Stop Trying to Make Everything Frictionless

Image by @sortino from Unsplash

There is a sound I will never forget. A sequence of squeals, static, and negotiation — the dial-up modem connecting to the internet. It was slow, ungainly, and tied up the phone line. And yet, in that waiting, something happened that we have since engineered out of existence: you understood, viscerally, that you were reaching across a distance. The internet felt like somewhere you went. Now it is simply somewhere you are — always, instantly, without effort or awareness.

That is the bargain we made. And most days, we do not notice what it cost us.

I grew up in a hybrid era. Old enough to remember the friction; young enough to have been seduced away from it. I still remember phone numbers — real ones, earned through repetition and wrong dials. They are fossils in the grey matter, because I had to put them there. Now I could not tell you the number of someone I speak to every week. The knowledge lives in a device, not in me. I haven't lost convenience. I have outsourced a piece of myself — willingly. That is the part that should unsettle us.

Convenience has a seductive way of disguising itself as progress. Self-checkout. Automated phone systems. Contactless payment. The transaction takes fewer seconds — but somewhere in that acceleration, we lost the human who absorbed the friction on our behalf. The cashier who noticed you were having a rough day. The telephone operator who could actually solve your problem rather than route you into a loop of numbered options from which there was no escape. These people were not merely performing a function. They were providing a witness. When we automated them out, we didn't just save time — we removed the person. And then had the audacity to act surprised when everyone became short-fused.

We have been trained to expect seamlessness. So when the self-checkout mishears us for the third time, the rage is disproportionate — and that disproportion is not a character flaw. It is a calibration error. We were promised zero friction, and any friction at all now registers as a personal affront.

I am guilty of all of it.

I remember the going to the video rental shop. Walking the aisles. Picking up the box and reading the back. Finding that the film you wanted was out — and being forced, brilliantly, to choose something else, something you wouldn't have picked, something that turned out to be extraordinary. The limitation was the discovery mechanism. Now I open a streaming platform, scroll for twenty minutes through infinite choice, and watch nothing — or default to something I have already seen. The abundance is, paradoxically, impoverishing.

I remember buying CDs. The walk to the shop, the deliberate choice, the money counted out and handed over. The mild regret if the album wasn't worth it, the disproportionate pride if it was. Now I press play on Spotify and skip anything that doesn't hook me in ten seconds. I have access to essentially all recorded music in human history, and I listen to less carefully than I ever have. Frictionlessness did not deepen my relationship with music. It made it disposable.

And then there was the radio.

You could not summon a song unless you called in to request one. You could only wait for it. You would sit with the volume up, half-attending, ears pricked — and when the opening bars finally came, there was a scramble: grab the cassette player, hit record, pray that the DJ didn't talk over the intro. If you were lucky, you caught it clean. And because the lyrics weren't printed anywhere and the internet did not yet exist to retrieve them in seconds, you would sit with a pen and paper and really listen — replaying the tape, pausing, rewinding, writing down what you thought you heard and revising it until the words made sense. You learned that song from the inside out. You owned it, not as a file, but as knowledge earned through attention and effort.

Spotify knows every song I have ever skipped. It does not know a single one I have ever truly learned.

The radio also made choices for you that you would never have made for yourself. The DJ was a curator standing between you and pure self-selection, and that friction — the interruption of your own taste — was precisely where discovery lived. The algorithm now feeds me a perfect mirror of what I already like. I am never surprised, never challenged, never accidentally converted. I am perfectly catered to. I am also, culturally, shrinking.

Money, too, has become abstract. I remember handling cash — the physical weight of a decision. You could see, at a glance, what you had left. Spending hurt in a way that was useful. Now I tap a card and the consequence is deferred until a notification arrives to tell me I have already overspent. The friction of cash was a form of financial consciousness. We removed it and called it efficiency.

Here is the question that haunts me: if the convenience failed tomorrow — the payment systems, the internet, the GPS, the streaming — could we go back?

Not in theory. Actually.

The answer, increasingly, is no. Not only because we have forgotten the skills — though we have. But because the infrastructure for the old way has been quietly dismantled. You cannot choose to use a payphone if there are no payphones. You cannot browse a video rental shop that has closed. You cannot ask a bank teller at a branch that no longer exists. The choice to return was removed from us — not dramatically, not with any announcement, but gradually, until one day the alternative simply wasn't there.

We did not choose dependency. We were led into it, one small convenience at a time.

I want to be careful not to romanticise the friction. The dial-up screech was genuinely maddening. Queuing at the bank took ages. Not all friction is valuable, and nostalgia has a way of editing out the genuine misery of the past while preserving only its texture and warmth.

But there is a distinction worth holding onto: between friction that was incidental and friction that was doing quiet, unacknowledged work. The inconvenience of cash was incidental. The financial awareness it produced was the work. The slowness of the video shop was incidental. The serendipity it forced was the work. Sitting by the radio with a cassette on standby was incidental. The deep listening it demanded was the work.

When we removed the friction, we removed the inconvenience. We also, without meaning to, removed the work.

This is not only a personal problem. It is an organisational one.

Consider what friction removal looks like inside a workplace. The junior employee who never learns the slow way because the software does it for them. The meeting replaced by a message that resolves nothing — no eye contact, no discomfort, no accountability. The manager who never developed patience because every system responds instantly, and waiting — which is where judgement is forged — has been designed out of the working day. We have built workplaces optimised for speed and wondered why depth has become rare. We have confused processing with understanding, and throughput with skill.

The friction of human interaction built something that cannot be shortcut: the tolerance for difficulty that is the foundation of genuine expertise. Walk across the office to speak to someone. Make the phone call that requires you to improvise. Solve the problem without a template. These were not inefficiencies. They were the training ground. Remove them and you produce people who are efficient and brittle, fast and shallow, always available and rarely present.

The question for any organisation is the same one that applies to any individual: what is the friction in your system that is inconvenient, but doing work? What have you automated away that was quietly producing judgement, craft, or connection? And what will you do when the system fails — and you discover that no one remembers how to improvise?

We built a world optimised for best-case conditions and called it progress. Everything functions beautifully when nothing goes wrong. But a system is only truly resilient if it holds up when it fails — and by that measure, almost nothing we have built qualifies. What we have built is efficient under ideal conditions, which is a much more fragile thing.

The friction, it turns out, was not the obstacle to the system. In many ways, it was the system. It was what slowed us down enough to remember where we were going. It was what cost us enough that we valued what we got. It was what required other people — and what required us, in turn, to be the kind of people who showed up for them.

We forgot the value of things because we forgot the effort they once required.

And we will not remember until the convenience fails — at which point we may find, too late, that we have also forgotten how to cope.