There's a budding trend I've been watching with some delight.
People—grown adults with every convenience in the world at their fingertips—are starting to deliberately make their lives harder.
They're borrowing books from the library instead of one-click buying them. They’re calling a friend for advice instead of asking an AI. They’re cooking from a handwritten recipe instead of scrolling for one. They’re taking the long way home on purpose, and even getting a little lost because they’re choosing not to open their maps app.
And it’s making them happier.
They’re calling it “frictionmaxxing” (because of course we have to name everything), and although the name is cheesy, the impulse behind it isn't silly at all.
What the people adopting this are doing is consciously rejecting the idea that life is best lived when everything is easy—the notion that total comfort is the ultimate goal of the “good life”. They’re realizing that having every want or need met the instant you have it, every answer delivered before you've finished the question, every song and show and meal and ride summoned with the flick of a thumb hasn’t actually made their lives better.
They’ve found that the very friction we’ve spent years engineering away was actually pretty important. They’ve learned that when you take away hardship, discomfort, and effort, the reward actually feels pretty flat.
A while back I wrote about how we've outsourced the old work of the neighborhood—character building, belonging, skinned knees, sorting out your own squabbles—to professionals and screens. Most kids today have barely met any real friction. A bored moment lasts about four seconds before a glowing rectangle rushes in to fill it. A hard question gets answered by a search bar before they've had a chance to wrestle it.
We've built millions of childhoods with every bump smoothed flat, and then we're alarmed when kids today fall apart at the first real hardship.
I often think of an old illustration.
A man finds a cocoon right as the butterfly is fighting its way out. It's straining through this impossibly small opening, and it looks like pure agony, so he takes a pair of scissors and gently snips the cocoon to help. The butterfly flops out easily but never takes flight. The desperate squeeze through that tiny hole was what would have forced the fluid from its body out into its wings.
Spared the struggle, it spends the rest of its short life crawling—its wings ever-crumpled and useless.
People used to understand this. "A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor," the old line goes. Teddy Roosevelt called it the “strenuous life,” and he warned that a people who arrange their entire existence around dodging hardship and effort end up soft, and unfit to hold on to anything worth having.
He was talking about a nation, but a nation is just a lot of kids who either grew up being taught to do hard things or who weren't.
Reading a book is a kind of friction, isn’t it?
It asks a child to sit still, to aim their attention at one thing and keep it there, to build the pictures in their own head instead of having them beamed in, and to persevere through the slow parts to build to the exciting parts. Reading is one of the last ordinary things children do that still demands an investment of some applied physical effort (even discomfort!) from them.
There’s a bonus if the books they read teach lessons about doing hard things—about choosing hard rights over easy wrongs, recognizing the morality of working for what you have, and knowing that there’s a responsibility to help others once you find success.
Those are the kinds of books we write.
There’s a reason our graphic novels have become so loved by so many families. They are the perfect resource for reluctant readers and devoted ones alike, and they teach the kinds of character-building lessons that kids today aren’t encountering in the wild anymore.
They take the episodes of the Tuttle Twins cartoon and turn them into full-color hardcovers, with enough color and humor and real story that kids actually reach for them by choice.
Our Monster Sale ends Saturday and includes the brand-new Season 4 graphic novel set. It also offers steep discounts on most of our best-loved books and curricula.
The world is still focused on making everything smoother, faster, and easier. It’s unlikely that this frictionmaxxing is going to catch on in any grand way, which means that we have to be the ones to teach our kids the value of experiencing hard things, and enduring discomfort for the reward of having earned what we’ve got.
A book is a fine place to start. So is letting them be bored, or lose a game, or wrestle with a hard problem long enough to crack it on their own.
The next time your kids are bored because they’ve spent all their screen time for the day, set a book on the table, and then leave the room.
I bet it won’t be long before they pick it up.
— Connor
