Friction
Why We’re Paying Twice for Modern Life
THE PREMISE
Something feels off. You can't quite name it.
Your life has never been more optimised. Groceries arrive by algorithm. Your sleep is scored. Your commute is engineered away. Every inconvenience has been solved, and yet something keeps not adding up.
We take the escalator all day, then pay a gym to climb their stairs. We download meditation apps to recover the stillness our devices eroded. We swipe for connection in cities dense with people. A six-trillion-dollar wellness industry now sells back the effort, focus, and texture that ordinary life once supplied without branding.
This isn’t a glitch. It’s a pattern. And once you see it, you see it everywhere. In your gym, your relationships, your children’s childhoods, your workday. In the quiet distance growing between you and the people you’re supposed to be closest to.
Friction names the thing we removed without noticing, follows the invoice to where it lands, and offers a practical framework for reclaiming what matters without going backward.
This isn’t anti-technology. It’s pro-human.
A REFLECTION
Are You Experiencing Friction Deficit?
Do you exercise to compensate for how little your day actually demands of your body?
Do you check a device to know how you slept instead of asking yourself how you feel?
Can you not remember your best friend’s phone number? Or your way home without GPS?
Do you need caffeine to start the day and melatonin to end it?
Do small delays, a slow page, a queue, a person thinking before they speak, feel intolerable?
Do your relationships feel efficient but thin?
Can you sit with boredom, or does the stillness itself feel like something’s wrong?
When was the last time you were genuinely, productively lost?
Not a diagnosis. Just a mirror. If you nodded more than once, the book was written for you.
THREE WITNESSES
The invoice doesn't land in statistics. It lands in lives.
Michael
47 · London
A corporate lawyer who pays to climb stairs after a day spent avoiding them. He watches his StairMaster graph tick upward and wonders when effort became something he had to schedule.
He’s going to pay to climb stairs. After spending his entire day avoiding them.
Maya
24 · Cape Town
Raised in the optimised version. Her sleep is scored, her meals are algorithmic, her friendships swipe-based. Then she gets lost in a hospital and something ancient wakes up.
She wasn’t used to that absence of a signal telling her where to go. She liked it.
Evelyne
68 · Vienna
She remembers when delays were normal and neighbours‘ knocks were part of the day. She watches her grandchildren vanish into screens, then buys a bag of potatoes and three old peelers.
They are not just eating roast potatoes. They are eating the hour of their own tedious, shared, human effort.
We progressed until we no longer needed each other. Whether we still want each other is the question technology never asks.
— From the introduction
THE FRICTION FRAMEWORK
A practical blueprint for staying fully human
Not digital detox. Not neo-luddism. A conscious design for the friction that gives life texture, applied across body, mind, relationships, and work.
01
Artificial Hardship
The deliberate reintroduction of struggle when natural hardship disappears. Taking the stairs. Washing the dishes. Choosing the slower route. Not punishment but capacity.
02
Creating Contrast
Introducing deliberate peaks and valleys. The cold shock, the deep focus, the moment of real hunger before a meal. Without oscillation, the signal flatlines.
03
The Human Curve
The pauses, detours, and second thoughts that efficiency tries to eliminate. Doubt, hesitation, and the walk that solves the problem. The curve is not always delay but where judgment lives.
Imagine a river. The rock is Artificial Hardship. The ripple is Creating Contrast. The meander downstream is the Human Curve.