In Praise of Friction

In a world of summaries, short-form, and reaction, awkwardness, presence, and humanness is radical.

I stepped in from the cold a few minutes late for my first day of my cooking 101 class. The train was running late, and so was I. If I press further into myself, the reality was the presence of a small rumble of anxiety at meeting new people in a new environment had me dragging my feet. I’ve been excited for this class for weeks, and yet when it came time, the friction was there. I’ve loved the idea of this for a long time, and love to cook at home, and yet when the reality hit my google calendar for the day, the uncertainty was there.

Reader, I’ll jump ahead and let you know the first class did end up being worth the effort and anxiety, AND next time I will probably still have to resist the inertia to stay home. I will see my brain coming up with 8 different reasons to not do the very thing I’ve paid and want to do, most of which act as wrapping paper to cover the simple fact of mild anxiety and lack of tolerance for the awkward, non-optimized world of physical life.

Still Life with Oranges and Goblet of Wine, John Frederick Peto, 1880s

In this cooking class, we are on our feet and working at a quick clip for 3-4 hours each time. Our instructor speaks with seemingly no breaks between paragraphs, and each thing he says is insightful, instructive, or witty. We stand at our stations and watch and try, watch and try, watch and try. I learn to hold a knife in a new way, and realize this is the way I should have always been holding it. My new classmate and I look at each other and make small, opening comments about what’s happening in class, as we each try to master cutting an orange in the perfect way demonstrated. The man across from me asks questions to our instructor, and I listen as he answers or doesn’t answer, as a staccato symphony of knives press into tiny slivers of garlic, then thump onto the cooking board.

One of the reasons I wanted to take this class was the very nature of what a cooking class is, especially compared to how I spend most of my days as a psychiatry resident and writer online. Since COVID19, there has been more ability in mental health to see patients virtually. This, in many ways, has benefits in terms of accessibility, but there is also less in person interaction, which can have impact on care as well. Concretely, this means a lot of my visits with people are on Zoom, and given the nature of mental health care, much of my work is cognitive. I am sitting, staring at a screen, and still responding to someone with my embodied presence, even if that is only perceived via a small square box on their screen. In the day-to-day, though, it is not as one-minded nor as visceral as chopping an onion with strangers, and that change of pace seemed to me to be a good thing this winter.

Plate, Dorothy Posten, 1936

There’s been a growing collective conversation about screentime and social media platforms that is best represented by this question: “What, actually, are we doing here?” In other words, what is the use that we, collectively and as individuals, are getting from being online instead of not. This is not a moral question, but rather one of curiosity for each of us in our own daily lives. Louder and louder, the question berates us, especially as it becomes more clear that the apps are already setting to rot. As less and less value is delivered to us via these apps, the negatives of spending our lives online becomes clearer, though with much marketing to keep it somewhat obscured.

I know this. If you follow me and are reading what I’m writing, you know this. This digital landscape is part of what inspired The Avoidance Diaries, on my Tik Tok, ie the gentle bullying I did for you and for me to get us off of our phones and into our lives, which were YELLING at us to tend to. It is designed to be difficult to get off of these apps, even when we are actively having the experience of not enjoying being on them. We have all had the experience of not only encountering growing dread at the to-do’s we are procrastinating, but the actual unpleasant feelings of being enticed and manipulated by the attention economy.

As goes the saying, “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” COVID19’s social isolation, reduction of access to reasonably priced (or, ahem FREE)third spaces, and the continued ideological polarization of American politics leaves many of us with a sense of our physical worlds being unsafe, unsavory, and lacking understanding. For many, this is a true sense, at least in some ways. However, taking something true and then magnifying it beyond truth to sell you on staying online instead of outside is not an uncommon marketing tactic.

As Anne Helen Peterson says in her most recent post, The Social Media Sea Change, it seems that more of us are beginning to want off the ride, nauseated by it all as we are. This brings me back to cooking class, awkwardness, and the ability to tolerate the minor frictions and absurdities of human social life.

We have for the last five years, known or not, been socializing more and more with robots. Yes, I am saying it in this hyperbolic way because it gets the point across. I personally don’t feel like I’ve fully known how much AI has become present in the past year, and beyond literal AI, the commodification of human experience on social media, including to the extent of lying about daily routines and recommendations, is another way of forming us towards standardized, conveyor-belt ways of relating.

We have to build back up our tolerance for the human. If you want a crash course in this, you could always consider working in retail or a service industry. Even at the height of the pandemic, essential workers weren’t as much a part of the isolation.

Bowl of Fruit, 1830

Maybe returning to a tolerance for the human looks like having a regular coffee at your local, non-instagrammable diner. Maybe it looks like going in person to workout classes, and asking a question after, not immediately plugging in your headphones and rushing out the door. Maybe it means spending less time in easy places online, and more in your physical life, like with that annoying pile of laundry or with your loved ones who can’t automatically respond to your every inquiry like a ChatGPT might. For me, it looks like going to cooking class, and having patience with myself in learning to be comfortable with the grit of human connection, instead of the friction-less, hyperconsumable version of connection the internet offers.

I will end with another way of saying this, from "You might just have to be bored", in which Kate Lindsay offers another framework for the need to re-acclimate ourselves with mild inconvenience and unpleasantness for a fuller life.

“As someone who has made plenty of contributions to the getting-off-your-phone content industry, I can confidently say that the real solution is not that complicated. There’s no theory to learn or science to practice. You don’t have to do anything to fix your attention span. You just have to be bored.”

You just have to be bored.

You just have to feel the friction.

You have to be awkward, show up, and be there. It will likely feel uncomfortable and odd. You don’t need to squash that sensation, either. You simply need to get out and do, and let the feelings, thoughts, and whatever else come along on the way.

xx, Margaret of Bad Art Every Day