the joy of inconvenience

I think there are things in life that you want to telescope and compress and accelerate and streamline and make more efficient. And there are things where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest.

“There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles. -- Muad'Dib”

― Frank Herbert, Dune

Almost everything that is meaningful, beautiful, life-affirming, empowering, transformational, true—it can’t be reached by shortcuts. But what we can do is make the longcuts walkable, put out footbridges and stairs, and a table where the ocean comes into view.

By leading us off the easy path—the one that leads to the garbage can and the mailbox—we can enable new activities.

The value proposition of the routine is that it becomes so ingrained it switches over from something you do purposely (hard) to something you do habitually (less hard). In other words, it disappears into the background, working quietly in service of your productivity without using up all your resources. This sounds useful, but I’m becoming less con... See more

But for me, for now, the friction is what I’m looking for. I am grateful — genuinely — for what Google and Apple and others did to make digital life easy over the past two decades. But too much ease carries a cost. I was lulled into the belief that I didn’t have to make decisions. Now my digital life is a series of monuments to the cost of combinin... See more