Convenience is one of the greatest achievements in human history. Clean water arrives at the turn of a tap, food can be delivered to your door, maps guide us anywhere we want to go, and information that once took days to find now arrives in seconds.
In the last piece, I argued the catch: as convenience increases, capability can quietly decrease. This is the practice I use to push back against it.
I call it the Deliberate Friction Principle:
Intentionally retain selected forms of effort, practice, and challenge even when technology can remove them, because capability decays when it is never exercised.
Deliberate friction serves two purposes. It preserves capability and awareness. Capability helps us retain skills. Awareness helps us appreciate what convenience has replaced.
The keyword is deliberate.
I am not talking about making life unnecessarily difficult. I am talking about choosing small amounts of friction because they preserve capability and awareness.
The frictions I keep on purpose
I often get off the bus one or two stops early and walk the rest of the way. When I drive, I sometimes park further away than I need to. When I have shopping to carry, I may choose to walk or take public transport rather than loading everything into a car.
These are not acts of suffering. They are small ways of keeping certain capabilities alive.
The gym is re-adding friction
Many people think exercise only happens in a gym. But carrying shopping bags is not very different from a farmer’s carry, where someone holds a heavy weight in each hand and walks a distance. The movement is almost identical. The gym has simply formalised a capability that used to occur naturally in everyday life.
In fact, many exercises are just capabilities that modern life no longer requires:
- Walking on a treadmill imitates travelling on foot.
- Farmer’s carry imitates carrying supplies.
- Cycling machines imitate movement that once happened naturally.
The gym reintroduces physical demands that convenience has removed.
The same idea works beyond the body:
- Do the mental arithmetic before reaching for the calculator.
- Find your way without GPS sometimes.
- Cook a meal from scratch.
- Read something long instead of asking for the summary.
The purpose is not to reject technology. The purpose is to remain capable.
Friction also creates awareness
There is another benefit. Deliberate friction creates awareness.
Consider carrying water from a well. I have no desire to do that every day; modern plumbing is one of humanity’s greatest inventions. But understanding that billions of people throughout history had to carry water just to survive changes your perspective. You gain an appreciation for what modern life provides.
The same applies to food, transport, communication, healthcare, and electricity. Convenience is so successful that it makes the effort underneath invisible. Deliberate friction helps us remember.
It helps to separate two lists: the frictions worth keeping and the burdens that were always worth losing.
| Keep the Friction | Remove the Friction |
|---|---|
| Exercise | Carrying water from a well |
| Learning a language | Grinding grain by hand |
| Practising an instrument | Washing clothes by hand |
| Thinking through a problem | Searching libraries for weeks |
| Cooking a meal | Walking days to deliver a message |
The line worth holding
The goal is not maximum convenience. The goal is not maximum difficulty. The goal is to keep the capabilities that matter while removing the burdens that do not.
The value is not in the struggle itself. The value is in preserving capability.
Technology should remove unnecessary friction. But some friction is worth keeping. Not because life should be harder. Because capability, awareness, and appreciation are easier to lose than we think.
