There was a time when getting somewhere involved a little uncertainty. You might have taken the wrong road, stopped to ask for directions, discovered a small town you had never heard of, or arrived later than planned. You might have spent an afternoon assembling furniture without a video tutorial or searched through a paper map while someone insisted they knew exactly where you were. None of it was especially efficient, yet these are often the sorts of experiences which become stories.
Modern life has become remarkably good at removing friction. We can have groceries delivered to the door, dinner brought to us, entertainment selected according to our tastes and almost any purchase delivered within days, sometimes hours. GPS tells us where to turn and streaming services ensure we rarely need to wonder what to watch. We can automate payments, reminders, lights, heating and countless other tasks. Even waiting, once an ordinary part of life, is increasingly something technology is designed to eliminate.
There is enormous value in all of this. Convenience can be liberating, particularly when mobility, time or energy become more precious. Nobody needs to romanticise queuing at the bank. Having tedious jobs made easier leaves more time for people and activities we care about. The problem begins when convenience becomes the default answer to every small inconvenience.
A Little Friction Might Be Good for Us
Consider what happens when we remove every opportunity to figure something out for ourselves. GPS is wonderfully useful, yet following its instructions turn by turn means we may arrive somewhere without ever learning where we are. A recipe can save dinner, but there is something different about opening the refrigerator and working out what might become a meal. Taking the most direct route is easier than taking the scenic one. Ordering online is easier than stumbling across something we never knew we wanted.
Ease is not the enemy. Effort is simply more complicated than we sometimes give it credit for.
A little friction can make us pay attention. When we have to find our own way, we notice the landscape. When we cook without a precise plan, we develop judgement. When we repair something instead of replacing it, we learn how it works. When we wait, we may look around, start a conversation or allow our minds to wander. It requires us to participate rather than having everything arranged on our behalf.
We Remember the Things Which Went Wrong
Perhaps this explains why some of our favourite memories are not necessarily our most comfortable ones. We remember the holiday where the weather turned dreadful, getting lost and finding a beautiful beach by accident, or the dinner party where the soufflé collapsed. The inconvenience becomes part of the story.
Think about the stories people tell repeatedly. They rarely begin, “Everything went exactly according to plan.” They involve missed trains, wrong turns, terrible weather and ambitious projects which went off course. The things we eliminate in the moment often become the details which give an experience its character later.
Perhaps a perfectly frictionless life has a strange downside: there may be less to remember.
When Comfort Becomes Something We Protect
There is another possibility worth considering. The more comfortable we become, the less comfortable we may become with being uncomfortable. A delayed parcel can feel surprisingly irritating. A website which takes too long to load can test our patience. Small inconveniences can seem disproportionately frustrating because we have become accustomed to removing them.
None of this makes us spoiled. Technology has simply changed our expectations. When something which once took an hour can now take five minutes, an hour begins to feel unreasonable.
Yet life has not changed quite as dramatically as our expectations. People still get lost, plans fall apart, machines break and weather changes. Eventually, convenience reaches its limits and we must deal with something which cannot be streamlined or automated. Perhaps learning to tolerate small frustrations is useful because life will always contain larger ones we cannot choose.
We Can Choose Our Own Inconvenience
This becomes particularly interesting as we get older. After decades spent meeting obligations and solving problems, there is an entirely reasonable desire for things to become easier. Retirement can bring the freedom to slow down, and technology can remove chores which once consumed hours. There is no virtue in making life unnecessarily difficult. Yet freedom from obligation need not mean freedom from challenge.
Later life may offer an unusually good opportunity to choose our own inconveniences. We can take the long way home simply because we have time. We can attempt a recipe which looks slightly beyond our abilities, take up a hobby where being a beginner is unavoidable or spend an afternoon doing something without worrying about whether it is productive.
The distinction matters. Chosen difficulty can feel very different from imposed difficulty. Struggling to learn a new skill because you want to learn it is not the same as struggling because you have no alternative. There can be pleasure in choosing a little friction when we know we can return to comfort whenever we like.
Perhaps We Need a Little More Friction
The answer is hardly to abandon convenience. Nobody needs to return to paper maps, queue at the bank or deliberately make everyday tasks harder. The point is to notice what we might be losing when every obstacle becomes something to remove.
A life organised entirely around ease can become remarkably efficient, but also strangely narrow. We move quickly, choose quickly, consume quickly and solve problems before they have a chance to become interesting. Perhaps every now and then it is worth leaving room for the unexpected.