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Amina Srna: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Amina Srna, filling in for Brian today. To end the show, we'll turn to a new trend that emerged earlier this year, friction-maxxing. Have you heard this term? It's a new trend that advocates for deliberately choosing inconvenience, AKA friction, over the efficiency that modern technology-driven convenience provides. The idea is to build back tolerance for inconvenience and strive for maybe a little bit more mindfulness in our daily lives, that can look like driving without Google Maps or having difficult conversations in person rather than texting or even cooking from scratch rather than ordering delivery.

Kathryn Jezer-Morton, author of The Cut's Brooding newsletter, wrote up her plan to friction-maxx this year in life and in parenting, and she joins us now. Kathryn, welcome to WNYC.

Kathryn Jezer-Morton: Thank you for having me.

Amina Srna: Listeners, how are you introducing friction back into your digital forward lives? Maybe you make a point to take public transit instead of hopping into an Uber. Maybe you're off the social media apps and checking in with your friend's IRL now. I know at least of one person who uses Instagram on desktop, that's a form of friction-maxxing. Call in and share your stories. 212-433-WNYC, that's 212-433-9692, and we can take your texts as well.

Kathryn, you've resolved to commit to make 2026 a year of friction-maxxing. Did I get that definition right in my intro? Why would anyone want to add more friction to their lives?

Kathryn Jezer-Morton: Yes, you did. It's so interesting to be thinking about this in the context of McKay's what he was just talking about before us, because so much of the tools that we're using today are basically they are based on predictive models to do with our own behavior. We live within a matrix of prediction models. If you think about suggested stuff when you open your Netflix app or obviously social media in general, a lot of this feels like it's personalized, and it's making life easier. It's mostly just based on information about what we've done before and in the hopes of steering us in a particular direction.

That's another aspect of friction-maxxing that I've been thinking about, which is just kind of reclaiming your own decision-making as something that occurs privately in your own mind as opposed to in relationship with a tool that already knows what you might do.

Amina Srna: You write once we've adopted a habit of escaping from something, whether it's Ubering dinner five nights a week or using AI for replying to texts, the act of return, which is how we might describe no longer using a tool of escape, feels full of irritating friction. You liken us to toddlers whose iPads have been taken away. Talk a little bit more about that feeling.

Kathryn Jezer-Morton: I feel like we've all had that moment where, maybe we forgot our phone, and now we're waiting in line somewhere. This is where most of us don't forget our phones, even. For me, I really noticed this when I had become accustomed to Amazon's Buy Now button, which allows you to make a purchase the click of one button as opposed to filling out anything. Online retailers are becoming better and better at creating a frictionless consumer experience. Then I had to purchase from a small vendor, and I had to enter all my information, and I was suddenly consumed with this totally irrational frustration. Like, "How dare you ask me to put my address in here?"

That was a moment where I realized that maybe I wasn't fully in control. I had ceded a lot of myself to this idea of convenience that was becoming infantilizing.

Amina Srna: Let's go to a call. Here's Ben in Mamaroneck, Westchester County. Hi, you're on WNYC.

Ben: Hi, how's it going? I'm just calling. I guess I've always been, what is it? What kind of maxxing is it called?

Amina Srna: Friction-maxxing.

Ben: Friction-maxxing. I guess I'm a millennial. I still use a flip phone. I always cooked for myself, even when I lived in the city. I always rode around a bike, never used an Uber. We don't give iPads and stuff to our kids, and it's pretty easy. I don't understand. I know all these things everyone says to me, it's convenient. I've always felt is inconvenient. I don't use Google Maps. I just look where I'm going, and I figure it out and use my head. I don't know, it seems like my son is listening. He says, "Kid," anyways, he listens to the radio. We're not streaming either.

Amina Srna: A young Brian Lehrer Show listener. Ben, thank you so much for your call. Kathryn, you actually write, parents who themselves are horribly averse to friction can't reasonably expect their kids to tolerate much. A little bit opposite of what I guess Ben was saying, but in relationship to your kids, you write that there's a whole parenting component to this. You want to tell us more?

Kathryn Jezer-Morton: Yes, in my experience, it was really about getting my kids to start enjoying reading. I really found that when you have iPads and phone games around, it's really hard for reading to compete with the fun and the entertainment that that offers. For me, it was a family road trip that ended up being a little bit, I guess you could say, long and eventful in terms of vehicular issues.

Anyway, my kids didn't have iPads, and they learned to read in the back of the car because there was nothing else to do for days at a time. I really don't know if they would have become avid readers without that forced monasticism of no technology. I honestly don't think that for a lot of parents, they're up against it when it comes to raising people who love to read, when you have an iPad sitting on the couch waiting to be played with.

Amina Srna: Let's go to another call. Steve in upper Manhattan. Hi, you're on WNYC.

Steve: Hi, thanks for taking my call. I agree with the previous caller, by the way. You have to force it. The other guy was showing off because it's really hard. My example is an app. It's Substack, which is growing in popularity. I've been writing a newsletter on it, and I've been tempted to try to write something on my phone because an idea comes to me, and you can't. You've got to write your newsletter from a desktop, and it makes you slow down, and it's not. A lot of longer form, I try to write really short stuff, but the point is you're stopping and really thinking, and you can't do this stuff on the fly, which is all over social media and just escalates conflict.

I can find an audience of people, a niche thing, educators who care about the school-to-prison pipeline. You can write more thoughtful stuff that way.

Amina Srna: That's really cool, Steve. Thank you so much for sharing your story. Let's take one more. Here's Neeraj in New Providence, New Jersey. Hi, you're on WNYC.

Neeraj: Hi, good morning, Amina. Thank you very much. I wanted to talk about writing. It's funny, I actually have a four-year-old who's learning how to write right now and write well. I thought about, "Hey, when do I write anymore?" I think the whole card process, writing cards now has become more automated than I expected. I think whether it's holiday cards or even like a wedding, save the date, it's all, find a service, load in your addresses. They'll send it out. You don't have to do anything.

I still prefer writing cards, whether I know that creates a lot of ink and paperwork, but still, just writing something personal, writing a message to let my friends and family know I care more than just having to do automated. I understand that people are busy, so they can't always write, but it's still that personal touch. I still enjoy adding to them.

Amina Srna: Neeraj, thank you so much for your call. Kathryn, something that I was thinking of hearing Neeraj speak was I saw somebody call somebody out on Reddit for using ChatGPT to write a note of condolence after a loss. You have a maybe a controversial take for some. You say, stop using ChatGPT completely. Tell us more about that.

Kathryn Jezer-Morton: Yes, I guess in that regard, I'm like some of the previous callers who are really just never adopted these things, and therefore there's no temptation. I just don't want to use it. I just don't. I'm a writer, so it's a little bit easier, maybe for me to make that commitment. I have a friend recently who attended a funeral and was struggling over what she was going to say, and had family say, "Well, why don't you just use ChatGPT?" She was really taken aback and felt like, "No, this is something that I have to struggle over articulating how I feel about a loss," is like, this is part of what being a person is.

It's like one of the challenges of human life. I think there are a lot of our experiences that if we sand them away, it becomes a matter of dehumanizing ourselves. I think that's something worth thinking about.

Amina Srna: Another example, I shop online, but almost always pick up my purchase at the store, unless the store isn't local and related shopping. A listener writes, "I use cash, so I have to do just a little bit of math instead of a credit card." Kathryn, we're getting a few listeners who are texting and calling. Asking is friction-maxxing, just being frugal. That's my motivation, to cook from scratch and take public transit. Could you just parse the difference for us?

Kathryn Jezer-Morton: Well, there's certainly overlap, and I think that's very convenient. I think it's a little more than that, because a lot of the tools that we use that eliminate friction from our lives are they don't cost us anything, and these are the tools that collect our data, obviously, and so they cost us that. I think that the idea that even just leaving voice memos instead of calling people, which is one of my downfalls, I hate talking on the phone. I found voice memos to be this great workaround where I can talk to people but not really talk to them. It's not great. I find myself really relying on that instead of a back-and-forth conversation. I'm forcing myself to call people on the phone.

I think these are just ways of facing our own discomfort with just regular, everyday human stuff that everyone struggles with a little bit, rather than letting these struggles be washed away, be eased away for us.

Amina Srna: Kathryn Jezer-Morton is the author of The Cut's Brooding newsletter. She wrote up her plan to friction-maxx this year in life and in parenting. You can catch that in The Cut. Kathryn, thank you so much for your time today.

Kathryn Jezer-Morton: Oh, thank you so much.

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