Things Worth Remembering: Friction Makes Life Worth Living Technology promises to alleviate every inconvenience. But as Kurt Vonnegut said in 1995, aren’t the annoyances we’re racing to erase the very things that make life feel real?
What if we lose something when we outsource all our annoying jobs to the machines? (George Pickow/Three Lions via Getty Images)
Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Free Press digital editor Josh Kaplan turns to a Kurt Vonnegut quote that captures a simple truth: In an age defined by efficiency, the frictions of daily life are not a problem to be solved, but the very point of being alive.
Will we ever need to write an email again? What about make a restaurant reservation? Go to an office? Drive a car? When the story of the last few years of global technology is written, it’s hard to imagine that it will focus on anything other than how tech—and artificial intelligence in particular—removed all friction from our lives: a Claude to text everyone for you; a Copilot to build slide decks at work; a ChatGPT to save you a trip to a therapist. On the surface, it sounds great. A million little daily annoyances evaporated into nothing. A door opened to the kind of smooth life where everyone can focus on what really matters. But what if that’s not actually what we need? What if we lose something when we outsource all our annoying jobs to the machines?...
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