Nonfriction

Despite its austere and lowkey glum reputation, I have always loved the Lenten season. I love the invitation toward deep contemplation, the emphasis on being bare-bones honest with yourself about where your attention (and thus, your heart) actually lie, as opposed to where you say they do. It’s a wonderful exercise in getting real.

I have been arrested lately with the idea of friction, and how modern life is catered toward mitigating it. When I say friction, I mean it both practically (inconvenience) and emotionally (discomfort—be it boredom, sadness, annoyance, whatever). The elements of life that interrupt us neutrally, positively, and negatively from autopilot or the status quo.

It’s no big secret that we’re in an attention crisis, and that despite it being objectively the best time to be alive due to advancements in technology, medicine, education, and quality of life, there has never been a time in history where people are more electively escaping reality (through increasingly insidious avenues: AI girlfriends and sex robots? Yikes!). People regularly joke about waning attention spans and dwindling literacy rates. Perhaps this is just my algorithm (a dystopian phrase !), but I’ve noticed an uptick in a particular type of video: someone (typically just an influencer, though occasionally a credible expert in a pertinent field) records a video, in which they clearly and succinctly tell you how to make a decision within 1 to 3 minutes. “Three Red Flags That Let You Know It’s Time to Dump Him.” “Five Signs That You Need to Change Your Wake Up Time.” “Seven Reasons to Switch from Dermaplaning to Red Light Therapy.” The stakes vary, but many of these videos are telling people how to live their lives in the amount of time it takes you to brush your teeth. Never mind that 99% of the time you are being sold a product; in general, the tone and implicit message is disregarding context and specificity and dressing them up as simplicity.

In the past 3 months, I have come up against 3 distinct situations that required time-sensitive decisions where I had a gut feeling about what I wanted to do and what I thought was right, but the outcomes of each were high stakes enough that I invited other people into all 3 decisions to see if I was missing something. For each, I sought advice from people of integrity who had specific knowledge about the field of the respective decision, ranging from professional to personal (for the record, I changed my mind all 3 times; the power of friction, baby).

For one such decision, I called my oldest friend, who is one of the most nuanced thinkers I have ever met. Regardless of her own bias and tendency toward having a gut reaction to most problems, she is fastidious in her examination of all sides of any situation when called upon to do so. I was asking her for advice regarding a professional conversation I was being pressured to have that I deeply did not want to. After taking me on a tour of all the ways it could actually be a good thing, she signed off by saying, “Whatever you decide to say is ultimately between you and God anyway.”

This reminded me of one of my all time favorite quotes, spoken by Sinead O’Connor about her experience navigating the music industry: “I don't define success as having a good name or being wealthy. I define success by whether I keep the contract I made with the Holy Spirit.” I get chills whenever I think of it. It’s an incredible lens to make decisions from, especially in an age of dwindling curiosity and smooth-brained choices. It is, more or less, the lens I aim to sift my decision-making through, though I break it regularly (Are you there, Lent? It’s me, Jessie).

Despite being critically panned almost across the board, I recently read Olivia Nuzzi’s memoir American Canto, which is a nonlinear, occasionally opaque semi-description of her affair with RFK Jr. that was an extremely niche tabloid item toward the end of 2024, all under the umbrella of the unique socio-cultural psychic reckoning of the last 10 years in American politics. You probably heard about the affair itself (though frankly it’s hard to keep track of the sheer volume of political figures engaging in personal moral corruption), but if you do know who Olivia Nuzzi is, you likely don’t know much about her outside of her name being attached to RFK’s. I followed her writing pre-scandal, and admire the genuine curiosity she is able to bring to whoever she is covering, despite stark ideological differences with her subjects (she reminds me of my oldest friend that way).

The book itself is decidedly not for everyone, and I can understand why. She is an entirely original thinker, and doesn’t so much drop sordid morsels as explain the way in which she makes decisions. If you are not a process person, it would likely be both confusing and boring to read. What’s more, when she does drop morsels, they remain colored by the love she clearly bears for the man she only ever describes as “The Politician.” It’s striking to read, and frankly disorienting, when her experience has already been neatly described in headlines and she takes the long road to say, “It’s not that simple.” You can tell, throughout the whole book, that her aim is to keep the moral contract she has with herself and God, even though the book would sell much better if she skewered said Politician (which is especially morally interesting in light of moral failing!).

I found myself still thinking about the book weeks after I finished it, and listened to an interview she did with that old so and so of modern stoicism, Ryan Holiday. The overall arc of their discussion is, How do you bear (public) dishonor honorably? It’s a fascinating and expansive conversation. It’s compelling and unusual listening to the way she thoroughly considered each step of the process through the lens of her moral code, how it didn’t even occur to her to necessarily make a choice outside of that metric. Most interestingly of all, she repeatedly reinforces that while she cannot call the decisions she made wise, she is the person that made them, ten toes down. She disappeared for a year to write the book, to think through what had happened to her and allow her thoughts to take shape in the friction created through silence.

Obviously, there’s all kinds of financial safety nets and privilege that enable that sort of thing, and by and large a year in self-imposed exile is not possible for the average person, but our brains crave those pockets of contemplation that modern, technology-enhanced life just does not afford. Many decisions require taking the long way around, turning it over and thinking it through to deliberately arrive at how to move through the specific obstacles of our lives. There are plenty that are better made quickly and with the gut, but those big moral questions, the ones that determine which direction a life can go, need the friction of uninterrupted time (and error) to hone themselves.

I already wrote about this at length at Inkwell, but this is what has consistently made me wary about technology, and what makes me concerned about my own relationship with it. Every day, particularly with the constant invocation of AI—specifically ChatGPT—is a step closer to eroding character and a unique-to-you, context-driven, integrity-forming way of thinking through a problem.

AI’s great strength is predicting patterns based on analysis of gargantuan amounts of information. But most real-life decisions don’t follow a pattern. Sure, there are patterns in human behavior that for varying degrees of time we feel we are exempt from, but by and large, even when we do prove to be the rule and not the exception, we still have to work our own way through our specific sets of circumstances to arrive at a conclusion. How we arrive there is what matters most.

I am past thinking AI can or will be stopped because, duh, it can’t and it won’t; the world only spins forward.1 It is simply too useful, too dulling of the hardships so many of us would prefer to get through more quickly, be they heartbreak or public disgrace or planning what’s for dinner. But what are we all doing with the time that it saves us? How is something that is designed to make reality easier to bear doing anything but keeping us from knowing how to inhabit it? Quietude and reflection, while being largely undervalued in modern parlance, are also extremely hard to come by, even with all this time we are being saved by Doordash and Roombas and 1.25x audiobook speed. Where is it going? What is it being spent on? Is it making us people of greater virtue or sincerity? Are we of greater utility to those who could most use our resources, be they time or money or company?

The moments, experiences, challenges that are the making of us all require friction. I understand the desire to save time and to enhance efficiency, and there are of course innumerable wonderful things that have come out of technological advancements, particularly for parents and disadvantaged groups, as well as creating access in some cases for those who would not have it otherwise. As my beloved Pitt is even grappling with, the amount of people that could be treated more quickly—and potentially more accurately—through the advancement of AI in medical technology is huge, especially in light of the increasingly prohibitive cost of health insurance.

But what are we doing with all that time we have saved? And why is everyone I know so tired and sad?

The completion of mundane, challenging tasks is inherently satisfying, and our ability to complete them is part and parcel to how we see ourselves and move through the world. Our brains crave problems to solve, from getting lost on purpose and finding our way home to putting together the latest acquisition from IKEA. There is inherent, subconscious or otherwise value to doing something yourself. When you make a difficult decision, alone or with your personal advisory board, it is a consistent vote for being the type of person you aim to be. It’s how you know whether or not you are keeping your contracts, whether it’s with the Holy Spirit or what you value.

There’s something to be said about inviting friction into your life, to treating it like a spiritual practice. There’s some gag that regularly goes around the Internet that in every romantic relationship there’s one person in the couple who loves ordering Doordash and the other who will always insist on picking it up. I’m not advocating for inviting difficulty or inefficiency for the sake of it (even though that is technically the position I personally hold and kind of do think that but freely understand I am in the minority), but finding areas where we can afford that extra bit of friction to continue to keep the muscle flexed. What would it look like to actively invite friction into daily modern life?

As I tried to get real with myself in the days leading up to Lent, I have felt consistently distressed about the role of technology in my life, and the way it’s rapidly shaping how we will live, and how humanity will exist. I can’t turn the tide on that. But my very brainwaves are being altered by how embedded technology is in daily life, and I do have agency over the level at which I engage with and am aided by it. In the practices I have implemented for myself during Lent (which include limited social media use and investigating both the practical and emotional friction in my life), there is a question I am continually asking myself, when I have an impulse to check Instagram or open Letterboxd or even take a sampling here on Substack: Is this the way you want to spend your time?

Ask anyone, by nature, I am no doom and gloomer, and, I repeat, I praise (and enjoy!) certain benefits only made possible through modern technology and advancement. I am resolutely hopeful though I have considered all the facts.2 But do you remember in that just-okay movie, Leave the World Behind, where (spoiler alert) when Ethan Hawke finds out that the grid went out, he gets this horrified look in his eye and says, “I don’t know how to get anywhere without my phone”? That stayed with me! There are all kinds of skills that people have had for millennia that many of us have willingly let go of in the name of ease. I guess I really should only speak for myself here. I willingly give my attention, my energy, my brain to things across the Internet far and wide that I do not care about, that don’t align with what I value or think about, and that I consider a legitimate waste of time. I am constantly letting myself off the hook! It is taking that checkpoint—Is this the way you want to spend your time?—for me to actively not do what is so easy for me to do.

I’ve talked in a few of my essays here about the theater group I was a part of in college. There was a wonderful exercise we did called Corner to Corner, where you walked from one corner of that old musty carpeted room with perfect light to the other. The job of the other 40 people in the room was to either help you or oppose you as you made your way across. Someone helping you might physically lift you up and carry you part of the way, walk in front of you to protect or guide you, simply hold up their hand from somewhere in the room in blessing. Someone opposing you, more often than not, quite literally physically opposed you, putting their full weight against you as you tried to walk the path, and the two of you had to negotiate your passage by pushing against each other. It wasn’t a physical fight; more a physical manifestation temporarily blocking your path. It was incredibly powerful—and clarifying—as both an actor and a person. What do you want? To move across the room. What’s in your way? What will you do to get what you want?

There’s a million reasons to embrace a frictionless existence; we are daily inundated with more negative and violent information than our brains were ever meant to handle, people we love die, things go the opposite as planned. Sometimes, checking out is the only thing you can do. (I’ll never forget an acting class I was in where a woman in her early 30’s stated, without embarrassment, that she loves Hallmark movies. A classmate snorted in derision, and she looked at him very simply and said, “They were all I could watch after my sister died. Nobody ever dies in a Hallmark movie.”) But it can’t be the main state of being. And there are an increasing number of obstacles, literally by the day, fighting to keep us checked out. Friction is required to stay grounded, interested, alive. It requires choosing a different set of obstacles—ones that re-up the contracts we’ve made.

Modern life does not afford most of us a year to make a hard, morally complex decision. But we can all certainly invite a bit more friction into daily living so that when we are faced with those morally complex decisions—those that require our actual attention, care, and character—the muscle has not completely atrophied. We get one shot at life. One shot at relationships, work, most conversations. Is this how I want to spend my time?