Why our frictionless lives are making us miserable and how to stop it

[upbeat music]So I wanna talk about something called friction maxing.

The name sounds a little bit intense, but the idea is really simple.

It's basically this new phenomenon about deliberately bringing a bit of inconvenience back into your life in a world that has been working very hard to remove all of it, or at the very least, to make you think you need to remove as much of it as possible.

Now, if you haven't heard of the term friction before in the way that it's referred to in regards to lifestyle rather than in [laughs] regards to physics, it's a term, and I can't actually remember the origin, so I'm gonna put it on screen, but it started to be referred to as these little points of inconvenience in your life.

So those little things we are all trying to remove by modern technology that actually maybe are what made life what it is.

Maybe they are what gave you the dopamine hit.

Maybe they are what gave your day a little bit more purpose.

And I think really despite the more dramatic example at the beginning, we all do feel the effects of that removal.

We do have same-day delivery, one-tap everything, ability to skip intros, never having to sit through ads on the TV, never having to wait for the next episode to come out, AI that writes our emails, algorithms that predict what we want before we've even thought to want it.

Even if you're not engaging in too many of the paid versions of this lack of inconvenience, it is being served to you through everything.

Like, even if you search on Google now, you don't need to find the answer.

It's gonna pop up at the very top.

And a lot of the time, we don't have to wait for things, or we don't have to inconvenience ourselves to get things in a way we used to.

We don't really have to plan ahead or tolerate boredom or sit with any discomfort because it feels like there's always a frictionless shortcut one tap away.

For example, if your friction is that you sit at the bus stop bored, or you have to walk somewhere an extra 10 minutes, and you don't wanna be alone with your thoughts, you always have a podcast or some music to listen to, something that means that you don't need to do that much that you don't want to do.

So that's friction.

And the first time I heard about friction maxing, which is, as we've said, consciously trying to reduce those areas of convenience that are unnecessary in our life, was through a piece in The Cut.

And what I found really interesting in this piece was the idea that this isn't accidental.

Tech companies have spent billions specifically engineering friction out of their products because the easier they make it for you to stay, the longer you stay, and the more money they make.

So every skipped intro, every one-tap purchase, every auto-complete is helping their business model.

The way the article put it is, "Tech companies are succeeding in making us think of life itself as something inconvenient to be escaped from." So this is, I suppose, the thesis of this whole episode.

Ease and joy are not the same thing.

I think we've all developed a tendency to conflate them constantly as if removing all of the hard parts of anything will make us happy.

I think realistically, this comes from the fact that actually life has had a lot of added areas of convenience within the past 100, 200 years that were absolutely necessary, like the fact that the large majority of us don't need to be washing our clothes for eight hours a day to be even wearing them or getting water or whatever it might be.

There was an area of added convenience that felt very essential, but it's gone beyond that essential point.