Notes on friction vs suffering

Today, we’re coming to terms with the fact that we’re learning less, thinking less, tolerating less. We increasingly behave more like toddlers expecting machines to handle life’s unpleasantness.

Writing in The Cut ( free archived version ), Kathryn Jezer-Morton argues that tech companies are succeeding in making us think of life itself as inconvenient – something to continuously escape from into digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands.

“Reading is boring; talking is awkward; moving is tiring; leaving the house is daunting. Thinking is hard.”

“Our love of escaping is one of humanity’s most poetically problematic tendencies, and now it’s being used against us. [...] We’re foie gras ducks being force-fed escapism.”

Once we’ve adopted these habits of escape, the act of returning to unmediated existence feels insufferable.

To counter this trend, she’s coined a brilliant term to carry us through 2026: friction-maxxing.

“Friction-maxxing is … the process of building up tolerance for ‘inconvenience’ (which is usually not inconvenience at all but just the vagaries of being a person living with other people in spaces that are impossible to completely control) – and then reaching even toward enjoyment. And then, it’s modelling this tolerance, followed by enjoyment and humour, for our kids.”

What we’re really talking about is learning to distinguish between friction and suffering – recognising that not all discomfort is bad, that some resistance makes us stronger, sharper, more alive. The tech companies want to collapse that distinction, to sell us a world where nothing is ever awkward or boring or difficult.

We’ve been conditioned to expect frictionless existence and now we’re collectively enraged that it hasn’t delivered happiness. That gap between promised utopia and persistent dissatisfaction – that’s where cynicism breeds, where political rage finds its fuel.

The end game was never convenience but a texture-rich life that challenges and rewards us. Not happiness as a frictionless state, but satisfaction earned through the friction itself.

from https://www.densediscovery.com/issues/372