Attention span has undergone an “alarming and shocking” decline over the last two decades, says Gloria Mark, a psychologist…
— from ‘Can ‘friction-maxxing’ fix your focus?’ by Alexandra Pattillo, on BBC.com, February 28, 2026.
I guess there’s an exciting new approach to living that’s all the rage among certain populations. Certain populations who have undergone an alarming decline in their attention spans in the last two decades? In fact, the decline has been both alarming and shocking.
Enter, stage right, “friction-maxxing”.
Doing things the hard way. For the sake of your brain. According to the BBC article:
The idea is to find tasks or ways of doing things which involve a level of difficulty, time or patience. This could, for example, involve going “old school” and swapping digital tech tools for analogue solutions, such as reading rather than watching YouTube, navigating by road signs in place of Google Maps or calling a friend for advice instead of consulting ChatGPT.
The people quoted in this article were having trouble staying focused, or else, they were psychologists treating people struggling with a lack of focus. I don’t know which group was having the harder time of it.
At any rate, everyone had decided to blame that lack of focus on technology, which is making life so easy and convenient that people’s brains have stopped working properly.
The obvious treatment for this malady: stop using your phone to do all your thinking for you. Go back to doing things the old fashioned way.
Humans evolved from cavemen into computer programmers by using our comparatively large brains, but now those large brains are becoming increasing useless, as technology becomes more and more useful.
Reportedly, the term “friction-maxxing” was coined by columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton in a January 2026 essay for The Cut, a bi-monthly New Zealand golf magazine. I used to play golf when I was younger, and I can vouch for the fact that there’s almost nothing harder than breaking 100 on a chilly Saturday morning. Mark Twain quite accurately described the game of golf as “A pleasant walk in the woods… spoiled.”
From Ms. Pattillo’s BBC article:
Three years ago, Stuart Semple began by simply taking technology breaks and locking his phone away. “I wanted to build my muscle for being able to sit in discomfort or even experience boredom to connect with creativity,” he says. “I’m getting some of the best ideas I’ve had for years.”
Thrilled by his initial success, the artist has now traded the instant gratification of Instagram for longer and more meaningful interactions on Substack, takeaways for home-cooked meals and emails for handwritten letters.
“I find the rewards for doing difficult things are absolutely massive,” says Semple. “I grow, I get better at things and I expand.”
I can totally agree that writing handwritten letters is one of the most difficult tasks ever conceived, and no doubt the rewards are massive. Ditto, home-cooked meals.
I wouldn’t know anything about meaningful interactions on Substack, even though I myself have a Substack account and wrote about back in November. I try not to interact with other writers on Substack, because I suspect they wouldn’t like me. Because we’re so similar.
The whole point of this “friction-maxxing” trend is to get off the instant gratification roller coaster that the corporate billionaires have constructed for us, and get back to doing things that humans have done for 100,000 years. We actually ought to be good at hard things — cooking and writing and such — considering the number of home-cooked meals and handwritten letters built into our genetic chromosomes, historically speaking. It’s shocking how many people have already forgotten how to make a sandwich ever since the invention of the iPhone, and now rely on prepackaged sandwiches from City Market.
To learn more about this exciting new trend of “doing things the hard way to enhance brain function” I decided the first step was to use the Google app on my iPhone and explore the new trend.
But to make it more difficult — for the sake of my brain — I logged in to an article about “friction-maxxing” on the website Chef.se
A website that publishes all its content in Swedish.
I don’t know how to read Swedish, so I figured this approach would kill two birds with one stone, in terms of making my research effort as difficult as possible.
From that website:
TECHBRANSCHENS STRÄVAN ATT göra allt så enkelt som möjligt för oss genom appar som väljer väg åt oss har lett människan in i en ständigt ökande förslappning. Med AI:s inträde kan man rent av tala om en exponentiell ökning av detta.
Vi har blivit så tillvanda vid den bekvämlighet techtjänsterna ger oss att vi inte längre blir glada när något går smidigt – vi kräver att det ska göra det. Detta har bland annat beskrivits i boken ‘Bekvämlighetens tyranni’ av Andreas Ekström som gavs ut 2022.
As we all know, there are dozens of translation websites available online, and I could easily paste this entire Swedish text into Google Translate and have it spit out the English version.
But that’s the very problem we’re trying to overcome. The easiest route to everything. Which is destroying our brains.
So, instead, I visited the Swedish website ‘Folkets Lexikon’ and began translating the text one word at a time. I learned that “Techbranschen” means “The tech industry”… and “strävan” means “ambition” or maybe “aspiration”.
After several minutes, I had tentatively translated almost half of the first sentence.
The tech industry’s ambition to make everything as simple as possible for us…
But then I thought to myself, “This is really stupid, and time-consuming… when I could easily have the entire two paragraphs translated within a couple of seconds. Who am I trying to impress?”
I couldn’t figure out who I was trying to impress. Possibly that’s a symptom of my degraded brain function… but maybe it’s not. Who really knows?
Anyway, I went in the kitchen and made myself a sandwich. At least I still know how to manage that, as difficult as it was.