Park convenience. Embrace friction.

If you stop and look at the way we live now, you realise how much of modern life sands off the rough edges. Robots clean our floors, dishes and windows. Any film, any show, any clip is one tap away. Even books get boiled down into summaries on command.

It’s all very convenient. Maybe too convenient. The real question isn’t what we gain. It’s what we lose.

We tell ourselves convenience buys time for hobbies or self improvement. For other, better, things. Sometimes it does. More often it buys time to consume more of the same stuff that made us feel like we needed time in the first place.

So here’s the question. What are we humans missing when we scrub every bit of friction out of life?

Enter the idea of ‘Friction Maxxing’. It’s a reaction to Silicon Valley’s dream of a seamless, effort-free existence. Friction Maxxing is choosing the harder path because effort is the point. Satisfaction is the byproduct.

The Guardian put it neatly:

‘Then you’ve searched inside yourself. You’ve nudged your own personal boundaries, and discovered that you are more capable than you ever knew. You are building a foundation of perseverance and resilience that you cannot get from typing a prompt into a chatbot.’

Think about the joy of cooking instead of ordering in. The weird calm of cleaning your home properly. The satisfaction of hunting for knowledge in a library. The stretch you feel when you take on a tougher brief at work.

Convenience strips out the toil. But it also strips out the triumph. Without effort our bodies soften, our minds dull, our relationships become lighter than they should be.

So maybe friction isn’t a problem to solve. Maybe it’s a reminder that we are built to push, pull and strain a little. Maybe it’s the most human thing left in a world that keeps trying to remove humanity from the equation.