What The Heck Is Friction-Maxxing? (And Yes, It’s A Good Thing)

You can do just about anything from the comfort of your sofa so long as you’ve got wifi. You can bank, order groceries, speak to a therapist, even get a divorce. You can do a lot—more and more things each day—without physically doing anything or even touching much more than a keypad.

But what does it mean to stop doing so many things?

In December of last year, Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a columnist for New York magazine’s The Cut and author of the forthcoming The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything, sat down to write about just that. She wanted to give expression to what living in relationship to all that technological convenience feels like as a human being, and to consider if we aren’t losing something fundamental to our humanity in the exchange. As she looked ahead to 2026, she decided to formulate an approach for moving forward in daily life as a human being and not a user.

“It really was a reaction to this feeling that all of my patience and capacity was being reduced by all of this convenience that wasn’t actually making my life better or more meaningful,” she says over the phone from Montreal, where she lives with her husband and children.  

The plan of attack: to make a break with at least one or two of the overwhelming conveniences of technology, and its constant attempt to erect a barrier between us and the nitty-gritty interactions of daily life—a barrier that's pitched as an "escape." And not just because all the screen time is bad for your eyes, but because it doesn’t feel that good to offshore so much of our humanity to apps and platforms.

She wanted to make 2026 the year that renewed a personal relationship to the texture and rhythm of daily life—the frictions that we encounter when we go to the grocery store instead of ordering groceries online, or when we walk through the library and peruse the shelves rather than scroll or stream content that’s been “suggested” to us via algorithm.

 She called her project friction-maxxing.

What’s friction-maxxing?

Friction is the texture of life. It’s boredom and irritation, it’s the self-directed flow of private thoughts that occurs when you’re standing in line at the bank and eavesdropping on the conversation behind you instead of looking at your phone. It’s not asking ChatGPT a question—ever. It’s trying to figure stuff out on your own; it’s living through trial and error.

When you replace all the work of living and thinking with a simple one-to-one relationship with technology you lose something tangible, Jezer-Morton says.

“You become this entity floating in space,” says Jezer-Morton. “If you're on your phone for a long time doing stuff it is a deeply alienating experience and that experience is migrating into other parts of our life.”

The column took off and she’s spent the last few months watching her idea spawn a small cottage industry of responses. There are those that hate the idea, those that love the idea and many who seek to distill it to simple “how-to” directions.

The essay clearly touched a nerve, and that may be because it expressed how it feels to try and retain some connection to your own life that is not mediated by Silicon Valley.

“It really was a reaction to this feeling that all of my patience and capacity was being reduced by all of this convenience that wasn’t actually making my life better or more meaningful," she says. “Friction-maxxing was the way I came up with to talk about what that felt like.”

So, how the heck do you do it?

Don’t mistake friction-maxxing for the same kind of approach to living that Silicon Valley has been pushing on you, she says. It’s not a plan to become a high-functioning, human-efficiency model, it’s not self-optimizing in the narrow vein that sees “results” you can track on your watch or various apps.

It’s something like the opposite of self-improvement and efficiency, according to Jezer-Morton. It’s doing things like reading a paper map or going to the grocery store. It’s unplugging the TV. Hiding the kids’ iPad. It’s not asking ChatGPT a damn thing. It’s looking up the definition of a word in a desk dictionary.

It’s putting the little bits and bobs back into your schedule—which isn’t a schedule really but a day in your life.

It’s not a prescription but a way of thinking about how you want to live your life

For Jezer-Morton, friction-maxxing has involved way more trips to the grocery store and way less Instacart. But the idea behind friction maxxing is really to name how it feels to live increasingly mediated by technology, and by tech leaders who openly admit to wanting to disenfranchise educated women. It's become clearer that many of these forces take an unfortunate view of humanity and human life, and Jezer-Morton wants us to consider what that means for ourselves and the people around us.

Friction-maxxing isn’t just way of changing your habits, she explains. “It begins as a way of thinking about your own subjectivity.”

It's a way of thinking about life and what it means to be human rather than a prescription for living.

“By talking about how we feel, we rehumanize ourselves collectively.”

Doing less tech and more life is the point

Tech companies are increasingly operating under the assumption that human beings want to be consumers of convenience and escapism rather than people, says Jezer-Morton. Friction-maxxing is a call to action against such ideas.

Powerful people presume that friction-less human interaction is “desirable,” she says.

“What are we going to do about it?”

How you answer that call to action? That’s how you friction-maxx.