My mother had a mangle. A real one, cast iron, bolted to a wooden frame in the basement. You fed the wet sheets through the rollers and cranked the handle and the water ran out into a tin bucket underneath. It took twenty minutes to do what a spin cycle does in four. She never complained about it. She never called it friction.
Now there’s a word for doing things the way she did them. They call it friction-maxxing. Some writer coined it in January and the Washington Post picked it up and now half the internet is pretending that cooking dinner from scratch and reading an actual book are acts of radical resistance against the machine. As if your grandmother needs a hashtag.
The list of recommended friction is something else. See your friends in person instead of texting them. Try to remember something before Googling it. Cook a meal. Read a map. The fact that anyone needs to be told this — that basic human functioning now requires a lifestyle brand — tells you more about where we’ve landed than any AI benchmark ever will.
But here’s the thing. The people writing these articles aren’t wrong. They’re just late.
There was a study out of Carnegie Mellon, done with Microsoft of all people, that found workers using AI tools got more efficient but worse at thinking for themselves. Another one at MIT hooked writers up to brain scanners while they used large language models. The parts of the brain responsible for creativity, attention, cognitive processing — they went quiet. Not a little quiet. Measurably quiet. Like a muscle you stopped using because someone offered to carry your bags.
I spent years at the post office. Sorting mail. You stand there and your hands know the routes and your brain maps the city and after a while you don’t think about it anymore — except you do, somewhere underneath. You know which streets flood in the rain. You know the zip code sequence like a song you can’t forget. That knowledge lived in my fingers. No algorithm gave it to me. I earned it one envelope at a time.
The difference between this generation of AI and the washing machine is that the washing machine replaced physical labor. Nobody got dumber because they stopped wringing sheets through a mangle. But AI replaces mental labor. The thinking part. The part where you wrestle with the words until they make sense, where you sit with a problem until it cracks open and shows you something you didn’t expect.
Students using ChatGPT to write essays couldn’t remember the quotes they’d just cited. Couldn’t remember their own arguments. Because they weren’t their arguments. They were outputs. And an output is not a thought. A thought is what happens when friction meets a mind that refuses to give up.
I knew a guy at the track — Mikey Santangelo, big hands, bad teeth, always bet the wrong horse. Mikey couldn’t read past a fifth-grade level, but he could tell you the lifetime stats of every jockey at Santa Anita going back to 1972. Not because he looked it up. Because he was there. Saturday after Saturday, sunburn after sunburn, watching and remembering and losing his rent money. That knowledge cost him something. It was friction all the way down. And it was his. Nobody could take it from him. Nobody could prompt-engineer it out of a database.
The tech people don’t understand this. They look at friction and see inefficiency. They look at effort and see a problem to solve. Some startup kid in a two-thousand-dollar suit sees an old woman cooking dinner from scratch and thinks: we could optimize that. And he could. He could app-ify the grocery list and automate the recipe selection and have a drone deliver the ingredients and maybe, eventually, have a robot do the chopping. And at the end of it, the food would arrive on time and taste fine and nobody would have learned anything or felt anything or burned their finger on the stove and sworn and laughed about it.
That’s the exchange they’re offering. Convenience for competence. Speed for understanding. The frictionless life.
I tried it once with writing. Let the machine draft something for me, just to see. It was clean. Grammatically perfect. And it was dead. Dead as a mannequin in a department store window. It had the shape of writing without the weight. No scars, no wrong turns, no moment where the sentence breaks and rebuilds itself into something truer than what you planned.
Writing — real writing — is friction. It’s the mangle. You feed the wet, messy thing through and crank the handle and it hurts your arms and the water runs out and what’s left is something you wrung with your own hands.
They say friction is how you know you’re alive. I’d go further. Friction is how you know you’re you. Every shortcut you hand to the machine is a piece of yourself you’ll never get back. Not because the machine stole it — because you gave it away. Voluntarily. Gratefully. Like a prisoner thanking the warden for making the cell more comfortable.
My mother’s mangle is gone. Probably rusting in a landfill somewhere. She’d have laughed at the idea that cranking wet sheets through cast iron made her a better person. But it did something. It put her in her body. It gave her twenty minutes of mindless rhythm where her thoughts could wander, where she’d hum something and solve some problem she’d been chewing on, where the physical work freed the mental work to happen on its own.
They’ve got a word for that now too, probably. Some app-ready, TED-Talk-approved neologism.
She just called it doing the laundry.
Source: I baulked at the idea of ‘friction-maxxing’. But there’s more to it than meets the eye