The crushing boredom of a frictionless world

Sad, floppy pizzas, the death of the video store, and why we all need a pot of spring bulbs in our life...

We live in strange times.

My Dad and my brother think we are on the precipice of an AI revolution, about to lurch forward into the glorious abyss of a tech-driven utopia. My Mum has 15478 unread emails in her inbox and can’t access 99% of her applications because she installed a single-password security program and can’t remember the password. My husband wants to destroy his smartphone and abandon the internet. I’d quite like to ditch my phone too, but, so far, have only managed to delete Uber eats (something I’m actually quite proud of).

Uber eats is, perhaps, the catalyst for this article, because it neatly captures a lot about the world we now live in. It is easy, depersonalised, quick, efficient… and it tastes like shit.

I watched a movie once, called The Bothersome Man, and it stuck with me. The guy wakes up in this perfect world populated by beautiful people and Ikea-inspired furniture. It’s very clean, very ordered and civilised. But the food has no flavour, the alcohol doesn’t get you drunk and relationships are uniformly…pleasant, without any kind of love or passion. It’s easy. It’s bland. It’s empty.

It’s Uber eats on a Wednesday night in 2025.

We are, as a society, currently captured by ease. Captured by the idea of saving time and of minimising unnecessary human interactions (which, studies show, tend to fill us with a lot more happiness than we expect). Unfortunately, we don’t tend to notice what we’ve lost when we make our lives easier and more frictionless. But there is a lot.

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Here are a few examples of experiences you probably rarely have anymore (or may not have had in years).

1. You go to a video store at 7pm at night, in your pyjamas, to pick out a movie. The carpets smell like packaged popcorn, the lights are bright. There’s a certain safe, banal frisson in the air. What will you watch? Will you get an ice cream too? You take a free lolly, wrapped in cellophane from the bowl at the counter.

2. You have to wait for something. Maybe you go to the bookstore and ask them to order a book in for you. Weeks later they call to tell you that it’s arrived. You collect it excitedly - it feels valuable.

3. You watch Seinfeld on free-to-air tv. During the ad breaks, you race to the loo, hurriedly scoop ice cream out of a tub in the fridge, shouting over your shoulder ‘let me know if it comes back on!’. The TV waits for no one. Time is suddenly precious.

4. You decide to order takeaway for dinner. You open the little drawer that every family had in the 90s, right next to the telephone, stuffed full of takeout menus from every restaurant within a 5km radius. You bicker over what to get. You call the restaurant on the phone. You speak to a person. They take your order. You drive to collect it. And, actually, although it takes moderately more effort, it takes relatively less time. You’re there waiting for the bag of food when it’s ready, you pick it up while it’s still piping hot. You drive it directly home. Your car fills with the smell of the meal you’re about to eat. Maybe you sneak a few hot chips on the drive (the most precious and delicious part of the whole meal). Your food is not delayed, it does not arrive partially spilled into the bag. It does not sit on the footpath in front of your gate, hastily dumped by someone who is undervalued and underpaid, while you wait for your phone to ping and alert you to the fact that it’s there. The pizza is not limp.

I have started looking for opportunities to add friction back into my life. Because it is a lie that a frictionless life is a better life. Yes, of course, some trappings of the modern world are good. I’m not going to stop ordering books online, but I am going to go to brick and mortar bookstores a lot more often (it helps that my son is currently obsessed with the children’s section in a particular bookshop that happens to be right next to a cafe selling good coffee and cake). I’m not going to cook every meal from scratch, but I am going to cut out the Uber middle man and call the restaurants directly (you actually get to customise your order way better this way too, and the restaurants get 100% of the money for their work).

I want to learn to re-embrace friction, because what happens if we just keep shaving off every source of minor difficulty in our lives? Where do we actually find joy and satisfaction when everything is so simple that it requires absolutely no thought?

The other thing about our new obsession with frictionlessness is that it leaves very little room for nature. Nature is not easy. Or clean. Trees drop leaves (a fact that several of my neighbours are still struggling to come to grips with). Plants grow into each other. Flowers die and turn brown.

Gardening, like all the really good things in life, provides a source of friction. It’s not simple, efficient or easy, much as we might try to make it so. You can absolutely make it simpler, you can find workarounds so you spend less time doing the trivial stuff out there, but ultimately, gardening is an effortful pastime. And that’s kind of the point. It’s the work of gardening that makes you feel good. Not the garden.

A life of ease; devoid of trees.

I usually try to give practical tips in my emails, to atone for the fact that I frequently use this newsletter to rant and whinge about various modern maladies. So what’s my garden-specific advice for you if you want a bit more friction?

Honestly, it’s this: just garden.

You can’t really have a frictionless garden, and I think that’s what makes it one of the best things we can do these days. Gardening requires work. It requires sweat and exertion. It makes a mess. It is unpredictable, and tiring. And because of all of these things, it will make you vastly, incalculably happier, whenever you do it.

It doesn’t have to take up your whole day. And I assure you I will still be ordering my mulch online and having it delivered. But growing a garden is a daily reminder that life isn’t just about making things streamlined and efficient. It is small but significant proof that doing something the hard way is - nine times out of ten - going to make you feel better than taking the shortcut. I am, of course, biased. And at 31 weeks pregnant I have to admit that I am doing very, very little gardening right now. But there is something valuable about having easy-access to a little bit of meaningful struggle the moment you walk into your backyard.

So, next time you think you are doing something wrong - because your garden is messy, or because it feels like no matter what you do, the work never ends - remind yourself that that is the point. That our lives are growing increasingly slippery and deadeningly streamlined, but that if you want a surefire way to protect yourself from the crushing boredom of a frictionless world, you need only two things: a bit of earth, and a handful of seeds.

Post script: Three simple ways ways to add more pleasurable friction into your life

1. Plant a single pot of spring bulbs - tips for growing spring bulbs here:

2. Plant one tree this winter - see my list of trees that suit a Perth climate here:

3. Scatter seeds for spring - this is lazy gardening, but not actually effortless - here is my list of flowers that can be scattered around your garden as seeds:

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Thank you for reading! See you next time for more Lo fi life!

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