“Friction-maxxing” started popping up on my social media feed during the school vacation week—which, parents can attest, felt extra-long this year. And the same time, all my conversations concluded with the same guilt-ridden admission: “At this point, we’re just relying on screens.” Boredom felt interminable, and parents were tired of serving as staycation cruise directors on the heels of an already action-packed holiday month.
But boredom is healthy! I said to myself as I simultaneously longed for kid-free time to put my feet up and scroll mindlessly through my phone. Enter Kathyrn Jezer-Morton’s piece in The Cut about friction-maxxing and why we all need more of it in the new year.
What is friction-maxxing exactly? According to Jezer-Morton, it’s not just about reducing screentime—it’s the idea of building up our collective tolerance for “inconvenience” (by which she means “the vagaries of being a person living in a world with other people in spaces that are impossible to completely control”). The goal is ultimately to trust the process. There’s fun to be had in not always resorting to digital fixes to escape experiences that used to be commonplace, but we’ve now dubbed the “hard stuff”.
After all, Jezer-Morton maintains, it feels like there’s a tech solve for everything that might go awry in our day-to-day life (a delayed train; an awkward IRL social interaction). And if kids and adults could learn to sit with that discomfort, they’d become better at solving their own problems.
For instance, I recently met up with an old friend at a cozy café. As we sat down, I realized that there was no cell service inside. “Do you have a Wifi password?” I asked the hostess, internally panicking about the fact that I’d be unreachable to my spouse. When her answer was no, I was left with two options. 1. Walk down a couple blocks to get a signal and let my husband know I’d be out of pocket 2. Enjoy breakfast.
I went with the latter and everyone was fine. (I emerged to a flurry of texts about a missing game that everyone wanted to play.)
The best part? In that time spent logging off, I was actually present with my friend and my family actually dealt with the momentary friction of looking for the game themselves. (Spoiler: They found it.)
So what does friction-maxxing look like for kids? Well, it might be having them pay with cash instead of tapping an app. Or it might be encouraging them to meet a new friend group for pizza instead of a Snapchat interaction. In a lot of ways, the benefits of friction-maxxing dovetail with Jonathan Haidt’s argument from his viral book, The Anxious Generation, about granting kids more autonomy (and delaying access to smartphones). This, he says, helps them build resilience, coping skills, risk assessment and critical thinking—not to mention stronger emotional regulation and reduced anxiety. (Hey, if a crisis occurs and there’s not an app for that, don’t you want to trust that your kids can figure it out?)
To be clear, friction-maxxing isn’t about suffering. It’s about the healthy challenges that are ultimately character-building. There’s value in that for us, but especially our kids.
