Sitting in the long-cooked grass of a park in late summer, the moon our only light, my overworked and broke friend rips handfuls of dry straw from the ground while griping that North America’s religion is money. If people didn’t so blindly chase money, he says, we’d just about achieve world peace. He’s wrong, I think. North America’s greater god is convenience, and it’s eating us alive.
About five months ago, I was waking up at 6:00 a.m. before my alarm, putting as few strides between my bed and my home office—AKA my kitchen table and laptop—as I could. I’d taken on too many freelance writing assignments, agreed to a new corporate communications retainer, and was actively denying a swelling wave of grief around the sixth anniversary of my mum’s death, which made me work even slower than my usual chin-scratching pace. On top of it all, it was the butt-end of winter in Toronto. I worked hunched in my pajamas until lunch, showered at noon instead of eating, then climbed back online. Two or three nights a week, I’d take a short break, then restart the workday at 7:00 p.m., going until midnight or later. When I did sleep, I’d spend the whole night mentally writing.
I started relying on apps and services that promise more time. I got lunch and groceries delivered. I opted for rideshares over public transit. I hired a monthly cleaner. I barely registered the necessities I bought on sites equipped with Shop Pay or ApplePay, where not even the tiny chasm of an address form stood between wanting something and having it. The more I worked to make money, the more money I spent making it possible to work.
Convenience companies speak about these mechanisms proudly. In 2025, Uber funded research that found their food delivery and rideshare apps saved Canadians a total of 70.3 million hours. A meal-delivery service that recently tried to regain my subscription touted that they could help me win back three workdays per month. They frame ordinary living—grocery shopping, cooking, commuting—as less valuable than the ‘me time’ you could be having. Their bread and butter is having you believe that domestic labour is a nuisance for someone else to absorb.
But avoiding these supposed indignities made my life feel flat and colourless. It tasted like the not-actually-compostable cardboard my lunches arrived in. I missed the textures of the everyday and all of the small reasons we have bodies with senses.
Worse, buying into the convenience economy always felt ethically sus. You could argue that the society-wide efficiency complex—a culture of intensified pressure to be inhumanly personally and professionally productive at all costs—has actually been a good thing. After all, it produced an entire new economy of gig work, which has given some a route into 'self'-employment.
'Frictionless' experiences expose how the economy has come to feel like an abstract machine for moving money around, rather than a deeply human way of redistributing goods.
But major gig platforms are famously exploitative, and on top of that, there’s something generally bleak about the nature of the transactions they lead to. A driver leaves food at my door; I scurry out to retrieve it after they’ve left. A rideshare driver endures traffic and rain; I live in the separate weather of my phone. We share this world, this economy, the same few square feet—yet we don’t see each other. These “frictionless” experiences expose how the economy has come to feel like an abstract machine for moving money around, rather than a deeply human way of redistributing goods, services, and labour so that everyone walks away with something that they need.
I was done living as a satellite person in my home, with food and objects landing on my doorstep with little connection to humanity. I’m a totalizing and quixotic type—if I commit to a new life path, I set sail to be its subject expert – so when I decided to quit convenience, I went cold turkey. Like an addict in a movie tossing their stash in the toilet, I started with the standard first moves, deleting all food delivery apps – Instacart, UberEats and DoorDash – and cancelling my subscription to Factor and Amazon Prime. I stomped my foot and announced to no one that I’d also be banning myself from buying anything online.
I’m certainly not the first to take the path of most resistance. More than two millennia ago, stoics, the original friction-maxxers, volunteered to sleep in coarse cloaks on cold, hard floors and eat straight-up bad food in order to live a more honest existence. Henry David Thoreau wrote transcendentalist prose about simplicity and deliberate living from his minimalist cabin in the woods. Really, movements against automation pop up at every technological lurch forward, with subcultures emerging to protect what machines promised to spare them from. Yet today it feels more urgent because, in addition to labour, technology and automation are coming for personal interaction, expression, and thought. If that goes, what’s left?
I wanted to actively feel the work of transaction.
In January, Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s essay "In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing" gave a name to a growing trend of people doing things the harder way, in order to hang onto practical and critical thinking skills that are dwindling with digital tech and AI. A friction-maxxer might unfold a paper map instead of asking a GPS, buy or borrow a DVD rather than scroll through a streaming menu, flirt at a bar with a stranger instead of on a dating app, and refuse AI shortcuts at all costs. They’ll also make a point of catching up with friends in person instead of watching a curated update on social media (which seems like it shouldn’t be a notable triumph, but here we are.)
The term also became a financial strategy. 'Make buying things irritating again' became a genuine piece of financial advice. Delete mobile wallets. Pay in cash. Schedule a short and exclusive window for online buying. One study showed that just having tap-to-pay at US convenience stores increased spending by 8%. A writer at NerdWallet saved $300 in one month by cutting herself off from shopping and social apps from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during the week.
Bringing friction back into my own life though was less about fiercely holding onto my brain or money—or trying to recreate the romantic imagining of a previous era—and more about reframing economic exchange as an embodied practice. We've increasingly become online brains detached from our bodies with a fictional understanding of money. I wanted to actively feel the work of transaction. To look at the person it was affecting, to register the setting. I wanted to build some reverence for ‘getting something’ instead of consuming so invisibly.
Whenever I was doing something I would have previously called inconvenient, I’d mentally or audibly identify what I was enjoying about it.
To do so, I built more rules for myself. Whenever I was doing something I would have previously called inconvenient, I’d mentally or audibly identify what I was enjoying about it. At the grocery store, I banned myself from self-checkout machines even if it meant waiting in a long line. Sometimes, I chose the longest line on purpose. I would ask myself. What, here, deserves the kind of attention I might give something in a gallery? I thought of an old contemporary dance teacher who would call out to a room of moving bodies, eyes turned inward, “Can you name everything you see?” Once, I found myself marvelling at the moss-green canvas of my small wallet and its big zipper. I ran my fingers over the raised numbers on my debit card. Someone, somewhere, made these objects. Through them, across time, our hands were touching.
Early on, I had made a point of being dogmatic. One late night a friend gave me a lift home and she wanted to make a detour at the grocery store. I left my wallet in my bag in the car but realized I wanted to pick up some eggs. Tired and unthinking, I went to a self-checkout and paid for them with ApplePay. As I tapped I also audibly groaned, suddenly remembering my own new rules. I ripped the receipt from the machine and looked around the deserted store for an employee who would return the item so I could then go to the car, get my wallet and check them out again with a human.
A long-fingernailed teen made the return, risking the snap of her index talon at each swift tap of the screen. I asked how the night shift was going. “Yeah fine,” she replied, resigned and unwavering. When I came back with my wallet as my friend waited in her car, eggs in my hand for another try, the regular checkout lanes were unmanned. I had to ask the same teen if a cashier would be back, and, trying to save her from a lengthy explanation, I pointed to the self-checkout suite and with an air of conspiracy said, “I don’t like those machines.” An elderly cashier who had been on break shuffled toward a checkout, shuffling faster as I got in line. We chatted about her bejewelled spectacles, I paid and left.
My drive to produce something, anything of monetary value was lower, sometimes even tipping all the way into career nihilism as I touched my street’s best tree.
Was this nearly slapstick level of self-imposed friction worth it? Did it make sense for pet project to also inconvenience others? Well, yes! I met two women in two very different stages of life than me, who both were, in unmonumental ways, inspiring. Should I bejewel my hands or eyes like them? Probably! More importantly, I’d traded 30 seconds of efficiency for two sweet encounters, sharing the world, however briefly, with people I would have not met otherwise.
I had it all figured out. I was literally stopping to smell the roses. I was sleeping without work-stress dreams, and my drive to produce something, anything of monetary value was lower, sometimes even tipping all the way into career nihilism as I touched my street’s best tree. I was as close as I’ll ever come to being what my friend calls a 'whatever man.' I thought I’d write this essay and conclude: incorporating friction cured my depression! I am connected to the world and my fellow labourers in profound ways! Revolution is vividly on the horizon! Just delete a couple apps and pay attention to others and you too can be free of your padded, convenient chains! But to think of this process as a quick fix, one that does not need maintenance or room for failure, is also a product of the convenience-geared mindset.
When work swelled again, I started slowly relapsing on convenience. My little pledge I hedged my new identity on was getting harder to maintain. After eating fridge scraps for a few grinding days, I caved and ordered groceries. Contrasted with low value fast-food delivery, it didn’t seem like the worst culprit, and that’s how I justified it. The languid chard and shrivelling tomatoes that arrived looked like they were chosen by someone giving me the finger. Running late to meet a friend for a movie due to work, I took a surge-priced Uber and bought our tickets online.
Those minutes that convenience platforms try to claw back are plump with meaning.
With the convenience gate open again, I started to feel powerless against the pull of needing to work. Yes, spending more time thinking about the outer world helped me care less about my work. But I saw just how much these frictionless platforms did help me be more high-functioning, and I needed to be high functioning again to survive.
On one chained-to-my-desk kind of day, I ordered a salad bowl from the Uber Eats browser. I’d started keeping cash in my wallet, and instead of tipping the driver through the platform, I went outside to hand them the tip.
As I gathered the money before heading to the door I rediscovered the strange plastic beauty of Canadian cash. The cough-syrup-purple $10 bill, with its oddball vertical orientation and tribute to civil rights icon Viola Desmond, feels like an artifact with more value than the imagined 10 dollars in my bank account. The two-toned toonie, too, rolls in the lines of my palm like a giant wheel on a road map and roots me in 1996, the year it was introduced. It felt like progress to both be attentive to someone else’s labour in the exchange, and rooted in time while looking at the money.
I started doing these things to reintroduce friction to my life, but they never actually felt inconvenient or uncomfortable. When I’m able to lean into them, they’re an incredible freedom. It’s a pleasure to always be looking for something spectacularly mundane to enjoy. An errand can be a conversation; a long commute can be a springboard for mental poetry. Those minutes that convenience platforms try to claw back are plump with meaning.
I might not be able to be a friction maxxer – I’m more of a friction moderate – but after my experiment, watching my friend idly poke at dirt, listening to him trying to figure out the world, I was struck by how delicious inefficiency can be. Right then, we were responsible only to each other and the precise moment. We had nowhere else to be.
