BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
Something about the phrase “friction-maxxing” struck a nerve. When Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a columnist for New York magazine’s The Cut, published an essay in December 2025 naming the feeling of wanting to push back against frictionless technology, the response was immediate. She has spent the months since watching the idea spark a small cottage industry of follow-ups: people who love the concept, people who hate it, and many who want it reduced to a simple checklist.
The concept is straightforward and deliberately un-optimized. Friction-maxxing is the practice of choosing the slower, more inconvenient version of a task when technology has made it avoidable. Going to the grocery store instead of using Instacart. Looking up a word in a physical dictionary. Figuring something out yourself rather than asking an AI. Standing in line and letting your mind wander instead of reaching for your phone.
The problem with frictionless convenience
Jezer-Morton did not set out to write a productivity system or a digital detox plan. She wanted to put language to something she had noticed happening to her.
“It really was a reaction to this feeling that all of my patience and capacity was being reduced by all of this convenience that wasn’t actually making my life better or more meaningful,” she told Chatelaine. “Friction-maxxing was the way I came up with to talk about what that felt like.”
The friction in question is not inconvenience for its own sake. It is the texture of ordinary life: the boredom of waiting in line, the private train of thought that arrives when you are not being served content, the sense of working something out through your own effort. These are not inefficiencies to be engineered away. They are, in her view, how people stay in contact with themselves and with the world around them.
“You become this entity floating in space,” she said. “If you’re on your phone for a long time doing stuff it is a deeply alienating experience and that experience is migrating into other parts of our life.”
What it is not
It is worth being clear about what friction-maxxing is not, because the word “maxxing” invites a certain kind of misreading.
It is not a high-performance habit. It is not a routine to be tracked or a score to be optimized. It is not productivity rebranded as simplicity. Jezer-Morton is explicit that it runs in the opposite direction from the efficiency culture that tech companies have long pushed: the idea that the ideal human is a streamlined consumer of convenience, frictionless in every interaction.
Her concern is more political than personal. Tech leaders, she points out, have openly stated their interest in shaping how people live and what they want. Friction-maxxing is one person’s response to the question of what you do when powerful institutions operate on the assumption that you would rather be a user than a person.
“It begins as a way of thinking about your own subjectivity,” she said.
Naming it changes something
The essay resonated partly because it gave a name to something people were already feeling but had not quite been able to articulate. Many of the responses Jezer-Morton received were not about tips or techniques. They were from people who recognized the feeling she described: that seamless convenience, sold as liberation, had quietly narrowed something.
“By talking about how we feel, we rehumanize ourselves collectively,” she said.
There is no prescription at the end of that. The point is not to follow a set of rules but to notice that there is a choice being made, many times a day, about what kind of relationship you want with technology and with your own experience. Friction-maxxing, Jezer-Morton says, is a way of thinking about life rather than a plan for living it. The decision about what that looks like is, deliberately, yours to figure out.
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