Everyone is friction-maxxing these days—finding ways to wean themselves off technologies of convenience and into practices that might feel harder on the psyche, but result in better or more interesting or more satisfying outcomes. This is good, I think.

But in most pontifications about how technology has impacted our lives, I think we’ve misplaced the cause and effect, and thus set people up to fail at finding a more friction-filled life. Opinion columnists insist the base problem is that we’ve become to accustomed to an easy existence supported by automation and algorithms, and that that has made us lazy and ungrateful for the things that come harder in life.

I think this is wrong. We’re not all just slothful sinners looking for the easiest way through. No one is born wanting to scroll TikTok for the rest of their lives.

IMHO, it’s not that life has gotten too easy; if anything, it’s gotten much harder for many of us—the economy sucks, our political system feels hopeless, billionaires are becoming more cartoon-villainesque by the day, destroying our environment and our democracy and our brains in the process. And so, I think, the base problem is that because life has gotten harder, the allure of easiness has exponentially increased. The more beaten down and tired and aggravated we feel, the more we’ve been encouraged and enticed to addresses our aches and pains with the supposed salves sold to us by the same people making our world an actively more hostile place. We reach for our phones for the same reason we reach for a glass of wine at the end of the night or a vape or whatever other vice—not because our lives are good, but because our bodies and minds yearn for a temporary reprieve.

There’s nothing wrong with this. I like nicotine and wine as much as the next person. But, as with any vice, returns are diminishing. If you drink 10 glasses of wine a day, one glass will no longer relax you. If you reach for your phone 10 times an hour (or more), one Instagram Reel will no longer provide you with a bit of dopaminergic joy.

It is hard to decide how much of this is our individual responsibility. Drug addiction exists not because we live in a society of millions of individual failures unable to moderate their indulgences, but because we live in a society that causes an immense amount of pain and thus one in which people must constantly search for relief. Similarly, it is not just that the phones in our pockets are alluring to us, but that the deteriorating conditions of life around us make the phones so alluring.

But this systemic view can encourage us to abdicate our responsibility to ourselves: People throw up their hands and say that there’s nothing that can be done because we have so little power over the world and thus over our own lives.

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In my opinion, one can take a systems-based understanding of vice and still encourage individuals to individually make progress—to go to rehab or therapy or AA. One can acknowledge that phones and algorithms are only part of the problem, while still taking the responsibility to use them responsibly. Or, really, one can acknowledge that all of these problems are part of the same problem, and that tackling one part of this large problem can help solve the other parts.

If we become accustomed to a frictionless life in which we are searching for self-soothing via constant hits of electronic dopamine, it becomes much harder to do the work of making the world a place in which we do not need self-soothing via constant hits of electronic dopamine. You cannot easily create a revolution or even a community if you cannot concentrate. You cannot begin to address the systems-level problems if you don’t have the discipline to address the individual-level ones...