Friction: A Reading List on Why Inconvenience Can Be Meaningful

Was there a moment in the ’90s when we decided that efficiency was life’s greatest aim? Maybe it’s my age. I was born on the last hour of the last day of the last year of the ’70s, but it feels like my early twenties not only marked my fall from serendipity and wonder into protein bars and inboxes, but the whole world’s. Maybe we became efficiency zombies when cell phone adoption hit critical mass. 

Or perhaps that was the beginning of the end of searches that surprised and delighted us. The beginning of the end of holding a question—Did Roberta Flack write “Killing Me Softly?” Why does cilantro taste like soap to some people? How often do you need to trim a dog’s toenails?—in your brain for days until you found the person or book with the answer. Remember microfiche and flea markets and calling someone to see if they were, at that very moment, home and bored, so they could answer the ringing phone and meet at the park on your bikes?

Without getting too nostalgic about it, these readings will make you revisit the forgotten, sometimes wonderful feelings that go with friction. We don’t have to throw away our cell phones to bring spontaneity back into our lives. We can be intentional and collective. In fact, we must be intentional and collective; it’s the only way to live expansive lives connected by slow and messy delight. And that is an aim far more worthy of our finite time than productivity, no matter what the false gods of Silicon Valley and late-stage capitalism say.    

How to Thrive in an Uncertain World (Maggie Jackson, The New York Times, January 2013) 

Science fiction author Octavia Butler said: “All that you touch, You Change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.” 

Well, this moment of rapid change—of the climate, of intelligence, of politics—has us reeling and shaking our fists at various gods, praying for a return to predictability. But tolerating uncertainty is one of the most important psychic muscles of our time, says the research that journalist Maggie Jackson synthesizes in this very convincing piece. 

The pandemic, for example, was sort of a renaissance for friction. We waited in long lines to get into the grocery store—elders first. We wiped down our groceries—an ultimately pointless, but perhaps fruitful meditation on consumption. We made bread and music and mass movements—all the old-fashioned way. And those of us who could tolerate the uncertainty, scientists have found, were less likely to be in denial, become drunks, or disengage from life.

In the long tail of the pandemic, many of us have returned to elbowing our way into the grocery store to buy highly processed bread before rushing on to the disaster preparedness meeting. We might be better off letting the dough rise while reading Butler.

A wave of new scientific discoveries reveals that learning to lean into uncertainty in times of rapid change is a promising antidote to mental distress, not a royal road to angst, as many of us assume. A growing body of evidence and a range of new interventions suggest that skillfully managing uncertainty in the face of what’s murky, new, or unexpected is an effective treatment for anxiety, a likely path to building resilience and a mark of astute problem-solving ability. 

Our Longing for Inconvenience (Hanif Abdurraqib, The New Yorker, April 2026)

The other day, I was playing Colorku with my 12-year-old while she was belting out Gracie Abrams’s chart-topping song, “Close to You”: 

I burn for you
And you don’t even know my name
If you asked me to
I’d give up everything.

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked my daughter.

“Ugh, mom, it’s probably just about online dating or something,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Don’t overthink it.” 

What my daughter doesn’t understand is that “overthinking it” is a time-honored tradition in my life and that it’s really hard to write a truly romantic song about online dating. I’m not hating on Gracie Abrams, but on a culture that tricks one into having a facsimile of emotions about a facsimile of a person. 

Hanif Abdurraqib feels this way, too. In this beautiful essay, he details the “cost-benefit analysis of various inconveniences” with typical poetry and deep feeling, suggesting that these small frictions are what is best about the human condition. It’s not just losing delicious anticipation, but maybe even the possibility of revolution. Good music, like a more equal society, isn’t particularly convenient, as it turns out. It’s sought out, sacrificed for, pursued, cherished. 

Hanif vows to always do his own grocery shopping, in honor of his late mom’s little kindnesses, doled out to people at the deli where she got her sandwiches and the cleaners where she got her dry cleaning. People, too, are highly inconvenient—any parent can tell you that. But it is our mundane and idiosyncratic connections, a Monday afternoon playing a board game on the couch while withstanding an eyeroll, that make being alive feel alive. 

It is inconvenient to be a person, floating through the grand and impossible world, significant in your own resplendent garden of hours but insignificant as a fleck of dust in the greater arc of the universe. It is, in some ways, inconvenient to believe that your one significant life can collide meaningfully with someone else’s, someone whom you have to put the work into finding, in the outside world, where people still sometimes go to the market, reaching and reaching and reaching.

That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It was on Purpose (Chris Colin, The Atlantic, June 2025)

Lest we paint too romantic a picture of friction, let’s be clear: there is a soul-deadening kind. And it’s increasingly being called “sludge,” a term coined by legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and economist Richard H. Thaler in 2021 to describe a kind of customer-service inefficiency designed to exhaust you so that you give up. 

There is a lot to be enraged about right now. But there is a special place in hell for those who designed these systems to frustrate us so much that we hang up and take the loss. It’s like Goliath demoralizing David by feigning concern while sending him down one thousand fluorescently lit hallways that lead to nowhere.  

Chris Colin reports on what’s wrong with customer service these days, sharing the labyrinth he endured to get his Ford lemon fixed. The short answer: so much, but you won’t be surprised to know that it has to do with globalization, corporate consolidation, and the lost ethic of taking real pride in products and services. 

Not one to simply point out problems, Colin architected a new approach: don’t go into the administrative hinterlands alone. He coined his own term: ”admin nights.” This is where you invite your friends over to check off items on to-do lists in an adult version of parallel play, and make funny faces at one another across the table while talking to someone who is paid to exhaust you, but doesn’t realize you’ve got pals and Patrón to keep you strong for the long haul.        

Over the days ahead, and then weeks, and then more weeks, I got pulled into a corner of modern existence that you are, of course, familiar with. You know it from dealing with your own car company, or insurance company, or health-care network, or internet provider, or utility provider, or streaming service, or passport office, or DMV, or, or, or. My calls began getting lost, or transferred laterally to someone who needed the story of a previous repair all over again. In time, I could predict the emotional contours of every conversation: the burst of scripted empathy, the endless routing, the promise of finally reaching a manager who—CLICK.

The Disappearance of the Public Bench (Gabrielle Bruney, Places Journal, April 2026)

If you thought a bench was just a bench, think again. It’s a case study in disability, class, and race dynamics in urban spaces. It’s the center point of the clash between public and private interests. It’s a sociological exploration of how we arrange our bodies and perform acceptability in contemporary society. A bench can be a place to rest, wait, breathe, get shot, get vitamin D, sleep, freeze to death, kiss, read, chat, eat, or memorialize. A bench, in other words, is a portal. 

Or at least it is in the hands of writer Gabrielle Bruney in this heavily annotated, mind-expanding meditation on the disappearance of benches in public spaces and what it means about who we have been and who we are becoming. The friction created by public benches is very real, very inconvenient, very fraught. And it is also core to so many of the most important democratic questions of our fractured time. Even if you’re not an urban studies nerd, you will never look at—or sit on—a bench in the same way again.   

Reconciling bench users who have conflicting needs and desires may require negotiation between strangers—a skill grown rusty in our depersonalizing world of mobile commerce and self-checkout machines. These trends were hurried along by the COVID pandemic, whose months of enforced isolation lessened our tolerance for the unexpected intimacies of the public realm. Many people’s understanding of personal space ballooned during the pandemic, from a cultural standard of about four feet, to about six feet or more. ⁶² A stranger on the other end of a bench might now seem too close to our personal bubble, and any hint of a cough posed a threat. ⁶³ The late theorist Lauren Berlant called these sorts of interactions “the familiar friction of being in relation.” ⁶⁴ Lately these frictions feel particularly combustible. But mild social friction also spurs the growth of helpful emotional callouses, the kind that allow us to bump up against desires that conflict with our own and come away not too badly bruised.

“A Conflicted, Imperfect Love.” Jesmyn Ward on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (Jesmyn Ward, Literary Hub, March 2025)

We experience less friction these days in our cultural consumption. We can get a song, a TV show, or a podcast on demand and ingest them on autopilot. A lot of “content” these days is apparently designed to be consumed simultaneously, for example, to ”Netflix and chill” while scrolling. Goodbye nuance and dialect and slowness. Hello shallows and catchphrases and rapid plot twists designed for maximum engagement. 

Rigorous reading—reading that challenges and perhaps enrages us, while potentially inspiring us—is an entirely different and endangered beast. These are the books your club might hesitate to pick, books written long ago or maybe just yesterday, but unlikely to be featured on the morning shows. These are books that produce what philosopher Jean Piaget called “cognitive discomfort,” the prerequisite for learning. 

Classic novels like the ones William Faulkner once wrote out of Mississippi are evidence of a complex, gifted, and bigoted mind. Jesmyn Ward, a child of the same state, returns to his work again and again. She revisits it and struggles with it, letting her own life experience ready her for yet another attempt. One feels the hard-won meaning that comes with multiple reads. One might even call it literary friction.  

Darl may have been plumb insane, but his presence on the page spoke to me as a Mississippi-made aspiring artist. People often ask me why so many lauded, great writers come out of Mississippi, and I never have a satisfying answer for them. The most I can usually manage is a shrug and a smile, but returning to Darl and As I Lay Dying yields a half-formed, inarticulate answer. Perhaps so many great writers are born of this state because this place has endowed us with the particular temperament that demands we witness both the outrageous pain and the outrageous beauty of Mississippi. Perhaps we all share the same horror and awe at how the two are so closely intertwined here, how they seem to grow from the same root like a possum oak and a Spanish oak, one black-barked and prone to rot and breakage, the other feathered in small green ferns and a mosaic of moss.

Courtney E. Martin is a writer and sandwich generation caregiver in El Cerrito, California.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Carolyn Wells