Starving for friction

ravenous and parched

We have optimized everything and it is making us insane.

The algorithm learns all of our preferences and feeds them back to us, refined and frictionless (and now AI does it, too!). The apps smooth away the awkward silences, on purpose to keep your brain busy and “engaged” even if you’re really retaining fuck all of the content we just swiped through (and still saved, of course). The playlists never surprise us, it’s just more of what we like packaged differently but in the same font. The recommendations arrive pre-approved by a version of yourself that has been algorithmically assembled from our own behavior and handed back as aspirational identity. Everything we encounter has already been determined to be something we will like.

I realize this sounds much more bleak and dystopian that I intended. But it’s true.

And underneath all of it, a low and persistent hunger is rearing its head inside some of us or perhaps many of us.

Which brings me to Clarice Lispector, my patron saint: “I suddenly feel such a hunger for the ‘thing to really happen’ that I cry out and bite into reality with my lacerating teeth” (A Breath of Life, New Directions). This is the feeling and it’s the thing to really happen, the actual encounter with something that has its own edges, its own resistance that’s wrapped in its own refusal to be comfortable. There’s a sense of friction to it all.

Friction, now there’s a buzz word. Friction is how we know we touched something real. (And not for nothing, if I had a dollar every time I heard it in a client meeting or even when I worked brand side, I’d have a lot of dollars by now.)

bell hooks understood this in the context of language itself, too: “Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries.” The same is true of experience. The things worth having like the books that rearrange your soul or the intimate connections that ask something genuine of you all have friction built in. They cost something, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because they do resist forms of passive consumption.

hooks also wrote that “writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy — to stand outside — comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away.” Ecstasy as friction’s reward. The standing outside yourself that only happens when something has demanded enough of you to pull you out of the ordinary.

Another polished gem comes from another one of my favorites, Octavia Butler, who described herself as "an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive." She held herself in productive tension. This is what a real inner life feels like because it’s not a piece of beach glass that’s overly polished until it’s devoid of nearly all its original texture. What I also admire about this quote is that it’s not about a clean narrative of growth and arrival, it’s more of a non-linear and contradictory path (which humans walk down). We are complicated beings (isn’t that wonderful? Seriously). We’re alive because of these contrasts.

And, I think we’re starving for something that pulls and makes tension, because inevitably the journey of release is quite delicious in its own right. We’re all looking for an encounter that leaves a mark, even if it’s just psychically.