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It’s understandable that this “frictionless existence” is so appealing when so many parts of the “real” world feel unbearable.
Widespread suffering, hate, a dying planet, rising cost of living: retreating into a TikTok feed of endless cat videos or ghosting a friend is a natural reaction to what has become known as overwhelm.
But what do we lose when we outsource to technology the gritty, awkward and uncomfortable parts of what make us human?
“When friction disappears, we miss some of the richest parts of life: serendipity, connection and meaning,” says Dr Tim Sharp, a psychologist and founder of The Happiness Institute.
“The small inconveniences, such as walking to pick up dinner, browsing a bookstore, striking up conversation with a neighbour, are often where community, connection and very often joy live.”
“Positive psychology tells us that wellbeing is deeply rooted in relationships, engagement and purposeful action. That’s why I’ve often encouraged people to consider intentionally adding back a little friction; because the messy, imperfect parts of life are often where happiness hides.”
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I recently celebrated two years of sobriety, and in that time, I have become deeply familiar with discomfort: the initial awkwardness of meeting new people, the pain of a broken relationship or the bored madness of spending too much time with one’s own thoughts, sans substances. It sounds trite, but pushing through this discomfort is what has helped me make huge strides in recovery and become a happier and more connected person.
A few months ago, I cancelled my Spotify subscription and started using Qobuz, a French-founded alternative. As a decades-long Spotify user, I’d become accustomed to the sophisticated algorithm, spoon-feeding me new artists like a delicious happy meal.
Qobuz’s algorithm, which doesn’t use AI, is rather primitive (it’s hellbent on playing me Meghan Trainor, whom I have no interest in listening to). But that’s the point. It’s forced me to be less of a passive consumer of the artists I want to listen to, and to make a concerted effort to find the ones I haven’t discovered yet.
Promisingly, we’re seeing growing hunger for community, away from the slick, siloed world that tech can create. From run clubs to in-person dating and the resurgence of analogue culture, there’s been a shift towards embracing the hard and tedious parts of human connection.
Andrea Carter, a Canadian organisational scientist and a belonging expert, started looking into the importance of friction during the pandemic. While her research focuses on belonging in the workplace, it’s a powerful framework for examining the world at large.
Friction, she says, is an intrinsic part of belonging. Yet we’ve optimised our way towards convenience, often at great cost to our humanity and our ability to move through adversity.
“Right now, the biggest issue is we actually don’t have the infrastructure to move through [friction] anymore,” says Carter, who thinks this ability began eroding during COVID-19 with the explosion of AI-led technologies.
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“So this is where we’re going to avoid, we’re going to ghost, we’re going to withdraw. It’s fascinating because friction is now treated like a failure, rather than the cost of community, closeness or belonging,” she says.
She draws a straight line between this allergy to inconvenience and rising rates of loneliness, a decline in emotional intelligence, growing familial estrangement and an erosion of trust in institutions. This friction-averse mindset works as a feedback loop, says Carter, intensifying individualism and division in the physical world.
There’s an ethical dimension to the slick ease that technology has afforded us, too.
In Frictionlessness: The Silicon Valley Philosophy of Seamless Technology and the Aesthetic Value of Imperfection, author Jakko Kemper writes of the way the frictionless interfaces of digital consumer technologies shroud (often purposefully) the environmental and human cost that make them possible.
The cheap allure of ultra-fast fashion companies like Shein makes it easy to ignore the often unethical practices that make them possible in the first place. The convenience of typing a question into ChatGPT rather than doing the legwork of proper research makes it easy to gloss over the masses of water required to generate an answer.
Rhea Seehorn plays Carol Sturka, a woman immune to a virus that leads to a psychic harmony among every human on Earth.
Apple TV’s science-fiction series Pluribus takes the frictionless ideal to the extreme.
After a mysterious virus infects most of the people on earth, writer Carol (Rhea Seehorn) finds she is one of the few humans to have remained immune. Like artificial intelligence, the infected are all-knowing and eager to please. They anticipate Carol’s every need and desire without question.
This hive mind preaches harmony, peace and equality. But as Carol’s howl of discontent tells us, this is an empty kind of harmony, one where the interesting and prickly parts of being human have been sandpapered out.
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Injecting small doses of friction back into our lives – or “Friction-Maxxing”, as Kathryn Jezer-Morton put it in a recent article for The Cut – isn’t about eliminating technology altogether.
It’s about choosing people over convenience, and leaning into the fricative force that makes co-existence possible, by using friction productively: showing up when we say we will, leaning on one another and embracing mess. Because at the end of the day, technology won’t save us. We’re all each other has.
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