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The things I’m loving on the internet and likely won’t shut up about.

For the past 6 months, I have been furnishing my new (to me, old to the world) house the slow way. Thrift stores mostly, estate sales, yard sales, and of course Facebook Marketplace, which has sent me to neighborhoods I would likely never have visited otherwise. Corners of my city I had no reason to go to until a kitchen table or an antique lamp or a haul of free houseplants gave me one. I have stood in strangers' garages, yards, and living rooms, negotiated over text with people I will probably never meet again, and sent photos of finished rooms to sellers who didn’t ask to know how their old things were doing in their new home but I had to share anyway.

It’s taken considerably longer than clicking the ‘add to cart’ button and waiting for the shipment of home goods to arrive but it’s also returned something kind of wonderful, a residual feeling that these frictionless transactions, for all their genuine and undeniable convenience, tend not to leave behind.

Convenience culture made us a pretty clear promise —> to remove the effort in everyday tasks and give us our precious time back. But I’m sitting here wondering where that “time rebate” is and what it’s actually cost. The waiting, the wandering, the conversation with a stranger, the satisfaction of arriving somewhere I never intended to go, the (intentional “bebop” if you will) these losses were never part of my plan. There was a texture to doing things the long way. And when that texture disappeared, there was no notification. No moment of loss. Just a life that had become, incrementally, a little more frictionless and a little less interesting.

The friction-maxxing conversation does tend to assume, however, a starting point that not everyone shares. It imagines a person who has fully arrived at convenience and is now thoughtfully opting out of it. For a significant portion of people, that arrival never happened. Inconvenience was not something they optimized their way into as a lifestyle choice. It was the texture of their daily lives, unremarked upon, uncelebrated, and not especially romantic.

Chosen friction has a different quality. It is the long way that teaches you something, the slow process that leaves a residue of satisfaction, the inconvenience that turns out to have been the point. I have been thinking about this at work as much as at home. There is a growing desire to automate the parts of work that feel repetitive or time consuming. The summary, the briefing, the first draft, the scheduled update. But some of what gets automated in that process is not the repetitive part. It is the thinking. The discernment. The act of forming a point of view and finding the words for it. I know someone who is looking for an AI tool to automate her voice so she can receive daily briefings of her own perspective. I have been turning that over for weeks. What she is describing is not a productivity solution. It is the removal of herself from her own work.

Convenience has made a lot of daily life easier, to be clear. I wouldn’t want to romanticize inefficiency or even genuine hardship. But I do think something changed when nearly every errand, interaction, and task started becoming optimized for speed.

There are certain experiences that seem worth the effort if time allows. Wandering through a thrift store for an hour (or five). Getting lost in a neighborhood on your way somewhere. Sitting with writing a difficult paragraph until you finally know what you are trying to say. Figuring out which friction belongs to you.