Why We Need Friction
March 13, 2026
For my first apartment, I signed up for the cheapest possible phone service: ten calls per month. Gymnastics ensued, with exasperated friends forced to call back if I rang once and hung up. In our first home, my husband and I shared, with elaborate politeness, a computer—“Did you need the computer sweetheart?” “Oh, no, not if you do, go ahead.” When my car window got stuck, I amused myself for a solid year by using barbecue tongs shoved through the open two inches to wave my security card and enter my employer’s gated parking lot. When my alarm clock broke, my sweet husband would set an alarm for me then, half-awake, reset one for himself an hour later.
Okay, I am cheap. Frugal at first by necessity and later for the fun of it. But what interests me more is how fondly I remember those workarounds. These days, Alexa wakes me—but she does not love me. We each have our own laptop and spend far too much time in front of it. My car window works fine, but Mini does not even make a stickshift anymore, so driving has ceased to be fun. Our phone use is unlimited, but we dread most of the calls—telemarketers and poll takers, nearly always, because our friends make appointments to chat.
I touch my phone’s liquid glass to call them back, missing the slight vibration of guiding an old rotary phone dial to the right number and the zzztttt as it spins back. I miss the scritch of a pencil, indenting the smooth paper ever so slightly as I jot emphatic notes. I miss sifting through sale dresses on an overcrowded rack, gauging the quality and softness of the fabric under my fingertips
In a word, I miss friction. That term gets tossed about a lot lately; basically, it means resistance, an opposing force that slows you down. Tech smooths the way and speeds us forward—but friction makes the world feel more real, somehow. I took a free online poetry class and wound up dropping it, first time ever. It was too remote, too abstract, too easy. No personalities to learn, no trafficky battle to get there on time, no shared glances at moments of insight or wit. Sitting in front of that screen, I felt weightless, disconnected, not quite present.
Product designers like that. They avoid friction at all costs, preferring a “choice architecture” whose sexy convenience requires zero exertion. Scrolling is infinite, effortless, addictive. Committing to buy or like requires a single tap. Steps are collapsed and decision points eliminated, so there is little chance for hesitation before we commit to an expensive purchase or subscription. Soon we will be able to just bat an eye at the screen to finalize the purchase. So why, if consumption has been made easy, do the transactions seem so overwhelming and exhausting?
To me, it feels better, clearer and cleaner, to have fewer choices, to rely more on my own mind, to take more time with even the smallest acts. Made a little clumsier, a little harder, those acts begin to feel meaningful. Repeated, they become rhythmic extensions of my body into the world. For years I reflexively chose teabags and the microwave; now I am surprised to find a sweet satisfaction in boiling the water and steeping my Italian Earl Grey tea leaves for exactly four minutes. The ritual inserts a slow, deliberate pause in my day. If I close my eyes, I can feel the rest of the world rushing past me in a blur while I wait the full four minutes.
Crazy, how our sense of time and speed and lateness have all sped up, now that there is no friction to toss in a few speed bumps. Weird, that even as I bemoan how overbusy I am and scrounge for an extra ten minutes in the day, I find myself missing the old demands on my time and my mind—and the pride and calm that came from meeting them. Posing a question to an AI agent and receiving a comprehensive answer before my finger has lifted from the Enter key is amazing, and I do not want to give up that access. Yet it is nowhere nearas satisfying as spending a rainy afternoon in a library, sifting through stacks of books and poring over the few that would yield my answer. I used to carry home the feel of the pages, and idle thoughts and questions would pop into my mind as I read. The information was not concise, chatty, bulleted. It had to be worked with, sorted and integrated and interrogated. But even though I spent—today we would say wasted—many hours of labor to discover fewer usable bits of knowledge, I wound up knowing more.
Nothing is stopping me from going back to the library. Will I? Right after I write a few letters in longhand and bake bread from scratch for my new neighbor…. Socially, friction is vanishing fast. Lockdown showed us how to live in isolation and order whatever we needed online. Now, meetings, parties, even errands feel a bit more effortful. A meeting on Zoom sounds like a relief until I remember I hate it. Texting keeps me in touch with friends so swiftly and constantly, I forget how much I miss them.
Friction means real conversation, sometimes delicate, painful, or deep, conducted in person, without distractions. It makes sure my opinions are deliberately considered before they reach the world. It takes me to a meeting and seats me next to someone whose heavy perfume is strange to me, as is her culture, and makes me struggle to understand her. I must explain myself clearly and completely, not count on the shorthand of similarity, and I must listen with full attention and an extra vigilance for all my private biases and filters. Is it any wonder people have holed up instead?
We are not likely to go back to asking strangers for directions; no one will know how to give them anyway. Nor have we retained the patience to stand in long lines or wait for a bank cashier. But we can still play around with navigating a physical space, maybe on a hike. Or speculate about a big question with a friend before either of us reaches for AI. Or handwrite a love letter. Keep a few skills alive, so they do not atrophy and cast us adrift.
There is, of course, still plenty of the wrong kind of friction. The belled and whistled weather forecasts that throw charts at you when all you want is a two-sentence prediction for the next several days. The new tech snags with every update. The “sludge” of bureaucratic minutiae, long lines, endless and complex forms. None of that is soulful, unless you are simply trying to harden Stoic forbearance.
But the friction of difference, of interacting with other humans, of taking time to do physical tasks? That is what humans were made for. Why bother to be embodied, if we are not going to encounter one another (we used to be a social species) or use our arms to make things and our legs to move through the world?
Friction could chafe, and it often wore us out. But it stopped us from sliding.
