friction is the point
9.25.26
I’m not talking about poor internet log-in experiences or long cab lines or yogurt containers that cut your index finger in the middle of the night. That type of friction makes life unpleasant and should be avoided when possible. I experienced all of those within the last week and probably will next week and for the rest of my life. Them’s the breaks.
But often times, a certain type of friction is good. Often times, friction is the point.
Let’s consider the vacuum. In the abstract, no, I don’t want to vacuum. I didn’t dream of vacuuming as a young boy and I don’t now fall asleep excited for the next day to get up and vacuum the house. I’d rather scroll eBay for gently used vintage sweaters on sale for reasonable prices. But you have to vacuum because there’s dog hair and city dirt and cookie crumbs and plastic shards from yogurt containers on the ground and you have to clean it up. You have to vacuum. Yes, you can outsource the chore, you can buy an iRobot or whatever contraption’s new, you can spend two thousand dollars and let the machine roll around your house and suck up all the shit while you sit there and scroll eBay for reasonably priced sweaters. But then the machine gets stuck on the rug and it’s out of batteries and it falls down the stairs and shatters into a million pieces and wakes up the baby and the neighbors.
But the new ones are great they don’t do that!
Yes, they do, they’re poorly made and break and aren’t as smart as their website claims. But okay, fine, let’s pretend the new vacuum robot machine works perfectly and never breaks and empties its bowels without needing to wipe and even compliments your new haircut. I don’t care. Because the point of this blessed life we’ve been given is not to avoid even the slightest touch of discomfort at all times, nor to spend every waking minute avoiding doing something you didn’t necessarily dream of doing as a boy. Sometimes you just have to do things that you may not, in the abstract, want to do because, well, it’s better for you to do them than not do them. Sometimes you have to just fire up the vacuum (cordless, you gotta get the cordless — cord-vacuums are the bad kid of friction; get rid of them!) and move about the house and clean things up as you see fit. You bend your knees and hips and push that whirring tornado under the bed, onto those hidden surfaces housing cords and wayward socks, and you whip up whatever nasty shit is under there. You lift up the dining room chairs and pull the dog hair off the pads and make a pile and then run over it with the vacuum, witnessing it all disappear like magic. Don’t pretend you don’t love that part. It feels good. You empty the container — whoosh — into the trashcan, one clean push, and you strap that fucker back on the handle and you go over the rug three more times, watching that matted red come back to life, like a flower finding its bloom in mid-April ready to get sucked off by every bee in the county. You take a few steps back, wow, look at this place, it’s clean in all the right places and it took nine goddamn minutes total. How deeply satisfying it is to have had the agency to affect change, to be the reason something is better than it was. You got your heart rate up a little and you were reminded that hair likes to clump up in this one hard-to-reach spot behind the fridge and sometimes it leaks a little right there so it’s good to check every few days to make sure it doesn’t turn into a freaking ecosystem of bugs and mold. You learned that because you did the work, you absorbed the friction, and now you’re better off for it, your house and its inhabitants are better off for it, your mind and body and soul are better off for it. And you don’t get that without a little friction. Sometimes that’s the whole point.