do not remove the fence

friction, my friends, is not evil

At the Races (c.1875) by Edouard Manet. Original from National Gallery of Art

I’m one of those old-school writers who subscribes to the process of sitting down with my thoughts, sorting through them painstakingly, and then holding up each word in my vocabulary against each thought to see what fits. I wrote in a recent note that “the process of trying to articulate exactly what I mean sometimes feels like trying to catch an eel, slippery and frustrating”. (I’ve never caught an eel, but I imagine this is what it would feel like). As someone who has grappled with words for the last, say, 20 years, I find the friction-less experience of writing with AI rather ominous, uncanny.

Friction-less experience is, in general, the great definer of our times. Progress has come to mean faster, simpler, smoother, and ideally invisible. We imagined a future of flying cars, but instead we have 10-minute delivery that treats medical attention and the latest shade of matte lipstick with the same level of urgency.

I’ll come back to that. But first:

Last week, after several months of coming to the book and dropping it in favour of something else, I finally read The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han. (I think not reading it sooner was inflicting a minor tragedy on myself, so I urge you not to do that to yourself. Anyway…)

Han presents two branches of experience: Erlebnis, which translates to “a lived moment” or “sensation”, and Erfahrung, which literally translates to “The wisdom gained through traveling or passing through”.

One can experience a hundred Erlebnisse without ever being tested or challenged. That’s symptomatic of a thrill society, where people collect memorable events without meaning. We want to skate down a friction-free road towards The Perfect Showreel of Experience. Once you start noticing this, everything you encounter becomes evidence: one-click ordering, staff-less checkout counters, autoplay and auto-scroll that promise no breaks in listening or viewing, identical Airbnb designs to reduce decision fatigue by averaging the entire experience out… the list goes on. The world is a seamless mirror that only reflects back what we are, know, and like. People don’t want to be humbled by the world, they want to sail through it. The less the friction, the more you’ve progressed, goes the thinking.

On the other hand, Erfahrung is the sort of experience that you emerge from feeling—there’s no other word for it—changed. That comes only from actively grappling with things that might feel resistant or, at the very least, against the grain to you. But our preference for Erlebnisse has eroded our chances of experiencing Erfahrung.

While Han brought this up in the context of performance and burnout, I think it also maps a bit too well to our ideas of progress. We’ve come to expect the gap between “not done” and “done” to collapse into a matter of seconds. Ten years ago, it might have been a few hours, if not days.

As someone who works in tech and product design, I see this every single day. We think a lot about friction: where to add it, where to reduce it, and where to eliminate it entirely. In tech, all friction is administrative friction, so much so that designers often have to argue about introducing three-second pauses or extra pop-ups just to ensure users don’t feel like the app is running away with their decisions.

At the risk of sounding reductionist, these decisions are almost always money-driven: if friction exists or doesn’t exist, it is to ensure users either experience the value of the product before committing, or move so fast through it that they don’t realise they’ve committed until after the fact. Either way, the user has committed—to the company’s benefit, definitely, but not always to ours. Considering the fact that so much of daily life now runs on software built by people who believe that friction is evil, it’s easy to see the assumption has leaked out of the apps and into the rest of our lives.

The side effects of a frictionless life are pretty earth-shaking, and bring into question the whole idea of experience.

For one, we’re forgetting what it’s like to feel friction, even a little. When our threshold for challenge or difficulty drops to near zero like this, our world shrinks to fit the contours of what an app or service can offer us. If we have to go somewhere and can’t use a GPS, we’d rather not go at all. If we have to fit through a moment of social awkwardness to return something to a store, we’d rather bury it in the back of our closets. We slowly become closed off to a variety of experiences because they’re “not worth the hassle”; in making our lives simpler, it also makes our choices much more limited.

This also morphs into a downgrade in competence: when every single point of friction is removed, we go from agentic people to dependents who need a specific set of conditions to function. Physical reality will always refuse to be smooth. You will get stuck in traffic. You will run into an old friend just as your bus arrives. You will have to wait in line to get your fix of coffee. Insulating ourselves from even the mildest forms of resistance just makes us helpless.

Interestingly, though, by automating away natural occurrences of friction, we’re not reducing our base human need for it. Humans have an innate need for self-efficacy, which means we’re always trying to test our boundaries against reality. Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning:

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.

Striving and struggling—friction—is fodder for meaning, because it demands investment. It needs you to get your hands dirty, worry away at challenges like a horse on its bit, throw your presence and energy into the current moment. A lot of things are meaningful not despite the friction, but because of it.

Stripped of the type of resistance that would normally be organically integrated into our lives, we only push ourselves towards simulating hardship but in hyper-optimised or performative bubbles. If you’ve ever wondered why why people with all the conveniences of the world decide to put themselves through gruelling physical challenges and extreme bio-hacking, this might explain some of it.

Another thing I’ve only just started to notice with myself, especially, is that you can lose the measure of things. I find this one rather hard to explain because it’s viscerally felt, so I’ll try examples: you stop knowing how much a handful of spinach should cost, you feel a three-day delivery timeline is agonising, you expect everything to happen at the same speed of convenience. You want an ambulance in 10 minutes, but you also want your groceries in the same timeframe.

All this is not to say we should become martyrs in the battle against convenience. There’s only so much friction you can deal with before life starts to feel like one long slog. What I’m angling at was nicely described by Derek Thompson in his essay on Zombie Flow: “Life is supposed to be the right kind of hard”.

While the exact things that fall into this bucket differ from one person to the next, the throughline is that the right kind of hard gives more than it takes, and leaves your life richer when you go through it.

That’s pithy, sure, but how do you know what friction is worth keeping around and what needs to be optimised away? It’s a question I’ve grappled with, most often when I’m facing down a giant pile of dishes in the sink and cursing my refusal to buy a dishwasher. Why would someone not automate this stuff away?

I think part of the answer is seeing friction not as “good” or “bad”, but as a spectrum. In my head, it maps out as Crappy, Necessary, and Transformative.

Crappy Friction

… is the kind of friction that drains your brain and energy without really giving anything back in proportion to the amount of time and effort it took. Think standing in line at government offices, using clunky software, or dealing with bureaucratic red tape. You might have to go through it, but it’s not necessarily meaningful to you in and of itself. Removing this sort of friction doesn’t subtract anything from your Erfahrung, your transformative experience—it might even enhance it.

Necessary Friction

… is the kind where you have to go through resistance to get to an end that is more meaningful than if you’d never had it. You might not enjoy the friction itself, but you know it’s inherent to the process of getting where you want to be, and so you don’t fight it. Like learning a language or to drive a car, which might have a steep learning curve but significant rewards, not least increasing your agency and capacity. You have to sit with the resistance and fight the urge to optimise it away.

Han has a wonderful phrase for this, “contemplative lingering”, which means to stay present for a long enough time to reveal depth, rather than rush through it to claim its output. It’s the ability to acknowledge difficulty while not treating it as an obstacle or defect to be magicked away. Competence is forged in the messy middle, and it’s not uncommon to take a shortcut—like write an essay with AI, use summaries instead of reading books, or cook ready-to-eat meals all the time—and end up feeling like you didn’t really do anything, or what you did isn’t sticking.

And finally, there is:

Transformative Friction

… which are situations where the friction itself carries meaning, transforming the experience and you in the process. In The Burnout Society, Han says transformative friction requires “the negativity of the Other.” That just means resistance, or some sort of opposing force. Frictionless living means all instances of that are removed, so you don’t have to really reckon with anything. But transformation requires colliding with something outside yourself—the Other—that refuses to be smooth or immediately compliant.

I’ll give you an example.

I go to the gym three times a week, maybe four if I can swing it. Each week is a lesson in my capacity and my limits. The process of working out is pure, unnegotiable friction. I have to pick up the dumbbells and lift it above my shoulders or over my head or against my sides. I have to reckon with the cold, unyielding bar of iron that is physically incapable of making things easier for me. Three times a week, I have to face the Other, and come out a walking example of transformation. There is no other way.

You’d think that unrelenting friction would make me cave. Nope. I crave it. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the father of flow:

The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times... The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

Going back to what I was saying in the beginning and all over the place: friction is not always without purpose. It’s concerning that our default reaction to a challenge is now “this is difficult, remove it” and not “this is difficult, why?” It seems like a simple question, but the ramifications of it are far-reaching.

Writing, because I know it so well, is again a handy example: writing is frustrating because thinking is frustrating. Trying to articulate an elusive eel of an idea is the exact process by which a vague intuition, some flickering of intent and thought deep inside you, is turned into tangible understanding.

Our minds constantly look for the shortest way to go from not-knowing to knowing, and so it naturally latches onto the first resolution it sees for the sheer reason that it cuts effort in half. That’s not to say that’s the right way to do it, far from it. Shortcuts almost always belie a lack of understanding that makes itself known immediately or in the near future.

GK Chesterton, the literary critic and writer, has this parable that still remains uncannily relevant:

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

Tearing down every single fence indiscriminately feels great at first: “look at the swathes of land rolling as far as the eye can see”. Pure unencumbered possibility.

But often we venture into those lands only to realise why those fences were up in the first place: protection, perhaps, or structure, or even a frame that gives an otherwise chaotic landscape a sense of scale and human proportion. But we either don’t ask what the fence was for before we wish it away, or more often we’re not in the same rooms as the people who do the wishing away.

Again, I don’t say we have to throw all convenience out the window and start writing with a bird’s feather quill and vellum. But the next time we encounter friction in real life, could we put down the sledgehammer? Could we tap on it, peer at it from all angles, test our weight against it, wonder why it’s there, give our imagination a workout? Whatever we decide to do, could we first not remove the fence?