Natalie Audelo
@natalieaudelo
yes person for all things community, connection, & storytelling
Natalie Audelo
The moat of low status is one of my favorite concepts, courtesy of my husband Sasha. The idea is that making changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time where you are actually bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.
Cate Hall • How to Be More Agentic
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.
372 / Friction-maxxing through 2026?
“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
372 / Friction-maxxing through 2026?
“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
“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
372 / Friction-maxxing through 2026?
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.
372 / Friction-maxxing through 2026?
Wind extinguishes a candle and energises fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
372 / Friction-maxxing through 2026?
the secret of new york is that it only really works at the extremes
not that the rich or the poor have it easy, but the middle is where the city quietly grinds you down. the rich float above the city, insulated by square footage and silence, moving through private doors. the poor learn how to make the city bend. they split rooms and meals and jump
... See more
There’s a phrase making the rounds online: “The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.” I’ve been wondering if its resonance reveals a quiet fatigue with the constant push for more and a longing for lives that are simpler, quieter, and more self-directed. Not smaller in value, but in volume. To me, that’s not regression. That’s freedom.