Against a Frictionless Life

Intentional community, Ludwig Wittgenstein and a tale of lost pizzas.

Wittgenstein wrote in praise of friction, saying “Back to the rough ground!”

We have a lot of guests through the “micro-monastery” my family and I live in. We invite people to our regular open table dinners via all sorts of connections, following hunches about those who might be hungry for depth, or long to encounter community or just enjoy meeting new people and having a meal. It surprises and saddens me what a radical act inviting someone you don’t know well for dinner often seems. The opportunities to gather around a table with people outside our immediate circle, not for networking or promoting something or some other instrumental aim, but for its own sake, are vanishingly rare. It’s a stupidly simple thing to do, but it seems to bless the hundreds of people who come every year.

One of those guests recently described their work as a tech designer as striving for a “frictionless” UX, or User Experience. Frictionless design has long been a buzzword, a shorthand for online processes which do not require much of the user cognitively or take much time.

This makes sense, of course. No-one wants to waste their day navigating a clunky website. We’ve been formed to value convenience and speed over little else, and friction, by its very nature, slows you down. The phrase vaguely unsettled me this time though, as if someone had drawn a sickly neon highlighter over it.

Later that week, we hosted an open House Day, a chance for people in our extended community to come and share in our rhythms. This one was themed around getting the garden ready for the year’s vegetable growing, and loads of friends and neighbours came. Many of them live in flats and don’t have access to green space so enjoyed getting their hands in the soil¹. We had a wonderful day shovelling Alpaca poo (which makes great cheap manure), planting seeds and pruning things. I was in charge of sorting lunch, and so I pulled my phone from my muddy back pocket, ordered a huge pile of pizzas with surprising speed and went back to turning over the compost heap.

An hour later, I checked and realised that the delivery driver had been attempting to deliver p to an old address. They had now given up as no one was in. The systems had been so frictionless, so good at remembering me, that I’d been logged into an account I didn’t even know I had and paid before any thinking was required at all. Despite my best efforts with the various human-less portals that were offered, it proved impossible to chase down our lunch or get a refund. After an hour of frustration we had to give the £100s of pounds of pizzas up for lost (or hopefully, to an underpaid delivery driver) and serve everyone cheese and crackers instead. Next time, I’ll do what I used to do and walk to the pizzeria at the end of our road to deal with a real person instead.

The subject of friction comes up round the table at our dinners quite a lot. It’s one of the things people are most curious about when they learn that we are two families who have bought a house together and are attempting to live with monastic-inspired shared rhythms. “What do you do about the… friction?” They ask, as if it might be a taboo subject. Something dangerous that needs containing. We tell them that one of our house values is “frictionfull, not frictionless”. We believe a relationship with no friction is not a real relationship at all. A complete absence of it indicates either unhealthy uniformity or distance. Friction is normal, generative even. It creates grip, braking things that are careering out of control. I’m learning, despite my cultural scripts and temperamental preferences, that slowing things down is often what is needed.

Yes, unhealthy conflict can wound us, but intimacy requires acknowledging where we grate against each other, and asking why. “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another”, an ancient Hebrew proverb says. Some of my corners have certainly needed rubbing off. Elsewhere in that book of proverbs it says “Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses”.² Friction is relational data, and don’t we all, deep known, just long to be known?

I wonder if so much of our endemic loneliness is driven by a fear of friction. We are so influenced by the way things are framed to us, what we are told is normal or abnormal. Despite the messages, an ideal life should not be a Frictionless User Experience. I worry that in designing out friction (in explicit and implicit ways) we have lowered our tolerance for something we need.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, writing about the philosophical search for ideal, unambiguous language, warned against this tendency. “We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!³"

Any real relationship or real community will feel, often, like rough ground. We can’t move as fast over bumpy surfaces which grips us, but they are warmer, safer and ultimately more interesting than the ice rink of a frictionless life. I’m with Ludwig. Back to the rough ground!

1. I can’t type this line without pointing you to this wonderful song from

David Benjamin Blower

2. Both of these are from Proverbs Chapter 27

3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Part 1 Section 107.