Does life, of late, feel just too easy? Are you keen to make it harder than it already is? If that sounds like a genuinely demented question in the week that the world came close to threatened Armageddon, then fair enough. I bridled too when I read last week about friction-maxxing, the supposed trend for doing things in slightly more effortful, time-consuming or analogue ways – cooking from scratch instead of ordering a delivery, finding your way using road signs instead of just plugging in the satnav, or reading a book rather than half-listening to the audio version of it – as a form of creative resistance to the inexorable march of big tech through our lives. Times are tough enough for a lot of people without being made to feel lazy for taking shortcuts.
Besides, the list published this week by the Washington Post of ways to friction-maxx – which included such superhuman feats as seeing your friends in person rather than just WhatsApping them, and actively trying to remember something rather than just falling back on Google – sounds suspiciously like the rebranding under an irritating new name of what used to be considered merely living. Your grandparents would have scoffed at the idea that any of these things were remotely difficult, or that making an effort to do them could somehow make you a better, more resilient person.
On closer inspection, however, it turns out that’s the point. What Kathryn Jezer-Morton, the writer who originally coined the term friction-maxxing back in January was arguing is that none of these things are genuinely hard for most people – and if anything, they can be a source of deep meaning and joy. Yet somehow, she writes, we have allowed ourselves to fall for the idea that “reading is boring; talking is awkward; moving is tiring; leaving the house is daunting”, and that outsourcing all that supposed emotional labour to an app could be as liberating for 21st-century minds as the outsourcing of physical chores to the washing machine or the vacuum cleaner was supposed to be for 1950s housewives.
If you happen to be a socially awkward tech bro, anxious to offload as much of your personal life as humanly possible to someone else in order to focus on working at your startup round the clock, then perhaps the headlong pursuit of convenience at all costs makes sense. But what if you don’t want a life so effortlessly efficient, so devoid of contact with recognisably human surfaces, that it slides past mostly unnoticed while you’re hunched over a screen? Worse still, what if removing all these supposed tiny drags on our time, energy and patience risks leaving us not only unhappier, but dumber into the bargain?
For what differentiates this generation of AI tools from earlier labour-saving devices is that they largely replace mental rather than physical labour. Years of throwing the laundry into a washing machine and pressing a…
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