Friction and Maintenance

Coming off of holiday festivities, my brain, appropriately, is feeling rather sluggish. It’s fitting, I guess, for this liminal period of time between Christmas and New Years where somehow it’s more acceptable to find yourself still in sweats at 3pm. Much of society, necessarily, is humming along — especially for those we consider “essential” workers, whose pay I only wish matched their praise. But for the many of us in the unessential lot, we find ourselves nibbling a cookie for breakfast, reheating leftovers, forgetting the day of the week, and attempting to fend off all possible responsibilities.

In this transitory period, it’s seemingly okay to wonder how long it’s been since you last showered, and then find oneself questioning if our “normal” rate of bathing is actually just a capitalist construct created by the Shampoo-Industrial-Complex. On the verge of conspiracy theories, we realize that it might actually be a good idea to eventually put on pants, go outside, run an errand, and talk to another human being (but maybe shower first). As enticing as it is to avoid the “outside world” and continue to drool on our couches, hypnotized by screens, we clearly benefit from having a little friction with life and all its obligations.

Friction

There are many who have reflected on the idea that friction (things that require effort and involve the messy, complexity of other human beings) is fundamental to giving our life meaning. As posed in this article, when we think of the things that have given us a deep sense of fulfillment (which is different from simply pleasurable experiences), they are often those that involved challenges, emotions, obstacles, and most likely relationships with others. If we solely focused on making life efficient, seamless, easy, we would sap it of its resonance (something I’ve touched on before).

So, when I inevitably find myself irritable over the annoyance du jour, I try and remember that the messiness is often the good stuff. It makes me think of a clip from Bob Odenkirk on Mike Birbiglia’s podcast, that went somewhat viral. When asked who he is most jealous of, Odenkirk responds, without hesitation: “anyone who still has little kids at home”. It’s a moving answer, especially for us parents in the midst of toddlerhood, because it serves as a reminder that all the messiness (literal and emotional) of raising children is something to be embraced, because these moments will, sadly, be missed in a future that will come all too quickly. I’ll confess that there have been many times — cleaning tomato sauce off the couch, stepping on a Moana doll (her feet are like daggers) — that I have longing wondered when I will be converting our current “playroom” back into a dining room where I might eventually eat in peace. But, once these thoughts have run their course, I’m on the couch, scrolling through photos of Nina, reminiscing about something funny and unexpected she did that day, and looking forward to all the messiness of tomorrow.

Jia Tolentino (one of my favs) is a writer who has adeptly and uniquely explored the profound importance of friction — which was a theme in her conversation last year on Ezra Klein’ podcast, whose transcript I revisited to pull out a few relevant bits:

How I delineate good pleasure, meaningful pleasure, from meaningless pleasure… is that I think there’s friction in all real pleasure and in the kind of pleasure you learn to get in the real world. There’s friction in it. There’s true surprise….. That experience contains sharp edges in a way that the algorithmic one never can.

The experience of having children, wonderfully, it is the source of all that friction. I think that as our world orients itself increasingly towards frictionlessness, children can seem exclusively like a form of friction. And that friction can seem exclusively like something that’s undesirable, when, in fact, I think my sense that I wanted some of this specific kind [of friction] was one of the things that made me think [having children] would be fun.

There’s this old Kurt Vonnegut thing where he was talking about the pleasure of mailing a letter. And it’s like how the whole point of it is not that you’re doing something efficient. The whole point of it is that you go for a walk, and you wink at a girl, and you pet a dog or whatever.

That last reference brings to mind this UNICEF associated children’s book called Children Just Like Me, released in 1995. Caitlin used to read it as a kid and it’s now become a favorite of Nina’s. The book profiles children across the world, exploring their differing cultures, families, and interests in specific details. It’s genuinely enjoyable — when reading it to Nina, I find myself wanting more time on each page. The first time I got to the end of the book, I noticed there were instructions for how to mail a letter to one of the children, and for some reason this made me feel an almost painful form of nostalgia. It placed me back in a world pre-iPhone, imaging being a kid developing a deep interest in the lives of other kids in far off countries, and then experiencing the wonderful mystery of mailing a letter with the possibly of having an exchange. I don’t want to come off as a luddite here — I recognize the connections afforded by the internet have been net beneficial — but the difference between mailing a letter vs. DMing someone on Instagram is just such a pertinent example for what we lose when we remove too much friction.

While I’m sure there’s nothing less unique than thinking one is living through a unique time in history, what strikes me about our current moment is that we have a rather unnerving ability to remove friction from our lives — and it’s only getting easier. In many ways, like paying bills online, removal of friction is obviously a good thing. But at some point convenience can become a compulsion which can become an addiction — and that slope is slippery, especially as convenience expands to more domains of life, as experts forecast that 30% of U.S. adults will use AI “for companionship, emotional support, social interaction, or simulated relationships at least once daily” by 2040.

I don’t have a moral judgement here and it’s hard to know how this will all pan out — maybe there will be pushback and performative offlineness becomes a trend. But things can also get, and already are, really weird.

In this highly disturbing, brilliantly written article, The Goon Squad (that should come with a parental advisory warning), we learn of a niche online trend known as “gooning”. It’s the most extreme version of avoiding the friction of real life and instead (the pun is begging to be made) placing endless hours of friction in one particular area of which I’ll let you guess….

The piece, due to the gift of the writer, is a thoughtful, nuanced, insightful account of a culture that could have so easily been turned into salacious click bait. Given the level of absurdity, it’s impossible to spoil anything, but as the essay comes to a close, the journalist makes a weighty, poignant observation: Is the behavior of the “gooners” that different from the infinite scroll of social media of which many of us are all too familiar?

But I can’t get entirely behind the few-bad-apples theory. Nor can I so neatly separate the gooners as a whole from the rest of us. Think about it for a second: What are these gooners actually doing? Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms. Parasocially fixating on microcelebrities who want their money. Broadcasting their love for those microcelebrities in public forums. Conducting bizarre self-experiments because someone on the internet told them to. In general, abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone. Does any of this sound familiar? Do you maybe know some folks who get up to stuff like this? It’s true that gooners are masturbating while they engage in these behaviors. You could say that only makes them more honest.

Of course, there’s a spectrum here, but admittedly, I can find myself reaching for Instagram in moments where, for a variety of reasons, some of which remain unknown to me, I choose to avoid the friction of life and seamlessly wash away in the river of my feed. I try not to judge this behavior. But awareness, as they say, is the first step to change. As we look ahead to 2026, for many of us it’s worth considering how we might embrace more friction in our lives — for the gooners, I guess, they should consider literally reducing it.

I should also clarify that I had no intention to have my year-end entry included such a strong reference to masturbation — but don’t fight inspiration, I guess!

Maintenance

Few things are as enticing as the possibility of reinventing ourselves. I remember there was a summer between 6th and 7th grade where I hung out with a group of boys I found to be wittier, funnier, edgier, who showed me the Offspring and influenced my style — turns out you can buy shorts without pleats! Coming back into 7th grade, I had a heightened persona, which I likely upheld for all of a month, until my good ‘ole self (whoever that might be) came creeping back in. It’s relatable, because this appears to about the average amount of time people uphold their New Year’s resolutions.

And so while I’m all for life planning, goal setting, intention mapping, it might be worth thinking beyond what we want to change about ourselves and to consider what are the things we actually want to maintain. Certain writers have helped open my eyes to how much we seem to undervalue maintenence in our culture. We often glorify the new and innovative at the risk of overlooking the virtue of tending, maintaining, and cultivating the gifts we already possess.

There are economic dimensions here, as Kyla Scanlon observes:

75% of new jobs in healthcare and social assistance, our workforce is being absorbed by the essential but underfunded ‘maintenance economy’ of an aging population. While it props up the labor market, it fails to generate the type of wealth that fuels the stock market or long-term growth, as resources are poured into maintenance rather than creation.

And there are political and philosophical implications, a key theme in much of Jenny Oddell’s work (whose book How to Do Nothing first introduced me to many of these concepts):

Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.

The life force is concerned with cyclicality, care, and regeneration; the death force sounds to me a lot like 'disrupt.' Obviously, some amount of both is necessary, but one is routinely valorized, not to mention masculinized, while the other goes unrecognized because it has no part in 'progress’.

If you're optimizing your life or an environment for performance and production, something like conservation isn't where you're going to put your energy. The destruction that follows shows how narrow that value framework really is... Maintenance is the work that makes life possible

So, as part of our New Year’s resolutions in 2026, I’d invite us to counterintuitively consider what we might want to nurture, what we might want to keep the same.

Closing quotes

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .” - C.S. Lewis

"But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: this is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it feel this way to you?” - Kazuo Ishiguro

A parting song

Not the most hopeful of lyrics, but Everything Is Broken is a Dylan song that’s been rather cathartic and which I keep returning to for some reason. My cousin Asher, who is often my top source of music discovery, included it on one of his playlist.

Looking back on this year, it can sure feel like a lot is broken. Let’s recognize it, let’s keep moving.