Frictionless
Or, the Value of Rough Paths
I made a lifestyle change about a week ago and uninstalled Facebook from my phone. This was primarily driven by how much Facebook has embraced enshittification, but also because I realized it had become an effortless habit for me. It took realizing this combination for it to really click in my head how continuing with Facebook didn’t make sense. The thing was, my life has had Facebook longer than Squirt has even existed. So it was a big fucking deal to me.
Social Media
What I used to like about Facebook, indeed what I’ve always liked about social media, is that it created what I think of as “frictionless connections” with friends and family. I knew what was going on with all my friends without having to work for it. My mind is both wired and trained to pull in knowledge like this that sinks down into the swamp of my brain and then percolates. So I knew when people were getting married or divorced. I celebrated their kids’ successes, I mourned with them when they lost their parents. All for the cost of having a habit of scrolling that worked well for me because I didn’t really join groups or argue with strangers via Facebook. It was wholly for my friend connections.
Similarly, it gave me an “audience” for my stuff. I got in the habit of generating content that amused me. Picture albums of other habits of mine. Quick little snarky comments. Rants. Longer form things that were essentially Substack-before-there-was-Substack. But always and only for an audience of my friends which never even got past 200 people. Again, there wasn’t really any effort or friction. Friends created content and I had a pseudo-dialogue with them. I created whatever I wanted and threw it out there and got some interaction. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.
I felt connected to other folks. Then it slowly dawned on me that I was no longer really connected because the platform was morphing. It became a place not for my friends to talk to me, and not for me to talk to my friends, but instead just for all of us to feed our attention into the money-making machine. Which sucked.
But how to rewire my brain after 15 years?
Intentionality
A friend of mine, one not on social media, told me that he intentionally reaches out and connects with his friends and it changed the paradigm for me. He is about a decade younger, so he grew up in an entirely different world when it comes to the internet and social media. A world, I think, that was already quite down the road of enshittification and so he avoided the rose-colored nostalgia glasses I was subject to.
He had hit on something vital. The meaningful things should take work and energy. Sometimes you need to be intentional about what you’re doing and burn some of your precious time, otherwise the value becomes negligible. I chatted with the AI for a while about this, bound and determined there was a quote I had heard before that captured this but damned if I didn’t find words from a preacher I’d never heard of before that I fell immediately in love with.
Everything worthwhile is uphill. The problem is, we have downhill habits. If you have downhill habits and you have uphill hopes, you’re in trouble.
Did I have to wade through some ad-infused crap to find that quote? Yes. Did I have to endure some fire and brimstone pulpit preaching? Also yes. Did I feel a little icky wading into the self-help guru world? Very much yes. Does it perfectly encapsulate the idea I want to communicate? Maybe.
Downhill
It’s axiomatic that change is constant. Everyone finds change to be uncomfortable. We are all, to some extent, uncomfortable at every moment of our lives. Things change around us, we don’t like it, and that leads to those “downhill habits.” Like wasting time on Facebook telling myself that I was in contact with friends rather than whoring out my attention to make Meta more advertising revenue.
But it was so fucking easy. So comfortable. So inevitable. Like walking downhill. Didn’t even have to think about it.
Easy has become a problem for me. In fact, I think I’m coming around to the argument that easy is a problem for the whole modern world. Except for the CEOs of the modern world who I’ve heard for years keep their kids away from all social media because they know just how damaging it is. One of the books that Squirt and I both read this year is targeted at all the kids that aren’t children of tech CEOs and it digs deep into the tricks and dangers of social media, styling these CEOs as evil “wizards.” I devoured this book and then I gave it to Squirt who also tore through it.
Something I remember from this book is how easy it was to fall into the trap, only to realize it wasn’t really making the kids happy. Because the world was designed to trap anyone who participated. The perfect soporific. You look up and you realize that hours of your day are just gone. Slid away over the ice-slick modern world of a downhill habit.
Friction
I am a lazy person. It’s actually one of the things that make me good at my job. I hate doing anything more than once. If I did it twice, then it went on my list as another thing I need to design a better solution for. In many ways my job is to automate myself out of a job. To eliminate friction. There are not enough hours in the day, of course, but that’s the end goal — to make everything just effortless and not need me ever again. The systems never stand still, though, which means there’s always another thing that needs fixing and another thing for me to learn.
Talking to my father last week, we actually touched on friction without ever saying the word. We were comparing his past jobs, specifically working on an assembly line vs. a job that required problem-solving and adaptation. A job that required the same thing over and over vs. a job that necessitated constant learning. A frictionless job vs. a friction-filled job. We drifted then into how my job is changing as AI continues to improve and, essentially, reduce the friction for me solving problems. Finally, we landed on what the job world would look like for Squirt. We don’t know what the world will look like for him. But, I said, at least I know he’s a problem-solver and the world will always need problem-solvers.
The trick, I think, is choosing which problems to solve. Which friction to reduce. The value I bring to my job is choosing. Hell, this whole fucking Substack is about choices. What hard things do I want to do?
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
~ John F. Kennedy
Value
Hard things have value. Easy is cheap. I think most of us understand that even if we don’t say it out loud. Mindlessly doing something over and over doesn’t pay as well as highly skilled labor. My world is freaking out as it discovers that “coding” ain’t nearly the highly skilled labor we’d tricked the world into thinking it was. So the world, and the people, will need to adjust. Find the next thing to choose to put our effort into. Fair enough.
More stuff is becoming easy.
And there it is. I’ve been struggling on this piece for weeks trying to find the thing I wanted to say here, but I think I finally found it.
The modern world has made too many things easy and cheap.
Making so many things easy has leached meaning and value from them. Cheapened them. Relationships over social media lack depth. Or they become entirely parasocial. Computer programming is just an AI prompt away. Generating an image, like I do with almost every one of my posts, is just a matter of feeding a couple words into the Substack image generator. You don’t have to call and catch someone at home, you just text them and they’ll get to it when they get to it. Few of us struggle to eat or find shelter. We can find any information we can possibly imagine, true or not, to support our stances.
As easy as falling down. Or walking downhill.
This is the very definition of progress, though. Society does hard things because it makes things easier. I do exactly the same thing — solve the right problem to make something easier. Yet my concern here is that we’ve made some things too easy. That’s the tension, I think.
When has something been made too easy? When should we retain some friction? When should we avoid the easy answer?
Habits
There’s a thing you can do for good habits. Make something harder if you want to stop doing it. Make it easier if you want to keep doing it. For example, I find that my concentration has become shit with my phone. So I have turned off almost all push notifications on the phone for fewer distractions and it never comes off silent. I’ve also removed almost everything from my front screen except for the things I find “acceptable” to be immediately available when I unlock my phone. So here’s a picture of Ash and Luna on my “front page.”
Notice the distinct lack of social media apps other than Reddit. Yes, I know Reddit should be gone too, but I’m working up to it. The rest, though, are gone. It was too “easy,” so I formed the wrong habits. For the last year I kept Facebook on the last screen only to realize it would override that level of friction. I still find myself flipping to the back only to realize I fully deleted it now. My mind craves the frictionless social media drug. I know damn well I’m not alone in wanting the cheap little dopamine hits.
All because I was using it to be “social” and keep up with all my friends and post my own thoughts out to them. These are good things, right up until they weren’t. So, again, I ask myself — how do I determine when it’s not a good thing?
Choosing
I think, more than any other time in history, this is becoming a problem for us. How do we choose what’s good? Which habits do we want to encourage? Where do we find the valuable things that are worth the friction?
Man, I don’t fucking know, but I think I gotta figure it out. I think we all have to figure it out. I want Squirt to not only do hard things, I want him to want to do hard things. His brain, like all of ours, is wired to lean away from the friction. To avoid the hard things. But hard things are how we grow and improve. Hard things are where the pride and the confidence come from. Struggle leads to growth.
This, too, is frustrating and hard. So many of my pieces land here without a clear answer or rubric to apply to the world. Because nobody should only have to do hard things and fight against their biology. What a miserable existence. What an imbalanced existence.
So I don’t have any answers really, other than saying that “do hard things” should be part of a life well lived. How many hard things are up for debate. But not that there should be hard things.
Squirt Says…
I feel like that in the past, present, and future people will continue to do things that are easy over those that are hard, over those that are right, because it's human nature. Humans like simplicity, they like not thinking.
Dad Says…
Agreed, humans have always had these particular flaws. However, I think one of our strengths is that we’re making it easier for these very flaws to assert themselves. So perhaps I would change this to being that we’ve done it in the past, we’re doing it more in the present, and we will need to be on guard because in the future we’re probably going to get even worse.
