it together and you know they felt loved and supported. Or perhaps it’s that family reunion you hosted - yes, you didn’t need to have organized trivia games and a dance-off competition, complete with color-coded team costumes. But you’d rather go big or go home.

These things have friction - they slow us down, offer up resistance, and require effort and energy. But they also bring joy and make us feel alive.

Other important experiences create friction - differences of opinions or goals, cultural differences, power imbalances, competition, navigating personal boundaries, or simply times of change. These points of friction require care and full attention. Friction lights a match - and yes that match can become a conflagration, but it can also become a tool and source of energy and growth.

We obviously couldn’t get things done if everything was full of friction. But the problem is that too many of us are convinced that the pinnacle of modern life is to become seamless, to optimize everything, especially via digital technologies: social media, streaming tv services, videoconferencing, telemedicine, ride sharing, GPS-navigation, online commerce, food ordering, meeting scheduling apps, digital payments, smart homes, smart cars, and of course the list goes on and on.

All of these things are great individually, but the avalanche of ways we can reduce effort has tricked us into believing that life hacking IS THE goal. Frictionless efficiency has become our ends, not the means to a better life.

Placing the ultimate premium on making life as effortless as possible is like eating only junk food. It feels good for a time, but fails to nourish us for long. It leaves us feeling that something is missing.

It’s the friction’y things that provide intrinsic reward - rewarding because it’s personally meaningful and based on our own efforts. Friction’y things light that match, and allow us to practice the most essential things about being human - communicating, creating, and persisting.

I believe we’re starting to course correct. You see it in things like the Slow Food movement, the return of old-school technologies (you can buy cassette tapes again!), analog hobbies like woodworking and knitting, and of course the push for less infinite scrolling screen time and more in-person experiences. These all reflect our impulse to embrace friction because the payoffs are worth it.

The bottom line: We’ve come face to face with the inescapable fact that while frictionless things make our lives easier, they don’t make us feel better or more alive. They keep us ‘productive’ but having too many of them makes us numb.

Friction By Any Other Name

I’m not making an argument for making life harder. I REALLY don’t want a harder life myself. But I want to figure out where putting in the effort will yield me the biggest rewards. That is, if I remember that efficiency isn’t the be-all and end-all, can I focus my energy better on the things that count?

I thought more deeply about the many forms friction can take after listening to an episode of Ezra Klein interviewing the writer Jia Tolentino on parenting and living the good life in the age of smartphones.

The episode starts with the question - Why have children? Ms. Tolentino’s answer surprised me. She said it was for fun and pleasure. But not the typical fun. She said,

“But the thing that made me decide to do acid for the first time is not dissimilar to the thing that made me decide to have kids, which is, I think it’ll be fun. I think on the whole, I think it’ll be fun. I felt that there would be real, lasting, kind of destabilizing, kind of boundary-dissolving pleasure in it that would kind of scare me in the way that true pleasure kind of does.

And I really hadn’t thought about it that neatly until you said that we wanted to talk about this. I don’t think I understood that, really, the thing that drove me to this was probably the thing that drives me to a lot of things, which is pleasure-seeking.”

As a mom of two, I wholeheartedly agree that having kids is truly boundary-dissolving. It’s also chock-full of an overflowing amount of friction. And as hard as that can be, that is also the pleasure of it. Because having kids - and close family you care for or taking great care of a pet - is all about the effort and obstacles and surprises we face in pursuit of the most human of human desires - to be deeply and truly known, and to know others. That’s the fun of being alive. An algorithm or a chatbot that serves us up what we ‘want’ can never know us or be known in this way. They’re too frictionless.

Inviting friction into our lives requires us to check in on our definitions of pleasure and explore how this definition drives almost every choice we make.

Doing the Hard Thing

If we want to infuse our lives with more friction in ways that enrich us, we have to start simple and do it smart.

First, pick just one area of your life in which doing things with more care, attention, and effort will be fulfilling. In other words, pick something that matters to you or is an area of life that isn’t as satisfying as you’d like. It might be the big ones, like family or work, or it might be more about daily needs, like how you’re eating or sleeping. It might be about adding joy and surprise to your life, like picking up a new skill or hobby. Try this brief value exploration practice if you need to hone in more on life priorities and what gives you meaning.

Second, ask yourself what you’re willing to do to pursue this harder thing. How much time do you think it will require per day, per week, and per month. What extra actions and efforts will be needed. In other words, get concrete as then decide if you can commit. If it seems too time-consuming or hard, pare down your goals. It’s better to do one small thing than to do nothing or too much. You’ll also probably need to think through what to let go of to create more time and space for the harder stuff. If you want to start cooking more for yourself and your family, for example, you might have to let go of something at work or reconsider whether you want to binge watch a favorite show every night or if you can take some days off.

Third, ask yourself again why you’re adding friction. What do you hope to gain? What missing piece of the puzzle is this filling? Where do you want to grow? The clearer you are, the more payoff there will be from adding something to your life.

Remember, friction shouldn’t feel exhausting or overwhelming. It should feel worthwhile. And most of all, it should make you feel more alive.