The Case for Difficulty: Create Friction
Every time we remove friction from life, we remove a connection point.
Friction is resistance. It's the effort required to do something. It's what slows us down, makes us work harder, forces us to engage. And we've spent decades trying to eliminate it.
One-click ordering. You tap a button and your purchase arrives before you've thought twice about whether you need it. Food delivered to your door so you never walk past your neighbor. Messages that send before you've reconsidered what you meant. Algorithms that show you what to watch next before you've decided what you want. Connection without ever being in the same room.
We call this progress. But what if we're optimizing away the very things that make us human?
What if friction isn't the problem? What if it's the point?
Convenience Destroys Community
Brené Brown tells a story about a village where women all got washing machines. A wonderful, time-saving convenience. And soon after, the village experienced a spike in depression.
It turns out, women gathering to wash clothes in the river was a powerful act of community. When the labor moved indoors, women lost their daily socialization and robust support systems. The washing machine saved time. It also destroyed belonging.
This pattern repeats everywhere. DoorDash removes the friction of leaving your house, talking to a cashier, waiting for your food. It also removes the belonging that comes from being a regular, from small talk with the person behind the counter, from chance encounters in line. Research shows these "weak ties," casual interactions with people you don't know well, contribute significantly to well-being and sense of community.
Self-checkout removes the friction of waiting for a cashier. It also removes the micro-interaction, the brief moment of human contact that research suggests matters more than we think. Those five seconds of "how's your day going?" with someone you'll never see again still register as connection. Remove enough of them, and you feel it.
Anne Helen Petersen wrote about getting a second car after 17 years of sharing one with her husband. She lost the communication required to coordinate schedules. The intimacy of knowing each other's daily life. The relationships with neighbors who gave them rides. The community built through carpools.
She wrote: "What I crave is belonging to other people in a way that is so real it is inconvenient."
The data backs this up. Social isolation increases risk of premature death by 50%, comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. When we no longer share chores, wait in lines, or depend on others for small acts of help, we weaken the bonds that once held neighbors, co-workers, and families together. Robert Putnam's research in "Bowling Alone" documents the decades-long decline in social capital, the networks and trust that make communities function.
Convenience culture has created what researchers call "social atomization." The less face-to-face contact in our everyday lives, the less practice we have with human connection, with fundamental principles like respect, patience, and compassion.
Identity Forms Through Effort
There's research on why people resist automation even when it's more efficient. People resist automation when it threatens what defines them. If you identify as a cook, you don't want a meal kit doing the work, because then it's the kit that made dinner, not you. The research calls this resisting "identity-relevant outcomes." Translation: we need to be able to say "I did this" about the things that tell us who we are.
Consider what requires friction:
Learning an instrument. Years of wrong notes. Hand cramps. Embarrassing performances. The payoff isn't just mastery. It's identity. You become a musician through the friction of failure.
Making art with your hands. Drawing badly before drawing well. Clay that won't cooperate. Paint that doesn't match what you envisioned. But eventually, you create something that didn't exist before you made it. That's agency. That's making your mark on the world, literally.
Building something physical. Woodworking, fixing your car, repairing your home. The frustration of things not fitting right. The scraped knuckles. The do-overs. But when it's done, you can point to it and say "I made that." You're not just consuming. You're creating.
Growing food. Even just herbs on a windowsill. Dirt under your fingernails. Plants that die. The patience required to wait for things to grow. But eventually, you eat something you grew yourself. You're not just a consumer in a supply chain. You're connected to what sustains you.
Showing up to a community event you didn't organize. A neighborhood cleanup. A town hall meeting. A local sports league. The awkwardness of not knowing anyone. The discomfort of showing up when it would be easier to stay home. But eventually, you're not just a resident. You're part of something.
Calling your representative about something you care about. Navigating the phone system. Not knowing what to say. Feeling like your voice doesn't matter. But doing it anyway. That's citizenship, not just voting.
Proposing a new idea at work. The risk of looking foolish. The discomfort of speaking up. The possibility of rejection. But eventually, you're not just executing someone else's plan. You're shaping what your team creates.
Creating an event that brings people together. A block party. A book club. A pickup basketball game. The friction of organizing, of reaching out, of risking that no one shows up. But when they do, you've created community where there wasn't one.
Identity requires contact. Meaning requires resistance. Being human requires the very friction we're trying to eliminate.
The Spectator Problem
When everything is frictionless, you float through life without touching it.
You know this feeling. You've had days where you were productive by every metric, efficient by every measure, but at the end you can't remember touching anything real. You ordered groceries and they appeared. You communicated without speaking. You moved through the world without resistance. You checked every box. And somehow, at the end of it all, you felt hollow.
You're managing life. Optimizing it. But you're not actually living it. You're a spectator watching your own existence unfold according to algorithms designed by someone else, for purposes that aren't yours.
This is what happens when you remove all friction: you remove all the points where you have to make choices. And choice is what makes you actual rather than automated. Choice is where meaning lives.
Remember Sisyphus. Condemned to push a boulder uphill forever, watching it roll back down, only to begin again. The task is meaningless. But Camus tells us to imagine Sisyphus happy, not because he transcends his fate, but because he chooses to keep pushing. The choice itself becomes the meaning. His rebellion is in continuing to engage, to choose, to touch the rock, even knowing the absurdity of it.
We're the opposite. We've engineered a life where we don't have to touch anything. Where everything flows without our engagement. We're efficient. We're frictionless. And we're slowly realizing that we've automated away the very thing that made life worth living: the act of choosing, of touching, of engaging with resistance.
Necessary Difficulty vs. Unnecessary Suffering
This isn't about romanticizing hardship. Not all friction is meaningful. There's a crucial difference between necessary difficulty and unnecessary suffering.
Necessary difficulty: Learning to cook. Burning dinner teaches you about heat control. The effort of reading recipes builds competence. Eventually, you can feed someone you love without looking at instructions. That's agency you can't order from DoorDash. The friction created something you didn't have before—competence, the ability to nourish others, connection through a shared meal, identity as someone who can create. This is friction that builds capability, creates autonomy, and connects you to what sustains you and to the people you feed.
Unnecessary suffering: Eight steps to reset your password. Forms that lose your data. Bureaucracy designed by people who don't have to use it. Friction that exists because no one with power had incentive to remove it. That's not meaningful difficulty. That's just bad design, or worse, gatekeeping. This kind of friction creates obstacles without learning, barriers that exclude people, and busy work that benefits someone else while costing you time and energy. It doesn't build anything. It just wastes.
The distinction matters. And it's not always obvious. Here are questions to help you distinguish:
Questions to distinguish:
Does this friction build capability or just waste time?
Does it connect me to others or isolate me?
Does it serve someone's power or my growth?
Would I choose this difficulty if I had the choice?
That last question matters because choosing difficulty is itself a privilege. Not everyone can afford to take risks. Not everyone has the resources to choose the slower path. Family obligations, economic constraints, systemic barriers—these are real limitations that make choosing friction a luxury some people don't have.
But here's what's also true: as thinking animals, as humans with the capacity for consciousness and choice, we have something unique. We can decide what our difficulties mean. We can choose which struggles are worth it. Choice itself is a fundamentally human capacity. Not everyone has equal access to choice, that's the privilege. But the ability to choose meaning, to decide what your resistance serves, that's part of what makes us human.
The question isn't "should everything be easy?" It's "what am I losing when I remove this particular friction?" And "who benefits from this difficulty, me or someone else?"
Choosing Friction Intentionally
Maybe you stop getting groceries delivered and go to the farmers market instead. Not because it's more efficient. Because it connects you to the people who grow your food and to your neighbors who also showed up.
Maybe you start writing by hand instead of typing everything. Not because it's faster. Because the friction of putting pen to paper, of crossing things out and starting over, changes what you're able to think. The slowness creates space for ideas you wouldn't have reached at typing speed.
Maybe you learn one song on an instrument instead of just streaming music. Not because you'll become a musician. Because making sound with your hands, even badly, is fundamentally different from consuming sound made by someone else.
Maybe you walk or bike instead of driving when you can. Not for exercise. Because you notice things at walking speed that you miss at car speed. You wave to neighbors. You discover the taco truck that's only open on Tuesdays. You're present in your neighborhood instead of just passing through it.
Maybe you show up to pick up trash in your local park with a group of strangers. Not because you're going to solve litter. You won't. But the park will be cleaner tomorrow. The families who bring their kids there will notice. The neighbors walking their dogs will see that someone cared enough to show up. Your small action leaves a visible mark on your community. And showing up when it would be easier to stay home, doing something small alongside people you don't know yet, that's how community starts. Not by solving everything. By doing something that matters to people beyond just you.
Maybe you call a friend when something's hard instead of texting. Not because it's more convenient. Because hearing their voice, navigating the awkward pauses, letting the conversation wander, that's the friction where intimacy lives.
Maybe you delete social media from your phone. Not to be virtuous about screen time. Because the friction of having to log in on a computer makes you ask: do I actually want to see this, or am I just filling time? And that extra second of choice might be the difference between scrolling and calling a friend, between consuming and creating, between spectating and living.
Maybe you turn off auto-play on streaming services. Not to watch less. Because the moment of friction where you have to choose what's next is the moment where you remember what you actually want, instead of what the algorithm thinks you'll tolerate.
Maybe you propose that difficult idea at work. The one that might get shot down. Not because you're guaranteed success. Because taking that risk, speaking up when it's uncomfortable, that's how you stop being a spectator in your own career.
Ask yourself:
Where am I optimizing away connection?
What am I trading for convenience?
What parts of my identity have I outsourced to apps, to algorithms, to systems designed to save me time?
What would I do if I weren't trying to be efficient?
Being Human in a Frictionless World
This isn't about nostalgia for a harder past. This is about recognizing what we're losing when everything gets easier.
Technology will continue to accelerate. More friction will be removed. More tasks will be automated. More convenience will be offered. This isn't stopping. The question is what you do with it.
What do you want to contribute, not just produce? What makes you irreplaceably human? What are you building that technology can't automate? The answers won't be efficient. They won't be optimized. They'll require presence and choice.
You're not anti-tech. You're pro-human. You're not rejecting efficiency. You're asking what efficiency costs. You're not advocating for unnecessary difficulty. You're recognizing that difficulty is sometimes where the necessary work happens.
If you're reading this and recognizing yourself, the emptiness despite efficiency, the sense that you're living in a world designed for speed but not for meaning, you're not alone.
You already know the optimization isn't working. You've felt the hollowness of moving through a day without touching anything real. You've had the unsettling realization that you're managing your life but not living it.
Friction is the point. Not all of it. Not arbitrary difficulty. But the specific resistance that builds who you want to become. The effort that connects you to what matters. The inconvenience that creates belonging. The choice that makes you actual rather than automated.
This is what it means to be human in a frictionless world: choosing, deliberately, the difficult things that make your life yours. Not efficient. Not optimized. But real.
Sisyphus keeps pushing his boulder. Not because it's easy. Because the choice to engage, to touch the rock, to keep pushing despite the absurdity—that's where his humanity lives.
The question isn't whether life has inherent meaning. The question is what meaning you create through your choices, through your friction, through your engagement with what resists you.
References
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