A cramp in every calf, a boulder in every path

There’s an entire strategy of product development centered around one simple fact about human beings.

People don’t want to do hard things. They want things to be easy. And if companies can launch an affordable product that minimizes some portion of the crap people have to do, but don’t want to, then those who can afford it will pay them for the trouble.

Now, from a consumer innovation standpoint, this is a beautiful thing. I’m grateful for these products in my life that reduce friction and make my daily existence easier. I support paying the sanity tax to optimize for my comfort, independence and happiness.

Billion dollar companies are built on this principle, and god bless them all for the work they do. Amazon overnight delivery adds massive value to my life because, let’s be honest, going to stores is hell on earth and I hope I never have to do it again.

The question is, to what degree do extraordinary advances in technology produce the incapacity to manage our basic life responsibilities? Have we completely lost the invaluable survival skill of relying on ourselves?

I don’t know about you, but I kind of like doing hard things. It’s a curious and absurd and important part of life. Maybe that makes me a masochist or an ascetic, but a part of me appreciates when things are annoying, exhausting and inconvenient.

It’s certainly stressful in the moment. Sometimes it seems like the universe is conspiring to cock block my every desire and need.

And yet, as stressful as something is in the moment, long term, I trust its benefit for me. Sure, nothing spoils fun like finding out that experience builds character. But in the words of my favorite baseball coach, it’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.

Hell, considering eighty percent of life is doing things we don’t want to do, we may as well get good at it.

Here’s an example. Remember how hard spending money used to be? You had to go to the bank to get cash, sign a physical check with a writing implement, go to the post office to send a money order, and later balance your finances on some kind of ledger.

Now money isn’t even a physical asset anymore. It’s just numbers. Code and pixels. You digitally send your friend fifty bucks to split the bill at dinner, and it feels like you never even had those dollars in the first place. You don’t even realize they’re gone.

What’s even scarier is, any jerk with decent hacking skills and a smidgen of ethical plasticity can steal your identity and buy hundreds of dollars of sex toys without you ever even knowing it.

Money is just too easy. There’s no friction. No force of gravity to make us feel the pinch. It’s like the whole world is wearing sweatpants, and the elastic waistband is so comfortable and invisible, that we don’t realize we’ve gained fifteen pounds in a week.

Our beer gut graduated from a six pack to a keg, because nothing’s hard anymore. And it should be. Some things should always be hard.

Look, there’s a time for instant gratification, but there’s also a time for work. My fear is that if technology continues to make things too easy for us, billions of people are going to develop some generational variant of dependent personality disorder.

We will become helpless, submissive bags of skin who are incapable of taking care of ourselves or making simple decisions. I hate to say it, but maybe everything shouldn’t be available at the push of a button. Maybe the scenic route should be the one and only available path.

Because what if people learned how to enjoy driving the long way home? What if, rather than having everything that ever was at our fingertips all of the time, we actually toiled to experience the spiritual value of our experiences?

My argument here is not new. For thousands of years, there’s been historical complaints about how every new technology movement makes things too easy. Every generation believes the generations after them are too soft and didn’t struggle enough.

Roosevelt, the quotable first lady, famously said that when life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.

Wow, can you imagine a presidential candidate today running on the friction platform? They wouldn’t earn a single vote, except maybe from members of the bdsm community.

But just try to imagine the commercial.

America, election day is right around the corner, and you have a choice between two very different plans for our great nation. My opponent’s platform would reduce friction in the workplace, speed up the shipping time of commercial products, and make life generally easier for the common man. My opponent voted for a bill that will provide all citizens with universal access to mobile phones that make pancakes and massage their genitals.

But you know what? We’ve tried that simple approach, and it’s what created this mess of a country in the first place. I believe the only way to create an economy built to last is through the power of voluntary suffering, intentional discomfort, delayed gratification and frustration tolerance. Americans have had things too good for too long, and we’ve grown softer than a bowl of wet noodles.

Ladies and gentleman, I’m imploring all citizens, both wealthy, poor and in between, to suck it up and stop being a punch of pussies. Look, sometimes politics can seem very small. But the choice you face, it couldn’t be bigger. Hurrah, Hurrah!

Reduce your wealth, increase the tariff on life itself. A cramp in every calf, a boulder in every path. America puts blood in the soil, with our dependence domestic toil.

Thank you and I approve this message.

What in your life has become too easy? Where might you gain benefit from greater friction?

Wow, that’s how I know I’m getting old. If you long for the halcyon days when things were harder, took longer and built more character, that officially mean you’ve reached middle age.

Now if you will excuse me, I just ordered a twenty four pack of peanut butter cups to be delivered to my apartment window by drone. Better go put a pair of sweatpants on.

What has become dangerously easy for you?