Friction-Maxxing: The 2026 Strategy for Efficiency
▼ Summary
– The author argues that the concept of escapism is now redundant because modern life is already oriented toward constant digital distraction and avoidance of real-world “friction.”
– Technology companies promote an ideology that life is inconvenient, creating tools to eliminate friction, which the author views as a dehumanizing process that exploits our natural desire to escape.
– The author advocates for “friction-maxxing,” a conscious effort to embrace and build tolerance for life’s inconveniences, such as stopping the use of location-sharing apps or AI for mundane tasks.
– A personal anecdote illustrates how forced boredom and stress during a difficult family road trip, without digital devices, led the author’s children to develop a genuine, habitual love for reading.
– The conclusion is that preserving friction is essential to defend against life-annihilating technology, requiring adults, especially parents, to model this tolerance to protect core human experiences like thinking and reading.
The modern drive to eliminate every inconvenience has quietly reshaped our relationship with life itself. We are encouraged to view basic human activities, conversation, movement, even thought, as burdens to be outsourced or avoided. This systematic removal of friction, sold to us as efficiency, risks sanding away the very texture that makes experience meaningful. Friction-maxxing emerges not as a rejection of technology, but as a conscious strategy to reclaim the small, vital resistances that define our humanity and connect us to the world.
An emerging ideology suggests most people would prefer not to be fully human, a notion tech companies claim is proven by our app usage. They invest billions in tools that smooth away every rough edge, from predictive algorithms to single-tap commands. The result is a form of dehumanization disguised as convenience. Our poetic tendency to seek escape, once a source of creativity, is now weaponized to keep us perpetually one foot out the door of our own lives. We become like force-fed ducks, consuming endless distraction until the dullness of unmediated existence feels unbearable.
This creates a vicious cycle. Once we adopt a tool of escape, whether using a ride-share for every errand or AI to draft personal messages, the act of returning to the manual alternative feels irritating and laborious. We mirror toddlers after screen time is removed, unable to tolerate the ordinary vagaries of embodied life. The joke is on us, infantilizing adults and impacting children in ways we are still struggling to name. This is precisely why a commitment to friction-maxxing is essential, particularly for parents modeling how to live.
Friction-maxxing is more than cutting screen time. It is the deliberate practice of building tolerance for so-called inconveniences, which are often just the natural unpredictability of sharing a life and space with others. The goal is to move beyond tolerance toward genuine enjoyment, then demonstrating that journey for our children. It is a defense against the life-annihilating suction of escape technologies.
Practical starting points are straightforward. Stop sharing live locations with family; make asking “where are you?” a normal interaction that preserves privacy. Abandon ChatGPT for meal ideas; buy a cookbook, text a friend, visit a market. Allow children more independence, accepting that worry, a form of productive friction, is part of caring. Invite people over without a deep clean. Babysit for a friend who resists out of convenience-aversion. Send kids on errands, comfortable they might do an imperfect job.
Each act seems small, but together they build an orientation toward friction, which is our primary defense. Without it, children have little reason to love reading or thinking for themselves. If you’re exhausted by the “screen time” debate, reorient your thinking toward friction instead.
Consider how children become readers. It rarely happens in a space where tablets and consoles offer frictionless entertainment. In my own case, a grueling, week-long family road trip in an unreliable van, devoid of digital devices, forced my sons into profound boredom punctuated by stress. With nothing else to do, they discovered books as a precious escape. That extreme, sustained attention-friction ignited a compulsive, happy reading habit. Most families won’t drive to Mexico, but the principle holds: withholding devices long enough for other possibilities to open up requires parents to endure the friction of their children’s perceived suffering.
Children are easy targets for frictionless tech because they don’t distinguish between suffering and mere friction. Adults should know the difference. Our comfort with friction is under attack, and we bear the responsibility to preserve it within our families. This erosion is everywhere. Even life-saving drugs like GLP-1s pose a philosophical question: who are we without the friction of appetite? Generative AI asks: who are we when we forfeit the friction of thinking?
Perhaps this moment offers a unique clarity. With technological innovation bearing down, we can no longer take our humanity for granted. We have a chance to see what is interesting and essential about being human when every irritant is removed. I am choosing to friction-max through it, optimistic, vaguely annoyed, and convinced my children deserve nothing less.
(Source: The Cut)
