A Good Life Embraces Friction
And a soft life makes a soft person
Let’s Hear it for Friction
The bill of goods we’ve been sold in the 21st century is how friction is bad.
- “Eliminate friction in your life, you deserve more time!”
- “Frictionless interactions are the cornerstone of success.”
- “Ah, that’s a high friction way to work, we need to eliminate it so the market will decide instead.”
Friction has such a negative connotation that people use it as a euphemism for “things not going without issue.” But let’s unpack why friction is actually very good, and in fact, extremely necessary to our existence.
Walk a Mile in Any Shoes
Walking, running, biking, driving, flying: you name a form of locomotion, friction is involved. Friction might be one of those elements we want to ignore in the early stages of physics, but it is actually how we move, even with ice skating (how do you get that initial push?)
Let’s just stick to walking; when you push down into the Earth, and you are on a surface with even a slight amount of friction, your shoes stick and you push down and across the surface, thanks to friction. You pushing down and across is responded in kind by the Earth pulling you, moving you forward.
Friction isn’t the thing getting in our way; it’s the things that gets us on our way. Friction is a core part of motion.
And friction matters just as much in a metaphorical manner as it does in a physical manner. Let’s walk through some examples of how friction makes our lives better, shall we?
Secure Software is High Friction Software
How do you keep an account secure? Choose from the following:
- A simple password anyone can guess (p@ssword!) ? (low friction)
- A complex password, generated and stored in a password manager (1238129dfasid8f1231DASD!@#123123%%^!@3), and secured with a second factor like a U2F key, or rolling codes on a phone (high friction)
Hopefully I don’t have to tell you the answer. All cybersecurity is built on friction.
Making it more difficult for individuals to get into systems, with networking isolation, firewalls, secured accounts, user access controls, etc. means attackers are going to have their hands full if they want to break in.
In fact, all security is built on friction, physical or not. Locked doors, locked vaults, gated facilities, these systems are all built around friction.
Intruder wants to get in? Nah, friction’s got them.
A Healthy Life is a High Friction Life
The healthiest individuals on the planet don’t live comfortable lives, they live high friction ones:
- They make it hard or impossible for themselves to eat Oreos or consume copious amounts of ice cream.
- They put fun, relaxing activities on the other side of arduous ones, like tough workouts or sweaty sojourns
You get the point… I could say more pithy things but I’ll just give some examples from my own life.
Recently I bought an ice cream maker: I wanted to eat some ice cream but I knew just buying a pint (or a quart, gasp), would be a slippery slope to unhealthy eating. So what alternatives are there?
Well, one is to say “Matt, if you want ice cream, make it yourself you lazy bum.” And so I have. And it isn’t actually that hard of a task (assembling a lot of dairy and a lot of sugar), but it does take some planning and deliberation to do, and I also have a rule (more broadly) that I don’t drive to the grocery store. The nearest one is only 1/2 a mile, so to make my ice cream I have to walk at least a mile.
AND making ice cream shows you how the “sausage is made”, which is to say 1.5 quarts of ice cream has (at least) a whopping 3/4 cup of sugar if you follow the recipe. Every time I put that much sugar in I go “well I won’t be binge eating this.”
That amount of friction (making it myself, walking to get the ingredients, seeing the ungodly amount of sugar involved) is I think the right amount to both get what I want (ice cream) and keep what I have (a flat stomach). The healthy life is one of friction.
Talented People Tolerate Pain Others Won’t
There’s plenty of (apparently questionable) evidence around how a disproportionate amount of time invested leads to expertise/ talent. In my experience, time is not the most critical factor, but putting weight behind something you can measurably and demonstrably improve is the key to acquiring talent.
The putting the weight behind something isn’t really the part that makes talented people unique, but rather, when the sweat builds on their brow, when they have off days or crap days, they regain composure and keep pushing. They tolerate the pain, the friction that comes with trying to persist at something. They embrace friction.
Free Princesses and Free Castles Are Worthless
Lastly, I’ll take another shot at Pornography and Video Games, two industries that very deliberately remove the friction men would normally face in acquiring sexual pleasure and physical achievement.
If a good life embraces high friction, a bad life embraces low friction. Video games can be difficult, but there is variety in the sort of friction they can offer. I think the most positive video game experiences are ones that are shared, time bound, and present a challenge to the player (friction, friction and more friction).
Conversely, there are games where you are essentially pulling a virtual slot handle, hoping imaginary coins will appear. Or you can simply go online and voyeuristically watch someone else play a game. These are low friction activities that give you the dopamine hit you do not deserve.
Similarly, you can voyeuristically watch individuals engage in sexual acts, receive the dopamine hits, but fail to feed the parts of yourself that need nourishment, i.e. feelings of attachment and closeness to another.
One of the highest friction acts in the world is sorting your way through a functional relationship, but this is the act of friction that we are made for and also made from. (Yes I do see the double meaning, hehe).
The princess and castle that you work every day to earn are worth so much more than ones you type into a search bar, for more reasons than I can enumerate here. But friction >> frictionless.
Embrace Friction
Make your life harder, in a way that makes you do more of what is good for you, and makes you a tougher person. Not all friction is worthwhile, so choose the pain you deem worth it for the reward.
But don’t just choose that pain, embrace it.
