Enough with the Frictionmaxxing Already: The Politics of Making Life Harder

By: Billy Kennedy

A typical example of frictionmaxxing social media content. This was not the post that started me down this rabbit hole, but it is quite similar. (Source: @workinghardpod).

Do you ever get the feeling that your algorithm is trying to tell you something?

One day, while idly scrolling on Instagram, I came across an infographic, an earth-toned exemplar of the Pinterestesque style, with a list of analog hobbies to pursue to cut down on screen time. Since I believe that we could all use less time on our phones, I gave the post a like. As often happens when you interact with content other than what you normally interact with online, the algorithm decides that it will serve you nothing else for the next week.

So, my feed is now full of advice on how to intentionally make my life more difficult. Go to a brick-and-mortar store to buy things rather than order from Amazon. Call your friends instead of texting them. Replace your iPhone with a “dumb” phone. Handwrite letters. Cook for yourself instead of ordering DoorDash. All of these, in isolation, are perfectly reasonable preferences to hold. I myself even prefer to buy certain things from a store, especially when the act of shopping is itself part of the experience.

Yet, rather than feel inspiration, as with the numerous breathlessly supportive commenters these posts attract, I feel irritation. Not because I think this way of life is less than my own, but because, as with many recent tech-related trends among Gen Z and younger users, personal preference quickly becomes a moral prescription. The genre no longer just says, “shopping locally is fun.” It also implies, “my slower way of living is more authentic and virtuous than yours.”

Why are we treating friction itself as a good?

The term “friction-maxxing” was coined in an article in The Cut, where author Kathryn Jezer-Morton proclaimed it to be her New Year’s resolution to build more tolerance for ordinary inconveniences. Rather than the simplified version we see on social media, her core complaint is that Big Tech has trained its customers to see ordinary effort, boredom, uncertainty, and awkwardness as defects to be eliminated. She defined “friction-maxxing” as building tolerance for such ordinary inconveniences, especially in children. In her article, she cites an anecdote from 2019 where her children, faced with a long road trip to Mexico with no tablets in hand, became enthusiastic readers as they turned to books for entertainment. Her thesis is that, as humans, we need at least some exposure to boredom, awkwardness, effort, and a lack of control because it teaches us virtues such as patience, independence, and confidence; these virtues cannot grow if technology removes every unpleasantness from our lives. Some inconveniences are developmental and, therefore, socially valuable.

Frictionless design also has practical downsides. Endless scrolling on social media eliminates natural stopping points and easily turns “my friend just DM’d me” into a 45-minute TikTok binge. One-click purchasing makes impulsive shopping and irresponsible financial decisions too easy. Algorithmic recommendations on streaming sites can discourage active discovery or curation. Constant convenience through food delivery, contactless checkout, and other conveniences can remove worthwhile skills and rituals. Some friction serves a function. Walking provides exercise, cooking can be enjoyable and communal, and calling a friend can produce a deeper conversation than sending memes over text.

But some friction being beneficial does not mean it is beneficial because it is friction.

Let me be clear: The frictionmaxxing that has become popular online is not the friction-maxxing that Jezer-Morton advocates for. To differentiate the two, I will use the hyphenated term to describe the phenomenon as she calls for, while the non-hyphenated term will describe the way it has been simplified on social media.

Those who are extremely online (me, I’m extremely online) will recognize the -maxxing suffix. The term, meaning to optimize or maximize a particular quality or activity, grew from incel culture, which applied the video gaming concept of min-maxing to real life. “-maxxing,” with two x’s, was first used in the term “looksmaxxing” – the act of maximizing one’s physical attractiveness. Starting around 2021, the term breached containment, appearing in non-incel corners of Instagram and Twitter, and then migrating to TikTok. By late 2023, the term was fully trending, and by 2024 had become detached from its incel origins – many people using x-maxxing terms may not even realize its origins.

A gap exists between the term -maxxing, with its maximalist implications, and the kinds of advice the term actually describes. As Nitsuh Abebe wrote in The New York Times, many incel looksmaxxing strategies, at least early on, were things that would not be out of place in a mainstream men’s magazine. But mundane, practical advice doesn’t get views. One day, incels are telling each other to practice basic grooming. The next day, they’re watching a video of a man smashing his jaw with a hammer because he thinks it will give him a jawline. “x-maxxing” rarely encourages doing a sensible amount of x, but rather means to optimize x as aggressively as possible. Thus, an ordinary practice becomes a totalizing project.

Friction-maxxing thus began with a reasonable insight: not every convenience should be engineered away. But the frame of “maxxing” nudges this insight into something more extreme: we should therefore deliberately add inconvenience wherever possible. Just as looksmaxxing made ordinary self-improvement into an arms race, an optimization project that treats the body as a machine that can always be pushed ever further, frictionmaxxing fails to recognize sufficiency. Frictionmaxxing is less a rejection of a culture of optimization than it is the practice of optimizing how un-optimized you are.

In his 1929 book The Thing (no relation to the John Carpenter film of the same name), the English author G.K. Chesterton proposed the principle now known as “Chesterton’s fence.” Essentially, he argued that things should not be changed until the reason why things are the way they are is understood. We should not tear down the fence before asking ourselves why it is there in the first place. Chesterton’s fence is a small-c conservative heuristic, but it can be applied to reintroducing friction, restoring an old way over a newer way. Before deliberately restoring an inconvenience into our lives, we should ask ourselves: Why did people stop this practice? What did it cost people in terms of time, labor, or money? Who paid that price? What genuine benefits disappeared along with it? Is there a way to recover the benefit without the burden?

Call it the Reverse Chesterton Test: we should not restore a traditional way of doing things without understanding why it was abandoned.

One key point that much frictionmaxxing content fails to interrogate is that, historically, inconvenience was not evenly distributed. Yes, life was harder for all classes in the past, but it was much harder for some classes than others. Consider scratch cooking at home, a classic activity that frictionmaxxers encourage their followers to take up. They paint romanticized pictures of Mom in the kitchen, rolling homemade pie crusts, kneading bread dough, seasoning a chicken according to a century-old family recipe, all while children run in and out of the room. It’s a beautiful image of a woman upholding the old ways of living.

Now, ask yourself: where is Dad? Is he in the kitchen helping Mom? Or are his feet propped up in the living room, newspaper and pipe in hand, waiting for Mom to serve him his dinner?

British historical interpreter Kathy Hipperson, in character as Mrs. Avis Crocombe, who lived in the 19th century and worked as a cook in an English great house, while filming the YouTube series The Victorian Way. The once-invisible labor of women like the historical Mrs. Crocombe made the leisurely lives of their employers possible. (Source: English Heritage)

A classic scene like this only appears wholesome when we fail to look at the allocation of labor, if we ignore just who is doing the repetitive work and who gets to remember the experience fondly as a “family tradition.” Before widespread refrigeration, indoor plumbing, modern appliances, and other labor-saving technologies, cooking involved hours of repetitive, strenuous labor in hot, poorly ventilated kitchens, more difficult food storage, and more restricted diets. All this labor was disproportionately performed by women or by servants, who were themselves disproportionately women. Plus, the scene I’ve described is very middle-class; if Mom were a rich woman, she might not be doing any cooking at all, but rather rely on hired domestic staff, frequently working-class women, immigrant women, or women of color, to do it for her.

Look back at that wholesome domestic scene. Who did the shopping? The prep? Who planned out the meal? Who will clean the dishes? Who will do it all again tomorrow?

This is not an argument that the old ways are always worse. I myself love to cook, and I cook the vast majority of my meals at home using simple, fresh (or at least minimally processed) ingredients. What I am arguing for is the right to choose the inconvenient way because you appreciate the craft, not because you were forced into it as an obligation of your sex or class. For many romanticizing the old ways, they imagine themselves not as a participant in the work but as someone who gets to enjoy the social scene that the work supports.

The political danger of frictionmaxxing is its restorationist temptation. It is not necessarily conservative, but its underlying logic becomes conservative very quickly: if modern convenience is corrupting, then yesterday’s inconvenience becomes evidence of yesterday’s virtue. It is built on a nostalgia that highlights what was pleasant about the past but obscures what made people seek alternatives. It is selective by design: we might remember trips to the mall because it meant popping into the toy store rather than for all the tedious errands that came before or after the jaunt to Toys ‘R’ Us. Nostalgia encourages a conservative and, occasionally, restorationist (bordering on reactionary) social politics, particularly when what we remember is used as evidence that older ways of doing things were inherently superior to modern methods.

Tradwives are an example of how a longing for a more authentic and traditional way of life can overlap with a conservative, restorationist politic. Pictured is Hannah Neeleman, known online as Ballerina Farm. (Source: The Economist).

This restorationist tendency often exists entirely outside partisan politics. I am not saying that having analog hobbies or baking your own bread means you will become MAGA in six months. I am saying that when we uncritically romanticize older technology, older courtship practices, older family structures, and older work patterns, we risk going from “I miss this” to “we should go back to this.” Many people, myself included, are all for stronger neighborhoods, less algorithmic control of our media, more durable goods, and more human interaction. This does not mean we must also want more burdensome labor, fewer communication options, less mobility, more social surveillance, or to struggle with obsolete technologies.

Recall our Reverse Chesterton Test: if in our analysis of an old inconvenience, we find that it produced something valuable in addition to a burden, the next step is not to adopt the old inconvenience uncritically. It is to ask, “can we reproduce the value without reproducing the burden?” If shopping locally produces community, then we should tell our friends about local businesses rather than complain about Amazon. If communal chores created opportunities to socialize, we should build more third spaces rather than getting rid of our washing machines. If older media habits cultivated higher attention spans, we should design deliberate media diets rather than fetishizing primitive equipment. If phone calls create intimacy, then call people when the conversation would benefit from talking rather than forsaking all forms of SMS.