What it is
Friction is everything convenience removes: waiting in line, making the phone call, walking in to order, asking a person instead of an app. Every year another piece of it gets engineered away, and the pitch is always the same. Faster, easier, no awkward small talk. What the pitch leaves out is that the small talk was doing something. Almost all of the casual human contact in a normal week happens inside those inconvenient minutes.
Why it matters
A perfectly frictionless day is a day where nobody learned your name. Remove the line, the counter, and the phone call, and you've also removed every chance for the low-stakes repeated contact that weak ties are made of. Any single convenience is harmless. The problem is the aggregate, because nobody decides to become isolated. They just take the frictionless option ten times a day for five years and wake up not knowing anyone. Choosing friction on purpose is how you buy that contact back, a few minutes at a time.
What to practice
- Order at the counter and wait, instead of mobile ordering or delivery
- Call instead of texting when the topic has any weight to it
- Use the staffed lane, not self-checkout
- Run errands on foot or by bike when you can; a car is a friction-free bubble
- When tech offers to remove a human from the loop, decline
Go deeper
- Blog: Annoyance Is The Cost To Feel Human
- Blog: Make Your Routines More Work
- Blog: How to Avoid Humans
- Book: The Comfort Crisis