The Danger of Making Things Too Easy: The Value of Friction
Though the definition can span several levels, from the metaphoric to the metaphysic, the friction of which I speak in this article is the effort needed to accomplish a task.
And my thesis here is that, while people and collectives have aimed to reduce this friction as much as possible, we might just want to add back in some of it for our own health and wellbeing.
I’ll grab a few examples of where we could use a little more friction, especially cases in which its reduced and reducing to almost nothing today:
Food: With the click a button or a quick call, almost anything can arrive at our doorstep, including prepared foods and convenience and junk foods and even fully loaded restaurant meals.
Products: One-click ordering? Automated orders based on usage or timing? You barely even need to shop on-line anymore for product charges to magically appear on your credit card.
Services, Subscriptions, (and even Donations): Through one-time-set-up subscriptions, you can automatically receive services and make donations of all kinds.
Errands: Outsource to someone else the need to do almost anything errand-related, from laundry to grocery shopping and beyond.
Integrations: Keep everything within one digital ecosystem or managed by an application (that automatically synchronizes and integrates with your other digital tools) and you won’t even need to toggle between or juggle even already-digital time-saving products and services.
Obviously, we all love ease, convenience, minimum efforts for maximum results.
Hence the seduction of these friction-free options.
In the past, I’ve been lured into friction-free. Over time, though, I’ve started to change my perspective and my habits to add some friction back into my life—insight-driven activity undoubtedly aided and abetted by having spent my career to date in marketing, which has kept me informed on what’s happening behind the scenes with these friction-free movements.
Because, obviously, the greatest benefit to decreasing the amount of friction in everyday human life accrues to corporations and organizations and institutions. The more they can sell us and keep us in the digital ecosystems they control, the better for their top lines and agendas.
They can sell us a lot more when they can play into our natural desires to get more by doing less. They can sell us and influence us a lot more when they reduce the time required for us to move from consideration to purchase and from idea to ingrained belief.
Further, the more they can sell us and the more they can keep us in their digital ecosystems for purchases and activity, the ever greater masses of data they can collect with ever greater overall market value that they can then sell to other corporations and organizations and institutions who can sell us more stuff or ideas and ideologies (I’m looking at you, political actors) or gamify us or influence us in other ways according to their best interests—and rarely ours.
And so.
Sometimes, even when I could easily reduce friction—and even when I am sorely tempted to do so—I keep the friction in place.
I have an iPhone, though I have a PC. Given the privacy protections I’ve put in place on the iPhone, many “features” don’t function. I avoid applications of all kinds (computer and phone) in favor of logging in via my browser, through which I’ve enabled several layers of privacy protection that require I take extra steps to get stuff done (and don’t allow me to do certain things—the difficulty a red flag that tends to keep me off the sites in question). I subscribe to nearly nothing, preferring one-off purchases and donations. When I have no other option than a subscription, I pass where possible or, if I cannot pass for some reason, I know that I’ll catch it when my to-do preset task appears to review my accounts and cancel unused or unvalued subscriptions. I don’t save my credit card in applications and digital stores. I actively choose software and services from different providers and in different digital ecosystems, to have fewer single points of failure and to give less data and control to any one player. I use masked e-mail addresses to make life harder for the data brokers.
More practically, I go to the grocery store or market (and sometimes several) and do my own food shopping. Same with all other regular errands, from buying home supplies to purchasing clothes and gifts and other goods. I prepare and cook my own food from scratch (not from preprepared ingredients)—unless I’m treating myself to a sit-down restaurant meal.
Further—and fortunately, given that I live in an urban area where I can do so—I take my friction-enabling to a physical level: I walk to run errands and get things done in almost all cases, unless the errand will take me far afield and, therefore, necessitates that I take public transportation, whether the bus or the train. Further, given that I live in an apartment, I take the stairs rather than the elevator even when I carry my shopping on my shoulders.
And I could go on.
Does this mean I spend time I could avoid spending and I use precious brain power—and more applications and devices—than I might need to use otherwise? Yep.
Does it mean that sometimes I need to give into less friction due to time or health or life constraints? Of course. I consider the option a luxury, and I’ll take it when I need to take it.
However, the benefits to enabling friction are immense in terms of my privacy, my security, my savoir faire about how and what I do and is done for me, my awareness of my spending and my activities, and my health in using my body not just for yoga and hiking and dedicated “physical fitness” activities but also in terms of using my body for daily life-maintenance activities, or “functional fitness” efforts. Not to mention that preparing my own food means much more awareness of what I consume—and that eating cookies means making a batch from scratch (and all the associated clean-up), which keeps me from eating as many cookies as I otherwise might.
Something for us all to consider?