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Picture this: it\u2019s Friday night, and you don\u2019t have anything in the fridge. What do you do? If you\u2019re anything like the 3.5 million Australians who have downloaded UberEats, you could have groceries or a steaming bowl of pad thai delivered to your doorstep without so much as getting off the couch.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t know what to watch? You can mindlessly scroll TikTok for bite-sized entertainment, or visit a streaming service if you\u2019re after something longer than 10 minutes.<\/p>\n
Need to write a birthday card for an aunt you haven\u2019t seen in a while? ChatGPT has you sorted<\/a>.<\/p>\n Looking for company? Hinge, Tinder or any number of dating apps can hook you up (although no guarantees on the quality of your match).<\/p>\n Heck, if you\u2019re in China, there\u2019s now even an app that allows you to verify someone hasn\u2019t died<\/a> without actually contacting them yourself. <\/p>\n Since its inception, the north star of Silicon Valley tech bros has been a life without friction: designing seamless user interfaces that promise ease and convenience. But is this a good thing?<\/p>\n In July, US author and economic commentator Kyla Scanlon spearheaded these ideas in an episode of The New York Times podcast The Ezra Klein Show<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cBasically, the idea of friction is that there is value in things being a tiny bit difficult,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we use digital tools, there really isn\u2019t a lot of friction. For instance, dating apps make dating very easy. DoorDash makes getting things to your house very easy. You can have this frictionless existence, whereas in the physical world, there\u2019s a lot of friction.\u201d<\/p>\n Editor’s pick It\u2019s understandable that this \u201cfrictionless existence\u201d is so appealing when so many parts of the \u201creal\u201d world feel unbearable.<\/p>\n Widespread suffering, hate, a dying planet, rising cost of living: retreating into a TikTok feed of endless cat videos or ghosting a friend is a natural reaction to what has become known as overwhelm.<\/p>\n But what do we lose when we outsource to technology the gritty, awkward and uncomfortable parts of what make us human?<\/p>\n \u201cWhen friction disappears, we miss some of the richest parts of life: serendipity, connection and meaning,\u201d says Dr Tim Sharp, a psychologist and founder of The Happiness Institute.<\/p>\n \u201cThe small inconveniences, such as walking to pick up dinner, browsing a bookstore, striking up conversation with a neighbour, are often where community, connection and very often joy live.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPositive psychology tells us that wellbeing is deeply rooted in relationships, engagement and purposeful action. That\u2019s why I\u2019ve often encouraged people to consider intentionally adding back a little friction; because the messy, imperfect parts of life are often where happiness hides.\u201d<\/p>\n Related Article I recently celebrated two years of sobriety<\/a>, and in that time, I have become deeply familiar with discomfort: the initial awkwardness of meeting new people, the pain of a broken relationship or the bored madness of spending too much time with one\u2019s own thoughts, sans substances. It sounds trite, but pushing through this discomfort is what has helped me make huge strides in recovery and become a happier and more connected person.<\/p>\n A few months ago, I cancelled my Spotify subscription and started using Qobuz, a French-founded alternative. As a decades-long Spotify user, I\u2019d become accustomed to the sophisticated algorithm<\/a>, spoon-feeding me new artists like a delicious happy meal.<\/p>\n Qobuz\u2019s algorithm, which doesn\u2019t use AI, is rather primitive (it\u2019s hellbent on playing me Meghan Trainor, whom I have no interest in listening to). But that\u2019s the point. It\u2019s forced me to be less of a passive consumer of the artists I want to listen to, and to make a concerted effort to find the ones I haven\u2019t discovered yet.<\/p>\n Promisingly, we\u2019re seeing growing hunger for community, away from the slick, siloed world that tech can create. From run clubs<\/a> to in-person dating<\/a> and the resurgence of analogue culture<\/a>, there\u2019s been a shift towards embracing the hard and tedious parts of human connection.<\/p>\n Andrea Carter, a Canadian organisational scientist and a belonging expert, started looking into the importance of friction during the pandemic. While her research focuses on belonging in the workplace, it\u2019s a powerful framework for examining the world at large.<\/p>\n Friction, she says, is an intrinsic part of belonging. Yet we\u2019ve optimised our way towards convenience, often at great cost to our humanity and our ability to move through adversity.<\/p>\n \u201cRight now, the biggest issue is we actually don\u2019t have the infrastructure to move through [friction] anymore,\u201d says Carter, who thinks this ability began eroding during COVID-19 with the explosion of AI-led technologies.<\/p>\n Editor’s pick \u201cSo this is where we\u2019re going to avoid, we\u2019re going to ghost, we\u2019re going to withdraw. It\u2019s fascinating because friction is now treated like a failure, rather than the cost of community, closeness or belonging,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n She draws a straight line between this allergy to inconvenience and rising rates of loneliness<\/a>, a decline in emotional intelligence<\/a>, growing familial estrangement<\/a> and an erosion of trust in institutions. This friction-averse mindset works as a feedback loop, says Carter, intensifying individualism and division in the physical world.<\/p>\n There\u2019s an ethical dimension to the slick ease that technology has afforded us, too.<\/p>\n In Frictionlessness: The Silicon Valley Philosophy of Seamless Technology and the Aesthetic Value of Imperfection, author Jakko Kemper writes of the way the frictionless interfaces of digital consumer technologies shroud (often purposefully) the environmental and human cost that make them possible.<\/p>\n The cheap allure of ultra-fast fashion companies like Shein<\/a> makes it easy to ignore the often unethical practices that make them possible in the first place. The convenience of typing a question into ChatGPT rather than doing the legwork of proper research makes it easy to gloss over the masses of water<\/a> required to generate an answer.<\/p>\n Apple TV\u2019s science-fiction series Pluribus<\/a> takes the frictionless ideal to the extreme.<\/p>\n After a mysterious virus infects most of the people on earth, writer Carol (Rhea Seehorn) finds she is one of the few humans to have remained immune. Like artificial intelligence, the infected are all-knowing and eager to please. They anticipate Carol\u2019s every need and desire without question.<\/p>\n This hive mind preaches harmony, peace and equality. But as Carol\u2019s howl of discontent tells us, this is an empty kind of harmony, one where the interesting and prickly parts of being human have been sandpapered out.<\/p>\n Editor’s pick Injecting small doses of friction back into our lives \u2013 or \u201cFriction-Maxxing\u201d<\/a>, as Kathryn Jezer-Morton put it in a recent article for The Cut \u2013 isn\u2019t about eliminating technology altogether.<\/p>\n It\u2019s about choosing people over convenience, and leaning into the fricative force that makes co-existence possible, by using friction productively<\/a>: showing up when we say we will, leaning on one another and embracing mess. Because at the end of the day, technology won\u2019t save us. We\u2019re all each other has.<\/p>\n Make the most of your health, relationships, fitness and nutrition with our Live Well newsletter. 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Is constant convenience making us miserable? Dionne Gain<\/p>\n![\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/8b2a9e751b67cae53afef78dd643489b83d79db5.jpeg\")
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Rhea Seehorn plays Carol Sturka, a woman immune to a virus that leads to a psychic harmony among every human on Earth.<\/p>\n![\"'You've](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/f8f91f64cda974b8bdf5dc040bb9970af391e2cb.jpeg\")
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