Friction Isn’t Always Bad

Friction requires energy and can slow you down. However, it’s essential: friction keeps your car on the road; in icy conditions without any resistance, maintaining control becomes impossible.

In the typewriter era, putting something on the record took effort. You carefully typed on paper, knowing mistakes meant starting over, then delivered it to the mailroom. This process made people think through their words, organise ideas, and skip the trivial.

Email erased that effort; it removed the helpful friction. Now, every fleeting thought becomes a message. With instant messaging, Slack, and notifications, we drown in communication that never needed to be sent.

AI presents a new friction challenge. Tasks that once required serious effort such as creating presentations, writing reports, analysing data now can happen in seconds. This seems like pure benefit until you realise what we’ve lost: the pause that forced us to think.

That sharp slide deck appears instantly, so why not tweak it again and again? Three iterations later, you’ve spent an hour refining what needed simple clarity, not perfection.

The universe didn’t install friction to frustrate you; it installed friction to make you pause, consider, and choose deliberately. Some resistance improves the outcome. Some struggle strengthens the result.

Don’t aim to remove all friction from your day. Remove unhelpful friction such as bureaucracy, ineffective tools, and unclear messages. Keep the friction that brings value such as pausing before you send or the effort that leads to quality and better thinking.

Easy isn’t always better. Sometimes it just gets you to the wrong place quickly.