harness your optionality
I wish Steve's Add Friction Back Into Your Life adopted Hill's complementary approach from Blogging vs. X (Twitter):
The main choice comes down to what you want from your content: Blogs work best when you need to explain something thoroughly and want it to be found later.
X works best when you want quick responses and immediate conversations.
The best approach combines them.
You cover both needs without having to choose one over the other.
You can enjoy analog and digital media, mundane and exciting things, and "the hard way" and "the easy way" together. More importantly, you can enjoy your preferred proportion and mapping of those concepts and more.
Convenience itself creates novel, uneven friction across the population. Steve mentions tasks "in an age of hyper-convenience" like shipping goods to your door, listening to any song, watching any movie, and creating images and code with a single prompt. No matter how convenient these activities become, they can go awry and cause frustration for people indulging in their luxury.
Fears of replacement can be met with voluntary agency. Augment daily chores like grocery shopping by getting it delivered to your door however often you desire. Have dedicated robots help you take care of the laundry at your rhythm. Substitute or complement the above procedures with other tactics and cadences if you wish. Instead of treating automation as an on-off switch for all activities, you can impart a nuanced level of automation for each facet of your life.
Reject the strict lens of mundane friction giving purpose over exciting convenience for one of optionality. Whether simultaneously or separately, you can:
- Get groceries delivered and interact with people outside.
- Enjoy streaming services and the excitement of resurrecting an old CD, vinyl, or DVD.
- Prompt Claude to generate a bunch of spaghetti code and write code yourself.
- Use ChatGPT to think critically about something and wrestle with the opinion.
- Drive on an interstate for 2 hours and through a beautiful background for an extra 30 minutes.
Consciously or not, everyone faces friction. Life is balancing many different kinds of constantly changing friction. That gives our lives layered rhythm and purpose over how simplistic seeking "the right kind of friction" can feel. Instead of flipping a single switch up and down, harness the power of the mixer before you.
See where what you want to do takes you.