The Cost of Frictionlessness

i work on making things frictionless. that is a lot of what my job is. the whole business i am in is the removal of steps. the removal of waiting. the removal of effort between wanting a thing and having it.

we are almost there. you can want dinner and it arrives. you can want a stranger and they arrive. you can want an answer and it arrives. you can want a companion and one has been generated for you. everything you want is being routed toward you faster than you can want the next thing.

and i keep noticing i am less happy than i was before we started.

the assumption of the last twenty years has been that friction is the enemy. every product deck says it. every startup pitches it. remove the steps. reduce the effort. make it seamless.

but friction is where meaning lives. this is the thing we forgot.

the letter matters because it took an hour. the meal matters because someone stood over it. the walk matters because you were not carried. the relationship matters because it was hard to keep and you kept it. the book matters because you read all of it, slowly, and it changed how you thought.

when you remove the friction you remove the record of care. the thing still arrives but nothing was spent to get it there. and a thing that costs nothing means nothing. this is not sentimental. it is just how meaning works.

there is a version of frictionless that is genuine liberation. the visa. the wheelchair ramp. the search bar that finds the medical answer. friction on top of already-hard lives is cruelty and removing it is a moral act.

that is not the friction i am talking about.

i am talking about the friction that was the point. the friction that was the practice. the writing by hand. the phone call instead of the text. the difficulty of learning. the difficulty of loving. the difficulty of staying with something long enough for it to matter.

we removed those and we called it progress. and we ended up in a life so smooth that nothing catches on anything. the days slide past. you cannot remember what any of it was for.

effort is a form of tenderness. this is the thing i keep coming back to.

if i wake up early to make you breakfast the breakfast is the smaller half of what i am giving you. the larger half is the waking up early. if i drive an hour to see you the seeing you is not the point. the hour is the point. cost is what turns a transaction into a gift.

the machine removes the cost. that is what it is for. and it does not understand that in some cases the cost was what we were paying because we wanted to pay it. we were not trying to get out of it. we were saying with our time that this thing was worth our time.

i am not saying go back. you cannot go back. i order the food too. i type instead of writing. i let the machine finish the sentence. that is fine.

i am saying pick your friction on purpose. keep some. choose the parts of your life where the effort is the practice, and refuse to optimize them.

cook the meal even though delivery is faster. write the letter even though the text goes through. walk the long way. love the difficult person. keep the ritual that has no reason to exist except that you keep it.

the frictionless life is a life with nothing to hold onto. it slides.

the friction is the grip.

— bella