In praise of friction: why life needs its rough edges
We’ve been sold the dream of a frictionless life — food at a tap, TV without pause, dopamine on demand. But convenience is leaving us cold. The truth is simpler: friction creates warmth.
The peasants are revolting.
As Blackadder once put it, “The peasants are revolting.”
“Yes,” comes the reply, “they certainly are.”
It was a throwaway gag, but these days it rings with a kind of accidental truth. A quiet rebellion is brewing against the modern notion that the perfect life is a frictionless one. You can see it in the cracks: people deleting their social media apps, quitting Uber Eats, taking up cold-water swimming, and queuing for vinyl records instead of streaming- little acts of resistance against the gospel of convenience.
Because for all the promises of smoothness, what have we actually built? A dopamine-spiked hellscape. Everything is engineered for immediacy, speed, and endless micro-rewards - a new series auto-plays before we’ve absorbed the last. Our phone pushes pings of hollow validation into our palm. Dinner arrives without us needing to speak to another human being. It is life stripped of friction - and, with it, life stripped of warmth.
I found myself thinking about this last weekend at CarFest, where I’d gone for a dose of noise, mess, and humanity. Amidst the clatter of kids, cars, campervans, and basslines, I attended a talk by TJ Power, who has written a book called DOSE. His argument is simple but powerful: our four happiness chemicals - dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins - are out of balance. Modern life has flooded us with dopamine while starving us of the rest. We binge on spikes of pleasure but forget the slow burn of fulfilment.
It made sense of something I’ve been feeling for a while. I grew up in a world before all this - before the constant twitch of notifications, before the laboratory-engineered slot machine of the infinite scroll. As a Gen Xer, my teenage dopamine came from mixtapes, long phone calls, and the occasional packet of salt and vinegar crisps - nothing like the casino that young people now carry in their pocket. I can hardly imagine growing up in such an atmosphere, and the resilience it must take to resist it.
And here’s the thing: it isn’t fair to blame individuals. That’s the easy mistake. We look at people endlessly scrolling, or ordering food at midnight, or avoiding strangers on the train, and we say, “Why don’t they just stop?” But these behaviours are the natural response to the system. Every incentive in the machine is tuned to keep us addicted, because addiction is profitable. If you want to change, you don’t berate the person. You change the system.
There’s an excellent study out of Chicago that always sticks with me. Researchers asked commuters on trains to strike up conversations with strangers. Most people dreaded it. They expected it to be awkward, embarrassing, and the longest ride of their life. However, when they actually did it, they reported the opposite: more joy, deeper connection, and greater warmth. The only thing holding them back was the assumption that it would be awful. The friction, it turned out, was the very thing that made it worthwhile.
That’s what TJ Power means when he talks about how “hard stuff is good.” Life isn’t supposed to be endless dopamine fireworks. It’s intended to have texture. It’s meant to make you sweat, stumble, and persist. He calls it “long, slow dopamine hunting” - building joy through things that take time: writing, gardening, running, cooking. The things that don’t pay off instantly, but create a deeper reservoir of satisfaction. I feel it myself when I sit down to write. It doesn’t spike, it stretches.
At CarFest, in all its chaos, I felt it again. The joy of getting hot in the sun while waiting in line for ice cream. The irritation of someone parking their deckchair directly in my line of sight. The delight of dancing badly to a band I didn’t know. All those messy, imperfect, slightly inconvenient things added up to something vivid and real. Friction created warmth.
And now, starting a new job this week, I feel it again in another way. The small rituals of office life, the awkward first chats, the sense of belonging to a group that’s bigger than myself. None of it is frictionless. But it feels human. It feels right.
I don’t want to be delivered convenience on tap. I don’t want every edge rounded off, every delay eliminated, every interaction smoothed away. I want to live in a world where friction is allowed to do its job: to slow us down, to make us feel, to generate heat. Because without it, life grows cold.
The peasants are revolting, and I hope they keep at it.
Perhaps the best way we can join them is through small, deliberate acts of kindness. Ring a friend instead of firing off a WhatsApp. Cook something slow, the kind that fogs up the kitchen windows, instead of tapping an app. Queue up for the market and strike up a conversation with the person next to you. Walk to the shop in the rain, even when Amazon could deliver by morning. Write something, not because it’s quick, but because it takes time to wrestle your thoughts into words.
These aren’t grand gestures. They won’t topple Silicon Valley. But they are small revolutions against the frictionless future we’ve been sold. And in their slowness, in their messiness, in their human weight, they give us back what convenience quietly stole: warmth.
Peace and love, Michael
Reading recommendation
If you want to go deeper, I can’t recommend TJ Power’s DOSE enough. His framework is a kind of field guide for rebalancing our chemical lives. His advice? Slow down the dopamine spikes, and give space for the other three chemicals to rise. Oxytocin through connection. Serotonin through gratitude and perspective. Endorphins through movement and laughter. It’s practical, hopeful, and — in its own way — a manifesto for friction.