In my late teens, I felt out of step with my peers. From the outside, we were the same - we were all a similar age, agonising over our relationships, and trying to choose the right outfit. But while my friends had supportive families, minimal responsibilities, and free time to socialise, I had two kids by 21 and was studying full-time. I was a few years out of foster care with no family support, and I was battling. It was a tough season.
This continued into my 20s and early 30s. While I parented young kids, ached with grief and guilt at every work trip or childcare conundrum, and built a career, then a business, I watched with envy as my peers figured themselves out with the luxury of time and a safety net.
The asymmetry remains, but it has shifted form. The tables have turned. My kids are older and my time increasingly belongs to me. I can read, write, and travel. Instead of sitting up nights studying or working my guts out, I can choose different friction: decoupling from technology, working on my craft, and forging new and deeper connections with my loved ones. I have a new hard now.
Filling madness with meaning
I spent yesterday afternoon with two of my cousins and their four beautiful kids. They're right in the thick of it: young kids, demanding careers, and bugger all spare time. One superhero is doing it at difficulty level 112. Her kids are 5 and 2, she's working a specialised job, and she's retraining in a new field. She fell in the door last night after pulling a 6am shift at work followed by a 4 hour lecture, right into the chaos of witching hour. Her 2 year old clung to her like a limpet as she placed her bags on the couch, lids and limbs heavy with exhaustion.
It looks like madness. But that's not how she sees it. Her husband calls it "levelling up the family." He's there for every step, rubbing her back, handling the morning shift with the kids, and reminding her that they're working for a better, brighter future. It's a crazy workload, but a temporary one they'll be forever grateful for.
It's much easier not to make choices like this. It's easier to just copy the people around you - zig when they zig, zag when they zag. But as the wise Russ Ackoff once said, you don't become a leader by imitation. Creativity is a discontinuous act. It requires coming up with new ideas, persisting against obstacles, and testing yourself. This is how you become a person you're proud of.
It's bloody hard going. Anytime you play the long game, you suffer. Anytime you put yourself in unknown situations, you doubt yourself. But you're not doing it for who you are today. It's for the version of yourself you're meant to become. The life you're meant to live. You have no idea how great you can be, and you won't find out unless you're willing to try something hard.
The cost of convenience
Convenience is the organising principle for much of modern life, and for our most ubiquitous and profitable forms of technology. Why cook when you can order fast food? Why think when you can Google?
Many conveniences make our lives easier in some ways but worse in others. The net effect and second order consequences of removing certain sources of friction from our lives are brutal. Online ordering saves a few minutes and a trip out, but writ large, it shackles us to screens and changes how our communities function. Tiny conveniences compound.
Some things need friction to have value. Writing is one. The process I'm battling right now - of writing too many words, restructuring, reading more widely than will be captured in the final product, slashing beautiful but unnecessary paragraphs... these things aren't a distraction, they're the point. Going through this process makes me better, and reading the result makes you better. Win, win.
Learning, too, requires friction. In the words of Marc Watkins, learning is friction. It is through the process of trying, testing, and failing, that we grow and change. An obsession with saving time can overshadow our innate curiosity, desire for mastery, and capacity for analysis.
Productive disagreement is another vital friction. When two worldviews or opinions collide, there is an uncomfortable moment of dissonance - one or both sides will have to give, reconsider their attachment to a belief, or find a new framing of a problem in order to make progress toward a shared vision. This is a feature, not a bug. It's how things get better for everyone.
Choosing your hard
Buffing the rough edges of a meaningful life away to something smooth and glossy is a fool's goal. Our character isn't forged through ease, our potential isn't discovered by accident, and our skills don't appear fully formed.
In our personal lives, we get to pick our hard. Parenting with connection and intention is hard, but so is raising kids you don't know or like. Going to therapy to untangle your neurosis is hard, but so is making the same mistakes over and over again. Working out is hard, but so is being unfit. Studying is hard, but so is working in a low-paid job you don't care about. Standing up for your beliefs is hard, but so is living out of alignment with your values.
In The Friction Project, authors Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton distinguish bad friction - obstacles that make the right thing hard - from good friction, which prevents mistakes or encourages better decisions. In UX, bad friction is communication that obfuscates or disorganised site maps. Good friction introduces helpful steps - pop-ups that stop you sending an email without the attachment, or the confirmation screen before a large payment.
Making things easier can be a false economy. Serving customers personally and generously is more difficult than installing a chatbot, but what does it do to your long-term sustainability? What becomes of your relationships, your business, and your future when you erode trust and goodwill? Researching and writing an essay is more difficult than generating something instant and fluent with ChatGPT, but what does it do to your mind? How will you understand core concepts, build critical thinking, make connections and improve your outlook on the world when you skip the difficult bit? When we optimise for fast, cheap, and more, we make sacrifices that affect not just us, but the world we're building.
The movement toward friction
The resistance is building. There is even an emerging trend of "friction-maxxing" - rebuilding tolerance for inconvenience in a world designed to deter us from it. By putting down our phones, cooking our own food, or hand-writing a letter, we reclaim control of our attention, health, and relationships. We rediscover our creativity, critical thinking, memory, and intelligence. Psychologists call this "desirable difficulty": challenges that improve us.
If you are choosing friction in things you care about - reading a book instead of watching Netflix, working things out rather than asking AI, reading to your kids instead of handing them the iPad - you already have the edge. Your agency and judgement have a better chance of remaining intact, while others cede their sovereignty.
What are you optimising for?
Not everything has to be hard to matter. Many things shouldn't be. If you've got a track record as a hero, a martyr, or a sucker for punishment, this is not a free pass to keep getting in your own way. Burnout is real and there is no heavenly reward for those who did it all themselves. You are not a machine. You deserve a day off and a bath.
But it is worth asking yourself some questions. Things like: What are you optimising for? In which directions are you determined to sustain, grow, and expand? Which forms of friction help you get there? Where does the hard choice become the right one?
Automating and streamlining our lives, opting out of change or challenge, or even entering a new, easier life stage, doesn't eliminate difficulty. While I was at uni struggling to put food on the table, my peers were wrestling with other dilemmas: making hard choices about their future without the clarifying, motivating purpose of a family to support. Young kids are hard, physically and logistically, but young adults are too, mentally and emotionally.
There are no winners in the comparison game, and there is no opting out of problems. All we can ever hope to do is choose ones that matter, and upgrade them as we go.
But if we buy into the hope of a frictionless future, we risk the loss of something else: a life we're proud of, filled with growth and possibility. If your life feels hard right now, take comfort. You're choosing meaning, and that matters.
Til next week,
AM
