Why You Need More Friction in Your Life

Life is more delicious and fulfilling when it isn’t as easy…

Everything is too easy. And you, my friend, need more friction in your life.

Let me explain.

You see, we live in a world opposed to friction. And we love it.

The digital world is designed to lower the barriers to your consumption at every turn. You experience it even when you don’t feel it. And this reduction of friction is literally being applied to everything in your world. Everything is easily accessible and, as a result, easily consumable.

Apple doesn’t ask me for a password to get into my locked smart phone. The phone they sell me just scans my face. And if I want to purchase something, I simply click Apple Pay, it scans my face again, and money is magically taken from my bank account in exchange for whatever rubbish I thought I needed. Frictionless.

Amazon, not to be outdone, lets me order with “one-click” and the package of shoes or surfboards or Singaporean noodles just shows up at my door - sometimes the same day! I don’t even have to get in a car or fight traffic or interact with any of those pesky humans. Frictionless!

And everyone, it seems, wants to entertain me. (I must be so important.) Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and Wuphf start showing me videos curated specifically for me without even asking for permission. Spotify makes playlists catered to my listening history so I don’t have to strain to remember what I actually like. ESPN offers to push updates to me every time the backup quarterback for my favorite team blinks. Netflix literally has hundreds of thousands of hours of programming for me just lined up and ready to play. No trip to the theater. No buying tickets or getting that one squeaky seat or dealing with sticky floors or $9 popcorn.

Life is increasingly frictionless.

And yet maybe the best example of this reduction in friction is not in the technologically-enhanced world at all.

Consider macaroni and cheese.

There was a day that macaroni and cheese required, well, cheese. You’ve experienced this deliciousness at your local soul food restaurant or church pot luck. Homemade, gooey, artery-clogging macaroni and cheese takes a long time to get just right, but is always a crowd favorite and a constant temptation for humanity…including lactose-intolerant pastors everywhere. 🫣

It’s also a lot of work. And cheese is relatively expensive. Lots of friction is involved. Between the trip to the store, the grating of cheese, all of that stirring, and eventually doing a pile of dishes…whew. Friction at every turn.

Enter our friends at the Kraft Heinz Company. Like many benevolent mega-corporations, they simply desire to produce delicious products that make your life better. Or do they desire to produce profitable products that may kill you? It’s one or the other…I can’t remember.

Anyway, the fine people at Kraft started selling their now-ubiquitous, blue-boxed macaroni and cheese product in 1937 and quickly came to dominate the processed macaroni and cheese dinner market. (It helps that they essentially created the market.) It wasn’t until 1984 that a worthy challenger emerged. You know it well - Velveeta Shells and Cheese, widely known as the mac and cheese of rich kids and bourgeois billionaires.

Growing up, I remember the rare occasions when we had Velveeta Shells and Cheese. Shells and cheese belonged to people who ate caviar and owned yachts. And now we’re going to have it? What!?!? Is the President coming to dinner? What exactly are we celebrating by trotting out such excessive luxuries?

One thing you might not know (I learned this little fun fact last week) is that Kraft owns Velveeta, too. Ya, the entire mac and cheese aisle is owned by one company. My guess is that federal regulators were literally asleep at the wheel when the time came to break up this cheesy monopoly, having just finished a family-sized serving of mac and cheese.

Anyway, let’s get back to that magical blue box of processed carbohydrate-y goodness.

You already know how this miraculous, nuclear-age food product works. Boil water and pour in the macaroni. Once the pasta is cooked and drained, you simply open the package of radioactive-orange processed cheese powder and, along with butter and milk, dump it into the pot and stir. Voila. Dinner in eleven minutes.

Oh, is that too much work? Too much friction?

Ok, we’ve got you.

Enter EasyMac. Introduced in 1999 (with the single-serve plastic cup debuting in 2006), EasyMac changed the game one more time. Open the package and you’ve got noodles covered in some mysterious white powder and a tiny packet of that famous glowing cheese mixture. That’s it.

If you have a microwave and water, you can make EasyMac. No milk. No butter. No stove. No regrets!!

Kraft killed friction - eliminating hurdles to jamming enriched macaroni into your mouth. And yet - I don’t know a single, sane person who would argue that this is a better product than the homemade version at the soul food joint or the church picnic.

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So I started by saying you need more friction in your life.

Here’s why: life is hard. Becoming who we were made to be is arduous. Relationship is messy. Community is complicated. And entirely necessary if we’re ever to grow.

Contrary to what modern culture seems to want to insist, we don’t grow when we retreat into ourselves or listen to our hearts. We grow when someone who has our best interests in mind loves us enough to create friction. Biblically said:

As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. - Proverbs 27:17, NIV

Said in light of our current conversation here: friction makes it better.

Like…I have a Japanese chef’s knife. I love it. And I sharpen it regularly using a steel sharpening rod. I grind the two together and the knife blade goes from dullish to impossibly sharp. But it requires friction as microscopic bits of the dull blade are literally shaved off to reveal a fresh edge. Honing a knife is literally making it a new creation.

True relationship is hard. Real community is a hassle long before it’s a radical blessing. But, as it works, it chips off the dull bits. It aids in making us new.

The frictionless world invites us into easy.

Easy entertainment. Easy friendship. Easy sex. Easy consumption.

All frictionless.

So we eat and watch and consume our way into what? Dull lives. Emptiness.

We need each other to be sharpened. Because iron sharpens iron. Air does not sharpen iron. Instagram does not sharpen iron. Hopes and dreams don’t sharpen iron. Living your truth doesn’t sharpen iron. Finding your true self doesn’t sharpen iron. Only friction of a similar sort.

Humans need…humans. Communities. Tribes.

Find yours. Find friction.

The (delicious, growing, hopeful, fulfilling) way, the truth, and the life await.

- KB