Is "Good Friction" A Bad Idea?
And what precisely does it mean?
I wrote about the idea of “friction” the other week, and whether something like “we should make things harder” is a good insight or barking up the wrong tree. Or even, as another writer I engaged with in that piece suggests, a kind of doorway into weird reactionary politics.
I argued that I didn’t think it was, though I can see how it can be. Referring to the other writer’s argument, I wrote, partly agreeing with him:
He means that “friction” is too vague, and is stated in the negative, and so that formulation of the idea can become a conduit to reactionary ideas. People don’t get married anymore because it’s too easy to have casual sex. People don’t have kids anymore because it’s too easy to be childless. People are too consumeristic because it’s too easy to buy stuff.
This is itself an important point: it’s a good exercise to try to state your ideas in the positive. In the same way that a complaint is not a solution, a negative formulation of an idea is related to but not the same as a positive formulation.
Anyway, in defense of “friction” as a good thing, I went back to one of my early pieces, where I recounted a talk I heard from an interior designer. She said, basically, that a little bit of difficulty can bind people together. Her example was a gas fireplace versus a wood fireplace, and how the uncertainty of how long the wood fire will burn is a kind of binding friction—people stay until the fire goes out, or use “one more log” as a shorthand for staying an undetermined little bit longer. With the gas fireplace, the ease of turning it on and off takes away that binding, social aspect.
An example I often think about is a time in college when we had a massive snowstorm and the campus lost power. We all had to go home, but it was about a day before everything was cleared and anybody could drive to campus. I remember how, without internet, we piled into the lounges, played board games, daisychained 100 chargers to a single outlet that improbably had power through a generator, even though the others didn’t. It seemed to me the “friction” of not having power and internet bound us together in a way we never really otherwise were.
I also saw this piece, from Dave Deek, about a totally different subject—grocery stores building apartments above their stores—but it touches on this friction point as well:
The central observation of behavioural economics: human beings are far more affected by friction than by price. If you make something ten seconds harder and people stop doing it. Make it ten seconds easier and they start. Reshaping of daily life over the last twenty years has been about removing small frictions like faster free delivery or smartphones. The grocery-anchored mid-rise applies the same idea to the activity humans spend more time on than any except sleep: keeping themselves fed.
And then I got a couple of interesting comments on my own piece. This one, on the related question of good land use reducing friction:
Urbanism is a local transportation efficiency scheme. Life should be convenient. Ordering Door Dash is convenient for the client, but imposes mobility on the part of the driver, while walking to a corner diner is a little less convenient for the consumer, it requires less overall mobility.
And then one, which unfortunately I can’t find, that made a bit of a counterpoint: the wood fire isn’t “friction”—it’s actually the removal of the interpersonal friction of having to ask, “Do you want to stay a little longer?” and instead say “How about another log?” I suppose that reduces to the same point—the wood fire has a binding effect—but it underscores the fact that apart from “friction, good or bad?” is the conceptual question of what we even mean by “friction”?
And as I’ve thought about it, I’ve wondered if the whole “I wish we had more ‘friction’ to make good things easier to do somehow” is a muddy way of thinking about things, and a highfalutin way of throwing up your hands and giving up your ability to do things.
I suppose, somehow, I see the wood fire as a hack to keep guests staying longer. Not that my friends leave early or don’t like me or don’t want to come over. Just, like, in a general way. I realize I’m doing something a lot of folks do: this sort of “My life is actually very nice, but there are so many problems out there, and so many miserable people out there, that it might as well not be.” The problems out there can feel more real, somehow, than your own life.
There’s also, maybe, an insecurity there. Like, my friends won’t stay unless they feel like they have to wait out the fire. It’s also not a very charitable way of thinking about other people: that they’re lab rats who need to be manipulated or “nudged” into doing the right thing. Of course, on some level, it’s true that we respond to incentives and do what’s easy. But you can subtly take that too far and just end up at Nudge larded up with metaphysics and right-wing grievances.
I remember one evening when we had folks over, and one of them grabbed another beer around 10pm. I remember thinking, that’s cool, it’s about time to head home really, but I guess he wants to stay long enough to have one more beer. But the beer wasn’t why he stayed, of course. And the fire isn’t why people stay. Ultimately, if your friends like you, they’ll hang out. So I realize there are multiple levels of abstraction going on with this whole “friction” thing, and abstraction can actually be the enemy of clear thinking, or seeing what’s in front of you.
Related Reading:
Friction, Distance, Incidental Activities
If It Feels Too Hard, You’re Doing It Wrong
Or if you offer another beer because you want the night to end, but you don't want to be rude, your friend can then decide if he wants to stay. He can say sure one for the road and stay a finite amount of time longer, or he can say I want one, but I really should be going.