In praise of slowing down
Time is the ultimate luxury.
What up, Traipser! Dakota here with a hearty welcome to Traipsing About, my newsletter about reclaiming creativity as an adult and ditching tired personal paradigms. No bots, no AI, just good, clean, human-spun fun.
Winds of change here in Oregon, fall splendor ceding to blustery, dark nights. I’m not ready…
Power bouncing off the Traipsing About trampoline this week:
Friction for the win (final essay in this series)
Very bad advice…and not even the unsolicited kind.
How to be indispensable in the age of AI.
Traipsing Tidbits:
AI (Sh)Art
The power of a few lines
YouTube at its best
In case you missed it: My last three newsletters contained parts of a series on friction, including:
In praise of friction and how it builds our character.
How friction strengthens friendships
How friction is the story in our lives, even if it requires Grandma’s Christmas tree falling over.
Also, I loved this recent email from Traipsing reader Mark sent me after my “friction is story” post. He was about to launch into a big trip (trekking in Kyrgyzstan, amongst other adventures…y’all Traipsers are cool!):
“Your Substack today. Right…on….target. Thank you for another reminder of how uncertainty, apprehension and nervousness, and the new invariably bring lasting memories and growth. It helps me to mitigate my anxiety and instead embrace the opportunity.”
Friction forces intention and connection
In my past few newsletters, I’ve tackled the concept of friction. Since then, I keep noticing it everywhere. (Call me a dude with a hammer looking for friction, whatevs!)
Scott Galloway warns that AI companions create “connections forged without friction, where intimacy is artificial.” Cognitive science researcher Eva Keiffenheim urges us to “put the friction back in” so we don’t offload too much thinking to machines. And Cal Newport reminds us that a bit of resistance can tame our questing simian minds’ dependence on them. Limit timers for apps? Pffft, monkeys can figure that out! Gotta put the phone in a drawer.
Even finance, that temple of efficiency, benefits from friction. The IEX stock exchange slowed down trading signals, as Michael Lewis chronicled in the excellent book Flash Boys.
Friction at a personal level
No friction in our lives runs the risk of transforming us into dreadful, entitled caricatures, someone like Harry Potter’s revolting cousin Dudley. Without effort and pushback (aka people telling us when we screw up), how can we possibly develop the grit and tenacity to thrive while avoiding becoming a stinky turd of a human?
As Scott Galloway puts it in his essay Love Algorithmically,
“We need people to judge us, to point out when we say something stupid. Friction and conflict are key to developing resilience and learning how to function in society.”
Friction shows up in the burn of a workout, in researching sustainable products vs. single-use crap. It’s the effort it takes to learn a skill, digging in for dozens or hundreds of hours. (Wow have I felt it learning piano and languages!)
It’s handwritten notes instead of quick texts. Ordering takeout for a sick friend is nice; cooking and delivering soup is love.
It’s the time we put into our relationships and communities, the red-eye flight to attend a wedding, the volunteer shift at a local event, caring for a sick loved one. It’s showing up for yourself and the people around you, again and again. Friction isn’t always fun, but I’d argue it’s what connects us and makes life feel full.
It’s also the safeguard of democracy, a check against authoritarians running roughshod over their citizens. Due process, protests, and unions all slow things down, and for good reason. Friction keeps power in check and protects ordinary lives from being steamrolled by efficiency and greed. Sure, too much red tape breeds frustration (as detailed in the eye-opening book Abundance), but too little leads to chaos.
Does it slow things down? Yes...usually for the betterment of the individual’s every day life and a feeling of security instead of leaving them wondering when the next rug will be yanked out.
La Dolce Vita
My Italian grandmother knew La Dolce Vita, the sweet lifestyle embracing simple pleasures, beauty, and a slower pace of living. She was surrounded by people she loved with treasures from her travels on every shelf. With a glass of Crown Royal and Jeopardy at 7pm, grandkids rampaging in the next room, she couldn’t have been happier.
Well, La Dolce Vita IS friction: home-cooked meals, real human messiness, Christmas trees falling over, one destination on a trip instead of five cities in a week. Slowing the hell down.
The life people dream about isn’t based in efficiency at all. It’s all about slow interactions where you engage with people in your community. Running into someone at the grocery store, chatting amiably at the dog park with people you don’t know, but whose bulldog Bruno you adore.
My parents model this beautifully: meal trains for sick neighbors, a shared community truck, my mom walking a friend’s dog for months, my dad’s friend reading poetry to him after surgery.
What are we rushing toward?
Efficiency connects us to things. Friction connects us to people. In a world where everything is one click away, maybe the only real act of care left is giving someone your time.
Otherwise, we end up fast-forwarding through life. But to what end? As Jay Jennifer Matthews writes in Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are:
“We can not get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket situated outside of life, which would steal life’s provisions and squirrel them away.”
Maybe friction is just the courage to slow down, to be fully present.
A few parting ideas:
-Be ruthlessly efficient with things you don’t enjoy. Put the soy milk on auto-order! Use that dishwasher and washing machine! Book a DMV appointment vs. standing in line for 2 hours!
-Meanwhile, leave space for serendipitous interactions that result in connection. Maybe don’t schedule every weekend? Leave your phone in a drawer for a few hours a day.
-Try not meticulously planning a trip. Make like Kevin Kelly and keep some of it engaging rather than relaxing.
-Finally, embrace inefficiency for what it is: a way to strengthen bonds and feel like you’re part of a community. It’s okay not to do everything in our lives. Maybe doing a few things really well with our full attention is enough.
Very bad advice
Morgan Housel, author of the fantastic book The Psychology of Money, knows that showing people what to NOT to do is more powerful than being bossy. (I’m still learning.) My favorites from his essay Very Bad Advice:
Envy others’ success without having a full picture of their lives, or (similarly) compare your behind-the-scenes life to others’ curated highlight reel.
Associate net worth with self-worth (for you and others), and also automatically associate wealth with wisdom.
Judge other people at their worst and yourself at your best.
Assume that all your success is due to hard work and all your failure is due to bad luck. (How much of any success I’ve had is mostly due to low interest rates and a booming economy in the 2010s?!)
Check out the full list. I’ve only fallen prey to ohhhh 75% of them in my lifetime, how about you? (“Value the appearance of looking busy” in my first job, for example.)
3 human skills that make you irreplaceable in an AI world
I dig the Prof G newsletter for its timely, humorous take on markets and trends. These important skills we need in the age of AI resonate with me:
Curation:
Time and attention are becoming even scarcer. Because of that, taste — the ability to identify what is worth paying attention to and what isn’t — is becoming increasingly important.
Curiosity:
To curate well, you need a big library to draw from. And to build that, you need curiosity — the willingness to explore outside your lane, to chase ideas that don’t have an immediate, or obvious, payoff.
As Robert Greene describes in Mastery, progress begins with anomalies, strange outliers or overlooked curiosities that spark deeper investigation. [D’s note: this reminds me of the excellent book Range by David Epstein.]
Connection:
AI can summarize, analyze, and even write with fluency. What it can’t do is care. It doesn’t build trust, show emotional investment, or make someone say “I want that person in the room.”
—
Overall, I’d argue that basically no one wants AI in the room, just doing the dirty work behind the scenes while humans shine. Hey, a boy can dream! We’ll see how it all pans out.
Traipsing Tidbits
The Oatmeal’s brilliant take on AI Art: “…I find out it’s AI art. Then I feel deflated, grossed out, and maybe a little bit bored.” This echoes my feelings exactly. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my artists to have worked hard, dammit!
How does this (non-AI) artist convey so much movement and life with a few strokes of a graphite pen?
Movie rec: Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching: Do I bird? No. Did I laugh my ass off and admire the brotherly relationship and beautiful filming of birds in this YouTube doc? Yes, yes I did. Trust me on this one.
This Traipsing About newsletter has left the station.
Unsolicited advice from entrepreneur Nat Elison:
If you’re in your 20s and have any aspiration to start a business or work for yourself or make a dramatic career change, you should do that as soon as possible. Ideally today.
You don’t appreciate how little time you have to easily go after it and how much harder it’s going to be later.
To this, I’d add if you have any aspiration for big, open-ended travel, do it in your early 20s! Your future self will thank you profusely.
Onward,
Dakota
Another great missive, Dakota! Substack didn't want to let me leave this comment until I logged back in with a code they sent to my email. I almost skipped it, then decided to embrace the friction. :)
“Efficiency connects us to things. Friction connects us to people. In a world where everything is one click away, maybe the only real act of care left is giving someone your time.”
So beautifully stated and so true. Thank you.