the joy of inconvenience

we don't need to make things more seamless. Bring back some friction!

What disappeared along the way was not just trust, but also the micro-doses of potency that came from navigating everyday risk. Choosing a restaurant without a thousand reviews, booking a room in an unfamiliar city - these were small but vital leaps of faith. They required us to extend ourselves beyond certainty, and in doing so they injected... See more

We’re Desperate For Potency

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.

Henrik Karlsson • On Shortcuts and Longcuts

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

― Frank Herbert, Dune

Dune Quotes by Frank Herbert

Sometimes it's harder, sometimes there are moments where you're like, man, I really wish I could escape this moment and go check Instagram or something, but instead I'm just going to sit here and my kid's crying and dinner's terrible because the kids are just being total jerks and I'm tired and not feeling great and my wife is upset because she's... See more

J.E. Petersen • Uncomfortable on Purpose

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.

Adam Grant • Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?

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... See more

Happy 20th Anniversary, Gmail. I’m Sorry I’m Leaving You.

convenience has created a culture of passivity. Where’s the intention behind things?

“Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That’s what directs you during rewriting, and that’s one of the things lacking when you start with text

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... See more

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