After how hard 2025 was, I don’t want to come out and say, “Let’s have more friction in 2026!” But I’ve read two different essays in the last two days about purposely adding friction back in to everyday life via turning your phone off, quitting delivery services, getting out of the car and back on foot, etc.
Dan Sheehan puts it like this, defining what he calls “The Smooth World” (emphasis mine):
The Smooth World, as it is currently and continually designed, is meant to avoid friction at all cost. In it, food can be delivered to your doorstep by unseen butlers, cars turn every excursion out of the house into an isolating door-to-door commute, and in whatever small ways you’re forced to interact with others, you now all have the option of doing so while simultaneously anesthetizing yourself with an unending stream of short form video content.
But hey, those things are chores! Surely optimizing them out of our lives has left more room for leisure! But the optimization hasn’t stopped at chores. Where once games, entertainment, and hobbies were a way of blowing off steam, now many opt instead to remain submerged in that unending stream of content. Our attention is no longer ours to give, having become a new frontier for those who wish to sell targeted advertising.
And Kathryn Jezer-Morton writes,
Tech companies are succeeding in making us think of life itself as inconvenient and something to be continuously escaping from, into digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands: Reading is boring; talking is awkward; moving is tiring; leaving the house is daunting. Thinking is hard. Interacting with strangers is scary. Risking an unexpected reaction from someone isn’t worth it. Speaking at all — overrated. These are all frictions that we can now eliminate, easily, and we do.
Maybe it’s more about remembering where our attention is going than wanting more friction (because even though I see their points, I am not about to say out loud, “Let’s have a difficult year!”). 
