Most people believe that doing things should be as easy as possible.
Suppose you wanted to listen to some music. You could either:
- Go to a store, browse through a catalog of physical CDs. Purchase an album which costs about 20 dollars. Then put the CD into your player. Sit down and listen to the music. When you wanted to skip to a different album or artist, you’d have to stand up walk over press eject then replace the CD in its old case. Find the new CD, insert it and hit play.
- Reach into your pocket, grab your phone, tap your screen a few times and listen.
The level of friction between these two scenarios is great. In the first one there is time friction, monetary friction and energy friction. In the last one there is almost none. The friction I am talking about here can be defined as:
Friction: factors which prevent bringing your mental desire to physical reality.
In the second scenario, the gap between desire and fulfillment collapses to nearly nothing—your thought can transform into reality the instant it forms.
There are different types of friction.
Monetary Friction: The financial cost that creates barriers to action.
Time Friction: The amount of time required before achieving results.
Energy Friction: The physical or mental effort needed to complete a task.
There is also the friction of staying in the status quo. When doing anything there is always the low-friction alternative of not doing anything at all.
Some things are hard to do (high friction) and we often don’t often have to or feel the need to change our circumstances (status quo).
Status Quo Friction: The natural resistance to change that makes maintaining current behaviors, systems, or circumstances more comfortable than adopting new ones.
Technology Reduces Friction
Technology makes things easier to do. It removes friction. The common intuition stated in the beginning was that: making things easier to do is preferable. If asked which music listening scenario you’d prefer, most would say the second. In fact, that is what we have seen in society. No one really listens to physical media anymore. Instead we’ve opted for digital streaming services.
I contend that making things easier to do is actually not always preferable. Instead I believe that in some domains it is good up until a point where thereafter it becomes less-good.
At first reducing friction allows significant value increases until it reaches a tipping point. An apex of maximum value. After which removing friction, surprisingly, reduces value.
Why Does Friction and Value Work This Way?
In some cases the value or experience of doing a thing is affected with how easy it is to do. When you are unbounded to listen to any music, artist, or song, at any moment, our relationship with what music is changes. Before, music was much more intentional. To listen meant you had to do a series of high friction activities. The willingness to endure the friction meant you really wanted to listen and you would be less likely to move on to something else. If I walked 20 minutes to the store, searched and purchased the latest album from The Strokes for 20 dollars, then brought it home to play, I am not as likely to just give up on it if I don’t like it at first. I am, by way of friction, invested in it. This level of friction investment is absent in a world of zero-friction music streaming. The instant I cease to enjoy the album I am free to move on and listen to something else. When friction is reduced beyond the apex, we see behaviors evolve to be much more nomadic, unfocused and erratic. Our will has a new found direct power to divert us at its each and every whim. When friction is present, your will has less power. “I bought this album, so I should give it a good shot, even if I’m not loving it right now.” There’s a way that our short-term will (not loving it now) must relenting to the larger friction tested will (I bought it). Imagine going through all the setup to take out your speakers and CD player. Plug them all in. Find the album of your choosing. Then insert it and hit play. The will needed to derail you from listening would be pretty significant.
Friction is good at giving us guardrails. It allows us to stay committed to a path and prevent deviations that get in the way of engaging deeply with something. In a world of decreasing friction, where it is easier to do whatever we want moment to moment, we are faced with a paradox: either we are paralyzed by choice or we jump rapidly thing to thing losing the real value we were looking for in the first place. This interplay between value and friction reveals a crucial insight: as activities become frictionless, they transform from meaningful experiences into mere commodities. What was once hard fought becomes instrumentalized, ubiquitous, and devalued. The ease of access doesn’t just change how we obtain things—it fundamentally alters our relationship with them.
So far I have applied friction to music listening, but this structure is pervasive across most aspects of our life. In relationships, we want it to be easy enough that we can go and meet people we like, form initial connections and proceed to deepen them. Modern digital dating apps have made finding people to connect with phenomenally easy. Yet we have find that real connections are even harder to cultivate. A very similar thing is also present in creating music. It is easier than ever to learn how to play an instrument an online, but that ease of entry comes at a cost: the ease of exit.
A Middle Way
Let me be clear, reducing friction is and will continue to be a worthwhile pursuit. In most circumstances, we have not arrived to the “digital streaming moment” where we can make real our every whim. In many instances we can’t effectively enact our own long-term sustained will. My desire to have a prestigious, fun, ethically sound, high-paying job is filled with friction. So much so that many people fail to do so even when they put a lot of time, money, and energy to. And like we’ve seen with status quo, friction functions to keep you where you are. When you want to leave your job but the friction of finding a new one is high (applying to new jobs, risk of losing income), you are stuck there. Being stuck on the wrong end of friction is unpleasant. At the same time, the reflex to always look for the exit as soon as things get challenging is no way to live, especially when challenges will await you where ever you go. How can we find the balance of friction where we can maximize value without diminishing our experience?
Reintroducing Friction
If you struggle with a disconnect between your short term and long term desires, friction can be a valuable tool.
Case: The MP3 Player
I listen to my music on Spotify. I recently went through a “Digital Declutter” which involved removing any non-essential technology from my life for one month. I stripped my iPhone down to the studs. I only had texts, phone calls and maps. Whether or not to remove Spotify was a challenging decision for me. I believed that removing Spotify meant that I wouldn’t be able to listen to music for a month. Or if I did listen to music it would be so onerous that I’d rarely ever do it. During that month off my life was a lot quieter. I didn’t listen to music on the train, or at work, or at random small increments of my daily life. But I did find myself listening to music differently. I started listening to nearly all my music on my record collection. I’d put on a record and listen to it all the way through. I felt a much deeper and profound connection with the music I did listen to, even if it was a smaller amount. I was rediscovering the joy of music. I was listening to album after album, the hits and the deep cuts. Music as a form of leisure had become much more live for me.
Thanks to the analysis we’ve done so far it’s clear I was on the wrong side of the friction curve. Streaming had such little friction that I forgotten what I had ever enjoyed about music in the first place. Forcing myself to use physical media re-introduced friction and caused me to slow down and appreciate it. After a few weeks, I felt that I had over-corrected. I still wanted to be able to listen to music outside of my house, but I didn’t want to backside to where I had started. So I bought an MP3 player.
The MP3 player, to me, is the perfect middle point of friction for music. It is portable and a separable from my phone. It eliminates any unwanted distractions. Having all your digital life in one place is a blessing and a curse. The friction of needing to carry, charge and purchase multiple devices is removed, but so are the guardrails that keeps you focused on one thing. I have to manually add music. In the beginning of each week I spend an hour thinking about what I want to add. This process forces me to tap into my longer-term will. After I identify the 3-5 albums, I have to find the songs, purchase them and add them. Once added, I am “locked in”. If I have any new music I want to add I write it down to revisit on my loading day. I have to stick with what I have. This usually means I listen to the albums front to back multiple times. A way of engaging with music I find meaningful.
When I listened to music on my iPhone, I found technology got in the way. Distracting apps would pull me from thing to thing. Spotify’s song suggestion algorithm, playlist centric design and unlimited catalog felt intrusive to what it was I really wanted to do. With the MP3 player, I felt like the technology disappeared. It was just me and the music I wanted to listen to.
Some Lessons of Reintroducing Friction
It’s hard to realize what low-friction has done to you. Its often unclear where we could benefit the most from adding back friction.
Don’t be afraid to go too far. When you add friction into your life it feels unnatural. You can easily return to the way you were doing things before. Over correction is sometimes needed to make sure you’re going far enough. It can help you identify the friction points you like and those you don’t.
Beware of Backsliding. After you learn the lessons from adding friction it can feel tempting to remove the friction with the commitment that you won’t fall for the same pitfalls as before. This is incredibly difficult to do.
Find your personal friction sweet spot. The optimal amount of friction varies by person and activity. For me, the MP3 player represented the perfect balance for music - portable but separate from my phone, limited but not overly restrictive. For others, vinyl records or curated playlists might be the right amount of friction. Experiment to find where on the curve you experience maximum value.
Use friction as a tool, not a punishment. Reintroducing friction isn’t about making things needlessly difficult. It’s about creating intentional barriers that align with your deeper values and goals. The friction should support what matters to you, not just make life harder.