We Removed All The Friction. Now We Want It Back.
The rise of friction-maxxing — a cultural analysis on why people are choosing to do things the hard way
TL;DR
We removed all friction from life and now we are voluntarily adding it back in order to reclaim a sense of agency. This is a 3000 word article about that. The irony of summarizing it is not lost on me.
Life on autopilot
Life feels smooth nowadays. Almost too smooth, to the point that it is slippery. This is what happens when there is no friction.
Not friction in the physical sense but friction in terms of choice. Decisions are increasingly made and served for us on a platter. Our algorithms and systems choose what we watch, where we eat and what we do — through prediction and not necessarily by force. This is life under a panopticon-like surveillance where our behaviours are shaped not by visible monitoring but by the quiet awareness that every action is tracked. It often happens without us noticing the exact moment we agreed to be on autopilot.
Nothing feels particularly difficult anymore. And yet many people report feeling a quiet sense of discomfort through the realisation that thinking, waiting and choosing are no longer required in the way they once were.
In this culture of constant overexposure, it is only natural that it becomes desirable to opt out. Sometimes that resistance starts with baby steps such as adding a little bit of friction back into everyday life and reclaiming a sense of agency in the process.
This is where friction-maxxing enters the picture.
When we add deliberate, small obstructions to certain behaviours, like making distractions harder or good habits slightly easier to stick to, we are technically Friction-maxxing. It was first used in a 2026 article by The Cut’s columnist, Kathryn Jezer-Morton who introduced the concept of friction-maxxing in daily life.
Friction can be digital, physical, mental or even lifestyle-related. This might look like deleting social media apps and accessing them only via browser, keeping phones in another room while working, doing mental math instead of reaching for a calculator, reading physical books instead of e-books and even something as basic as cooking food instead of defaulting to delivery.
None of these actions are strictly necessary. These small friction points involve deliberately embracing inconvenience and discomfort in daily life in order to sharpen focus, rebuild attention and counter over-reliance on seamless technologies such as AI.
But why are people trying to make life difficult for themselves, that too on purpose?
The most obvious answer is agency. With AI and frictionless systems deciding for us what to watch, what to buy and what to read next, we have begun losing the experience of making a choice. Adding a pause such as a confirmation pop-up or a deliberate extra click, gives us the actual authority to make decisions instead of being automatically compliant.
The second reason is meaning. Things that require patience and discomfort feel more meaningful than instant outcomes. Even the IKEA effect (which is the tendency for people to value things more when they’ve put effort into creating them themselves) plays out in everyday life more than we realise. Buying groceries by handpicking items at a supermarket somehow feels more productive than Zepto-ing them home in 10 mins. Knowing that the outcome of their effort is well-earned, people introduce friction as a tool for ownership and value into everyday life.
Then there is the more uncomfortable reason of convenience being weaponised nowadays. Friction is not removed evenly across all parts of life. It is removed for spending, scrolling and consumption but remains intact for quitting, cancelling and slowing down. There are infinite scrolling loops on every social media app today, yet we have to go through 500 steps to cancel a single Netflix subscription. In this context, friction-maxxing becomes a resistance to addictive design, not to technology itself.
And finally, there is cognitive debt. Frictionless systems remove the need for sustained cognitive effort and in doing so, they weaken recall, calculation and the ability to think critically. That is why most AI tools are offered at little to no cost because widespread adoption creates long-term dependency through habit formation. People remain dependent on big tech companies to outsource their thinking which can then be used to subtly (or very obviously) influence behaviour and decision-making. This leaves people unfulfilled. Friction-maxxing as this self-imposed cognitive training is a barrier against a world that stopped requiring (and rewarding) the effort of thinking.
At this point, it is tempting to frame friction as either good or bad. But that binary misses the more important question: who does friction serve and for what purpose?
This framework makes it clear that friction itself isn’t the problem. In fact, some of the most humane systems are intentionally frictionless such as one-touch emergency and essential services. The issue is that friction has been selectively redistributed. So friction-maxxing largely lives in the ‘high effort-helps me’ quadrant where effort serves the individual and not the system.
Inconvenience as a symbol of status
Convenience today has become democratised — there are 10 minute delivery services, instant UPI payments and AI summaries in everybody’s pocket. Convenience has become cheap and universal, difficulty has become rare, and rarity is what signals status today. Time, in this context, becomes the real luxury. Friction requires time, patience, inefficiency and discomfort and only people with control over their time can afford that.
The fashion industry is rapidly changing as a symbol of status. Fast fashion brands ( like Savana, Zara, H&M) optimize for speed and scale and require no further involvement from the buyer beyond payment.
Tailor-made clothing, on the other hand, is deliberately friction-heavy. It requires in-person measurements, multiple fittings and weeks of waiting periods along with significant expenses. This friction is precisely what signals luxury. Only those with temporal wealth can afford to be inconvenienced this way.
Hermes also operates on a similar principle. One can’t simply walk into a store and buy a Birkin bag. There are no transparent waiting lists, no fixed timelines and no guaranteed access. Access requires repeated store visits and a lot of patience even with no certainty of outcome. Here, friction becomes the product itself. This difficulty of access transforms the Birkin from simply a bag into a signal of social capital.
But there is an uncomfortable edge to friction-maxxing. For many people, friction isn’t a choice, but rather exhaustion. Long commutes and manual labour become constraints rather than meaningful resistance. The ability to slow down and add effort back into one’s life depends on time, money and flexibility. Friction-maxxing is only empowering when it is voluntary. It is more of a signal of who has the freedom to choose effort.
The Indian jugaad paradox
The redistribution of friction plays out culturally. For decades, the Indian identity has been closely tied to jugaad. Jugaad does not have an exact English translation but the closest meaning incorporates the ability to find clever shortcuts in a system full of friction. Jugaad was a survival skill and made everyday life workable. We use(d) old containers for storage, take screenshots instead of downloading paid PDFs and even use 3-seater autos as 5-seater cars.
But with India’s digital infrastructure becoming increasingly frictionless and payments, deliveries and decisions happening instantly, the shortcut started losing its meaning. And right now we are seeing a reversal wherein many urban Indians are choosing daily rituals over such hacks.
Simple rituals like cooking from scratch and doing things the long way have become a response to a life that is too smooth. Jugaad helped us survive a high-friction world. In a low-friction one, what we are searching for is something solid to hold onto and rituals provide just that.
The remains of an analog childhood
Trends like “Bring back 2016” are often framed as nostalgia for the past but really we are nostalgic for an analog childhood where experiences were slower and offline. Information and entertainment required effort and patience. There was no “frictionless” experience. Boredom existed and it had to be solved. You stared at walls, counted the number of tiles on the floor, invented games and reread the same books till you memorised entire books line-by-line. Play was physical and there was a lot of body-based learning through falls and bruises. Creativity emerged from constraint — fewer toys, fewer options and more repurposing of objects.
None of this was magical. We lived ordinary childhoods. It only feels magical in retrospect because it stands in contrast to a world where the pleasure of friction has largely disappeared.
The body keeps the score
We have become “head-heavy” creatures in the digital age, living in our thoughts and scrolls while our bodies merely exist as vessels to carry our eyes from one screen to the next.
Physical friction-maxxing is a way to return to the body. It means reclaiming proprioceptive grounding which is the sensory awareness of our body’s position and movement in space. This often begins with ordinary activities, especially those in the kitchen. Grinding spices by hand, chopping slowly and kneading dough by hand, even when there are automatic options available, forces the body to participate fully. It provides “texture” to our memories.
There are higher chances that we remember the day we spent three hours cooking because of the smell and the fatigue than the day we spent three hours scrolling because it had no tactile anchor. The value lies in the effort required to produce it. So, friction-maxxing is about sensory diversity.
Even moving through the local markets, navigating heat and crowds and carrying things home by oneself restores a sense of scale and distance that convenience usually erases. Small tactile choices like writing with a pen on paper instead of typing on a laptop, and drying clothes by hand require attention and care that introduce natural pauses into the day and anchor us in the present rather than pulling us towards the next task.
Friction as a love language
Maybe intentional friction is the only remaining proof of sincerity in relationships today — the friction of effort. With automated reminders, AI texts and pre-curated gift baskets, the effort of maintaining a relationship gets outsourced to a server.
We value what we helped build and we love what we have had to struggle for. It is the clumsy vulnerability of a face-to-face admission of love (or an apology) that cannot be replaced by 5 heart emojis. It is the friction of a handwritten letter where the smudgy ink proves that a human was present and intentional in that moment.
In 2026, the greatest gift you can give someone is your undivided attention. Choosing the friction of boredom and silence with a partner is probably the most radical act of devotion left. It signals that the other person is interesting enough to hold your attention without any algorithmic assist.
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Frictionless love is a low-stakes subscription. If a relationship doesn’t have any friction, it’s probably because it is not going anywhere.
The romanticisation of thinking
In many ways friction-maxxing is just a rebrand for something that used to be unavoidable. Thinking.
Not too long ago, when completing an assignment meant searching through multiple sources and cross-checking ideas manually, the process itself left traces of recollection of arguments and connections. Recall was a byproduct of effort. Now, generative models collapse the entire process in one step leaving behind fully formed outputs but without the proof of cognitive labour.
Attention now requires constant stimulation in order to stay engaging. Without any pauses or effortful engagement, attention has nothing to anchor itself to.
Even original screenplays being pitched to streaming services nowadays need to be “second-screen enough” so that viewers can easily follow the plot line while consuming other media on their phones/laptops. The content should be interesting enough that the viewer would enjoy watching it but also can’t demand so much focus that it exhausts them.
Seen this way, friction-maxxing becomes a compensatory response in an attempt to reintroduce effort in a frictionless world.
Field notes from Reddit
The patterns of friction-maxxing shows up most clearly in how people talk about their everyday lives and to investigate it further, I turned to Reddit for candid descriptions of how people add resistance into their routines.
On subreddits like r/selfimprovement and r/DecidingToBeBetter, I asked people how they intentionally introduce friction into their lives — whether digital, physical or cognitive. What I wanted to understand is the reasoning behind their choices.
These are some of the comments and insights that stood out for me.
What stands out most across these responses is that nobody mentions discipline and motivation. Every single person is talking about design like where the phone charger lives, which apps are buried in folders and whether the guitar is in the closet or on a stand. They have all arrived, independently, at the same conclusion that the environment decides how much friction is needed to live meaningfully.
Interestingly, several people emphasised that friction-maxxing only works when paired with its opposite. Shaping the path away from what you want to stop and towards what you want to start, at the same time. Friction-maxxing in isolation would feel like punishment.
Across all these clusters, friction-maxxing appears like an informal design practice where by being intentional about their actions, people are learning to rebuild agency in their lives.
What friction-maxxing reveals about user experience
The need for friction-maxxing implies that there is something wrong with modern systems. It suggests that modern product design has succeeded so thoroughly at removing pain points that it has accidentally removed the user too.
Most tools nowadays can generate outputs instantly but they don’t absorb authorship, judgement or even accountability that still sit with the user.
We are now living through the era of clickbait notifications that use psychological gaslighting to get us to unlock our phones. It’s something like a Zomato notification that says “Someone shared a secret with you (it’s just a 10% discount code) or the instagram ping that says “Someone you know is on Threads.”
This is also called intermittent reinforcement because ‘sometimes’ the notification might be important, and that sometimes is enough to keep us hooked.
When systems optimize for retention instead of intent, users are left managing the psychological costs of attention collapse and decision fatigue which is why friction-maxxing becomes a way to rebalance that mismatch manually.
This raises an important question: If people are building their own safeguards, what responsibility do designers have to ensure more humane designs by default?
The irony is that the physical products we grew up with were already doing humane design without calling it that. You couldn’t accidentally call somebody on a landline. You had to mean it. Even polaroid cameras nowadays give us exactly one shot without a preview or a retake. The constraint is the product.
It is digital design that decided friction was the enemy.
Friction-maxxing is what happens when users do, by hand, what design chose not to do by default.
The case for humane friction
Truly humane technology centers the real human needs of compassion, conscience and care.
We must stop treating “time spent on app” as a success metric. Technology should solve for frustrations and not simply exploit new ones. Humane friction is the digital equivalent of a speed bump near a school which is a deliberate barrier to protect something vulnerable (our focus).
Designers are not neutral. Every decision about where to remove friction and where to keep it is a values decision, whether it is acknowledged or not. Humane design just means being honest about that choice instead of dressing it up as innovation.
A new Spotify update called Taste Profile will allow users to see exactly why something was recommended and would let them edit it as well. This is very different from other platforms’ philosophies because the moment an algorithm becomes visible, it also becomes possible to resist it. Most platforms would never do it because transparency reduces the algorithm’s power over us.
Instagram’s “You’ve reached your daily limit” and YouTube’s “Remind me to take a break” messages exist but they are buried somewhere in settings that nobody opens. Even though these features exist, they are never the default and are never as well-designed as the thing they are meant to protect us from. These things should be opt-out by default, rather than being opt-ins. You should have to turn on infinite scroll, not turn it off.
In the physical world, we accept cool-off periods for large financial decisions, the exchange of cash and calculating change and months of documentation and waiting before an adoption, even if we might find them frustrating. Nobody calls these anti-user experiences because we understand that the friction is proportional to the stakes. It makes you wonder why digital spaces are exempt from the same basic responsibility.
We have spent years optimizing for seamlessness and somewhere along the way, seamless became hollow. Humane friction is just the acknowledgement that some things are worth slowing down for. Maybe building that slowness into the system is the whole point of it.
Call to friction
The newest 2026 trend is to be chronically offline, embrace grandma hobbies and touch grass.
But underneath all this, there is an uncomfortable meta-irony in posting about a digital detox and documenting de-influencing setups for an audience of thousands. The chronically offline aesthetic exists almost entirely online and the target audience for “touch grass” content is people who are only touching their screens.
The performance of it is still very online. However, that doesn’t make it meaningless. The dumb/brick phone market is genuinely growing and the term “brain rot” exists because people have realised what infinite scroll is doing to their attention, even if they haven’t stopped scrolling.
And maybe that’s where we actually are right now. Not at the resolution, but somewhere in the middle.
Friction-maxxing reminds us that we are all humans with hands that can write, feet that can walk and minds that can think for themselves. Essentially, it is a survival strategy for the soul.
So, the challenge is to choose the long way out.
Write the letter instead of sending the text.
Walk to the store instead of tapping the app.
Sit in silence instead of reaching for the scroll.
