Self-help hacks such as ‘cooking from scratch’ or ‘meeting your friends’ may seem ridiculous. But there’s something deeply human at the heart of this trend
Does life, of late, feel just too easy? Are you keen to make it harder than it already is? If that sounds like a genuinely demented question in the week that the world came close to threatened Armageddon, then fair enough. I bridled too when I read last week about friction-maxxing, the supposed trend for doing things in slightly more effortful, time-consuming or analogue ways – cooking from scratch instead of ordering a delivery, finding your way using road signs instead of just plugging in the satnav, or reading a book rather than half-listening to the audio version of it – as a form of creative resistance to the inexorable march of big tech through our lives. Times are tough enough for a lot of people without being made to feel lazy for taking shortcuts.
Besides, the list published this week by the Washington Post of ways to friction-maxx – which included such superhuman feats as seeing your friends in person rather than just WhatsApping them, and actively trying to remember something rather than just falling back on Google – sounds suspiciously like the rebranding under an irritating new name of what used to be considered merely living. Your grandparents would have scoffed at the idea that any of these things were remotely difficult, or that making an effort to do them could somehow make you a better, more resilient person.
