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There is, and we've reached it, argues Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a columnist for the Cut who coined the term “Friction-Maxxing” in a recent article. She lays out her plan to build up her tolerance for inconvenience, which she says isn't even true inconvenience but rather “just the vagaries of being a person living with other people in spaces that are impossible to completely control.” Her strategies: delete Chat CPT, stop sharing your location, offer to babysit for a friend. Make life just a little more annoying.
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This idea is a powerful counterpoint to most of the messaging we can't help but receive. It encourages us to look at technology skeptically and ask what it really wants from us. Convenience is nice, but it always comes at a price. It's nice to remember that we're in charge of how we use it. We don't have to order our coffee ahead of time on an app, even though it saves us a couple of minutes. We can talk to the barista, get a dose of human interaction, and maybe even learn something. What are we in such a rush for anyway?
Friction-Maxxing might be the thing that saves us from our own worst tendencies: 'frictionmaxxing is really humanmaxxing'
What if making life harder actually made it more worth living?
We're used to convenience. You can DoorDash every meal, call up any movie to your TV screen, and use AI to write your emails. Advances in technology have mostly been focused on making our lives "easier." But this tech sometimes sells us solutions to problems that we didn't know we had. It leads us away from the regular human duties of chores, correspondence, and even leaving the house. If these tech companies had their way, we'd be in our houses 24/7, all of our needs met, hooked up to an infinite drip of dopamine that they are in control of. Instead of schlepping to your local library to flip through an encyclopedia to get an answer to a question like "how much does an elephant weigh," you can conjure up a truckload of information without even getting out of bed. Instead of making plans with a friend to talk through a breakup, we can fire up ChatGPT for some instant advice. Instead of visiting our local butcher to ask what cuts are good right now, we Instacart whatever cut the store's algorithm shows us first. We've all assumed this is a good thing. We aim for "frictionlessness." But is there a tipping point at which convenience actually hinders us?
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