“We become exactly like toddlers in the five minutes after the iPad is taken away: The dullness and labour of embodied existence is unbearable.”

“Children are the easiest targets for tech companies because they don’t know the difference between suffering and friction – one difference between children and adults is that adults do. Or at least, we’re... See more

“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... See more

Wind extinguishes a candle and energises fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them.

– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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.

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.