From ordering groceries online to using AI to write emails, technology is making life exponentially easier. But while that may be appealing, it has also become a crutch, and constantly outsourcing our thinking can be detrimental in the long term, according to experts. A new trend called friction maxxing seeks to reintroduce discordance into our lives.
‘Building up tolerance for inconvenience’
Tech companies are succeeding in “making us think of life itself as inconvenient” and an endeavor we should be “continuously escaping” from into “digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands,” sociologist Kathryn Jezer-Morton said at The Cut. The businesses have invested “as much money as possible in friction-elimination tools that effectively dehumanize users.”
It is a method that is “especially evil” because our “love of escaping is one of humanity’s most poetically problematic tendencies, and now it’s being used against us,” said Jezer-Morton. Enter “friction maxxing,” which isn’t “simply a matter of reducing your screen time.” Rather, it requires “building up tolerance for inconvenience” and then “reaching toward enjoyment.”
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Friction-maxxing practices could include navigating by road signs instead of Google Maps or arranging to meet up with friends without sharing your location. Or it could mean eschewing ChatGPT for information that could be gleaned from a book or asking other people. Each of these acts may seem insignificant, but an “orientation toward friction is really the only defense we have against the life-annihilating suction of technologies of escape,” said Jezer-Morton.
Friction maxxing may “play a valuable role in reorienting yourself away from tech dependency” and back toward “embracing the effort that makes people feel genuinely alive and fulfilled,” Mashable said. No one needs to optimize their life in “pursuit of a proverbial gold star.”
The effect of frictionless living
Despite how easy technology advancements have made simple tasks, “living a frictionless life may not be the best for your cognitive function over time,” said The Washington Post. It is basically “having a personal trainer lift the weights for you,” neuroscientist Lila Landowski said to the Post.
Over time, frictionless living could be detrimental because brain functions like learning, memory and focused attention are “use it or lose it,” brain health researcher Marc Milstein, the author of “The Age-Proof Brain,” said to the Post. You need to practice these skills to maintain them. If you’re not regularly challenging your brain, those skills can erode, he said.
And the benefit of friction maxxing isn’t just in boosting cognitive abilities. It also helps to create a more meaningful life said, Emily Falk, a professor and author of “What We Value,” to the Post. If you value building social skills, for example, the ease of writing an email with AI may not align with your values and may make life feel less meaningful. When we “make choices that seem immediately rewarding but don’t take a step back to ask if those choices are compatible with big-picture goals and values, we can get in trouble.”
Many of our decisions about convenience are driven by “short-term emotions,” said Forbes. It feels good to order delivery “because you remove the worry of your kids messing up the ingredients you need to cook.” It feels good to scroll “because you know getting into a challenging book will feel lousy (at least initially).” On the other hand, if you can “learn to grapple with these pesky emotions head-on, the long-term benefits are big.”
Our comfort with friction is “under attack,” and we “bear the responsibility of keeping friction intact as part of our families’ lives” and should “notice the ways that it’s being sanded away for profit,” Jezer-Morton said. Perhaps this is an opportunity to “think more clearly than we ever have about what is interesting and essential about being human.” We have never before “had a chance to see our own humanity so clearly,” but now, with “tech innovation bearing down on us so hard, we can’t take it for granted anymore.”
