I am supposed to be adding more friction into my life – at least that’s what the #frictionmaxxers tell me. Over the past few months, friction has become a hot topic. Frictionmaxxing, coined by Kathryn Jezer-Morton in her piece for The Cut back in January, is an active rebellion against today’s technology-fueled convenience culture. As Morton put it, embracing friction is not just about reducing your screen time; it’s the process of “building up tolerance for ‘inconvenience’”. It’s walking to a restaurant and interacting with the owners, instead of ordering Uber Eats, or opening up a cookbook instead of sending ChatGPT photos of your fridge.

All of these friction-building tasks are good things to do. We know that an overreliance on AI can reduce critical thinking skills and that excessive phone use can cause mental health problems. The studies backing all this up only emphasise what many people are already feeling: the way we live our lives today doesn’t feel good in our bodies. I’ll speak for myself here: I know that I feel better when I go for a long walk and chat about the weather with my neighbours, but there are also days when it feels nearly impossible to spare a moment to actually get outside. And that’s coming from someone who works on a laptop and has no kids. With all this talk of frictionmaxxing, it had me thinking: whose life is actually frictionless?

Much of today’s talk online about friction takes the perspective of the person ordering food, not the delivery driver, whose day is full of friction. It doesn’t factor in that there are different types of friction, or how unevenly today’s sources of stress are distributed. While people in high-paying jobs figure out ways they can write creative ideas by hand instead of turning to AI, or restore antique furniture instead of buying something new, there are Amazon delivery drivers forced to pee in bottles. Almost 80 per cent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and a growing number are suffering from what experts refer to as “time poverty”, which means not having enough time for all the day’s tasks, never mind for rest, learning or personal development.

By speaking about convenience culture as a choice everyone can opt in and out of, we forget that millions of Americans would love to spend time making muffins from scratch, but are too bogged down by friction to look to it as a source of personal fulfilment. Psychologist Mic Moshel, who goes by The Cyber Psychologist online, refers to the type of friction people want to reduce (being overworked, money troubles, health issues and more) as “exhausting friction” and the more beneficial types as “productive friction”. Some people’s lives are “frictionless” precisely because they are outsourcing the more exhausting friction to low-wage workers.

“The friction is not being eliminated, it’s being passed down the line. For the person who does physically or mentally exhausting work, scrolling or a mobile game can act as a pressure valve,” says Moshel. “The product is engineered precisely for that moment, but because the brain is in this compromised state, it’s now harder to disengage.” It’s a feedback loop where exhausting friction drives people towards frictionless tech as a relief, only for it to further deplete their cognitive capacity. As Moshel puts it: “The tech is filling that recovery window, without providing actual recovery.”

“The friction is not being eliminated, it’s being passed down the line, and for the person who does physically or mentally exhausting work, scrolling or a mobile game can act as a pressure valve... The tech is filling that recovery window, without providing actual recovery”

If most of the population can’t choose to free themselves of exhausting friction, then the conversation around friction is really one about social structures, rather than personal choices, for the most part. As Dr Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Hunter College and The City University of New York, explains, convenience culture depends on an accepted trade-off: some people bear more friction so that others can experience less. “Humans are suffering because we have privileged convenience above our humanity, when convenience disembodies us and anchors us away from our values,” she says. “We need to feel that we have purpose and are connected, but there’s so much fracturing that – not just technology, but also the way our institutions have let us down.”

While speaking to Dr Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, she asks me to think about what memories have brought me joy over the past two months. “I promise you it wasn’t pressing a button to get your Seamless order or using an AI filter to go through your emails more efficiently,” she says. “It was when you got together with a bunch of friends, took a hike, got stuck in the rain or had a picnic under a tree.” And she was right: those moments do make life feel worth living. But I know it’s also not as simple as telling people to put down their phones. “All of us have to think about what type of friction moves us away from our values, and what moves us away from what we want to achieve in the world,” Dr Dennis-Tiwary says. 

If we know that productivity and optimisation culture are pulling us away from ourselves, what do we do when it feels inescapable? On a personal level, try to get off the hedonic treadmill in whatever ways you can. Ask yourself what makes your life worth living, as Dr Dennis-Tiwary suggested, then see if there are ways you can trade your phone for a book, your laptop for a notebook, or a night spent doomscrolling for a craft night with your friends. Reject AI suggestions when typing an email and take the long way around your Google search (actually reading the articles, not the summary). Protect your attention. It’s a valuable resource. “Almost anything that’s worth doing or considering, like having a conversation or asking yourself what you want to do with your life, requires problem-solving and a degree of attention,” says Moshel.

On a collective level, be mindful of the friction you are offloading onto others, and recognise that our so-called “frictionless” society, filled with frictionless tech, is built on the backs of those who have been forced to frictionmaxx (but not in the good way) for decades. Convenience culture is only alluring because it’s designed to plug into the systems that are exhausting us, and, as Moshel points out, it’s more difficult to notice the problematic loop developing when your attention is depleted. In other words, don’t blame yourself (or others) if you feel too burnt out to frictionmaxx. After all, people need to be free of exhaustive friction to even start to think about productive friction to begin with.