Zev van Zanten is a third-year student studying Math, Economics, and Science and Society.
We’re in the second month of 2025, which means that at least a few of us are still committed to our New Year’s resolutions. While the desire to improve one’s life through resolutions is wonderful, I have some advice for those who have a resolution or who are, more generally, trying to make a change in their life (regardless of the calendar): make sure that your resolution is not to remove all friction and uncertainty from your life.
For many people, the ideal life is the one in which everything is easy and effortless. Evidence of this is apparent in the popular genre of best-selling productivity books, which encourage readers to automate everything you can, do everything in less time, turn every good thing into a habit, and so on. There is an ever-growing industry catering to these desires for a frictionless life, offering everything from detailed planners to short summaries of major books to quick meal replacements like (the hopefully ironically named) Soylent. This aversion to friction is not limited to how people conduct themselves day-to-day either; instead, it is visible in some of our most significant life choices. Students increasingly aspire to career paths that minimize risk and uncertainty, both common sources of friction. While being a consultant or banker leaves some uncertainty about what you will do afterward, you can be quite certain that you will a) find a job and b) leave you with a nice nest egg. As a result, students have poured into these career paths in droves, as well as similar careers in tech and data science. Fittingly, our aversion to friction also animates our society’s approach to technology. This technology, which we find ourselves increasingly dependent on, is both shaped by and shapes our feelings on friction. As Marshall McLuhan famously wrote, “the medium is the message.” The more we produce and use friction-minimizing and uncertainty-reducing technology, the more we become increasingly averse to friction, difficulty, and uncertainty in our own lives. The internet is a wondrous invention, but for those who have constant access to it, we only sometimes only stop and think about how remarkable it is when we lose that access: when it breaks down or doesn’t work as well as we expect. And when that happens, we are furious. The target of our ire? The return of friction.
While our efforts at reducing friction almost always have noble intentions– self-improvement, bettering the human condition, and so forth– their consequences are rarely good. It’s time to turn to philosophy for evidence of this. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, a foundational work of American political thought, speaks glowingly of the American tradition of civic engagement and activity. At the same time, Tocqueville draws attention to the dangers of “soft despotism,” through which we let our own agency and ability atrophy by letting others take on our responsibilities. While he was talking about the limitations of American democracy, not productivity hacks or tech, his statement still holds true. Overreliance on productivity hacks and technology makes us paradoxically less capable in areas like social interactions, patience and personal resilience. Or take Isaiah Berlin, one of the 20th century’s greatest political theorists and philosophers, who famously separated liberty into positive and negative components. For Berlin, positive liberty concerns one’s freedom to actively do things, while negative liberty concerns freedom from constraints. On the surface, technology and productivity hacks make us more free. But, at a closer glance, it becomes clear that while they may reduce our constraints, they weaken our agency in a way that may make us less free to do things than before.
Though technology is likely the most consequential case of our aversion to friction gone awry, focusing purely on the dangers of avoiding friction disregards the fact that friction actually can have its own benefits. Friction creates delays, forcing us to truly consider if something is worth doing rather than letting us do it mindlessly. Friction means that accomplishing things takes more effort but is also more enjoyable. Friction gives us the chance to engage with something and gain deep knowledge, not the shallow knowledge we gain from reading a listicle of the most critical points. Friction, like so many things we dislike, actually has value to it. It provides the same kind of self-disciplinary character-building value we get, say, from eating vegetables or doing chores in childhood. This sentiment is backed by behavioral economics literature, which has demonstrated that friction is a powerful tool in structuring human behavior. Axiomatically, reducing the friction involved in an activity leads to people doing the activity more, while increasing friction leads to them doing it less.
An avoidance of friction can be harmful. By avoiding risks, one also avoids rewards. The least risky careers are also often not particularly enjoyable (or they are populated by equally uncertain people, creating a sort of uncertainty groupthink that makes every individual in the group less confident and less able). Avoiding uncertainty also keeps you from making many of life’s biggest and most rewarding choices, all of which require an embrace of uncertainty! More than that, avoiding uncertainty can rob you of the serendipity inherent in so much of life.
Instead of avoiding uncertainty and friction, embrace them. This isn’t to say you must uncritically accept all friction and uncertainty—increasing productivity and removing unnecessary stressors is often really important. But instead, be healthily skeptical of friction-reduction peddlers. Embrace productivity-hacking and reducing uncertainty where you need it to get by, but don’t overdo it. For example, don’t create that classic Duke schedule planner (you know the one), that Tetris game of multicolored rectangles in which every minute is allocated to some resume-building task, including specified time for breaks. Instead, have a clear plan, but leave room for flexibility.
Of course, in the case of the everyday moment, some things are worth taking at least some friction out of (and thus we should be more critical of friction). The fact that most people no longer spend hours a day handwashing clothes or gathering water and can instead use machines or turn on a faucet is something to be celebrated, not demonized (these are the basic premises of capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, and the whole history of progress, right? They’re not all bunk). But some everyday situations may benefit from a little friction. If you’re stuck doom scrolling on TikTok, try exiting the app after every few videos. This could be a worthwhile friction to introduce, one that might let you reclaim countless hours of time that would become marginally less and less enjoyable.
In the case of making bigger decisions, de-frictioning requires more thought. Some decisions — like picking a career, selecting a house, or even choosing where to go to school — should be hard in most cases (with some obvious exceptions). Yet big decisions aren’t the only ones that should be hard to make, they’re just the ones that should usually be the hardest to make. Sometimes an everyday decision like the ones I discussed above may need to be hard on some level (TikTok and doom scrolling in general are good examples of things that should be made hard but are not). But de-frictioning doesn’t usually account for this level of decision-making. It should.
Figuring out where friction is “good” and where it is “bad” requires prudent self-examination and an appreciation of cost-benefit analysis. If an instance of friction is an unnecessary time suck that consumes hours of your life and offers little in return, you are in the right to seek an easier life. But when the friction is good (the eat-your-vegetables kind of self-disciplining friction) which offers you a chance to pause and reflect on a snap decision— it’s worth keeping and you should embrace the struggle. There is no simple prescribed calculus for evaluating whether friction helps or hinders. For example, If I’m studying for a midterm the following day, I may need every moment and should take advantage of frictionless mobile ordering from WU. But if I’m just sitting around my house, I can definitely spare a few minutes for friction—going through the motions of preparing a meal might even be useful for my studying brain. The one thing to remember is that friction is neither inherently good nor bad.
Maximizing productive friction and eliminating harmful friction helps you achieve that blissful balance between serendipity and struggle which helps give structure to a meaningful and happy life. Serendipity isn’t just a beautiful word, it’s a beautiful experience that you should have in your life. And while struggle doesn’t sound particularly great, it’s necessary and worthwhile. Accept that sometimes you’ll spend a bunch of time doing things that are not the most exciting use of your time – like folding laundry or cleaning dishes – or which promise no guarantee that they’ll work out for the better. There’s beauty in hard work, in struggle, in wasted time, and in uncertainty—don’t abolish them completely. Don’t seek the false physics of a frictionless universe.
By Zev van Zanten
