The other day I was thrilled to come across the concept of ‘friction-maxxing’.
‘Friction-maxxing’ is a term recently invented to describe the conscious attempt to balance the high-tech smoothness of your life with other activities requiring old-school effort and discipline. It’s the deliberate introduction of ‘inconvenience’ into your activities, to slow you down and encourage you to focus on a process that may take some time to unroll and yield up its benefits.
It seems that many people are beginning to ask questions about a lifestyle in which you can lie on the sofa clicking and ordering things to be brought to you while you half-watch the latest Netflix film with subtitles on so that you can multi-task, texting or scrolling while occasionally glancing at the TV screen.
An article on BBC Future explained, ‘The idea [of friction-maxxing] 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.’
Now of course, all this looks like vindication for those of us who have been slow to master or adopt the technology. As a book reader, a shopper-in-person, a maker of soup from scratch, a user of paper maps and a writer of old-fashioned letters, I welcome the idea that such things are mentally nourishing.
But more seriously, as a musician practising every day and trying to learn things, I’ve always sensed that long-term effort, discipline and focus bring more to my life than just the ability to play particular pieces of music. BBC Future explains, ‘Although scientists are still trying understand why, research suggests effort can often feel intrinsically meaningful. Brain scan studies have found that the part of the brain that processes rewards is more active when the payoff requires effort to achieve’.
It goes on, ‘Analogue hobbies such as crafting, gardening or reading – which involve friction as opposed to scrolling or streaming – can act as “active meditation”, calming the mind and reducing stress. One 2024 study of more than 7,000 adults living in England found that those who engaged in crafting or the creative arts were more likely to report significantly higher life satisfaction, a greater sense that life is worthwhile and increased happiness.’
When I read about friction-maxxing, I felt like Monsieur Jourdain in Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme who, when his philosophy teacher explains to him what ‘prose’ is, is delighted to discover that he has been speaking prose all his life without knowing it.
It is good to hear these things are being talked about, but to me as well they just come naturally. Reality, silence and a full awareness of one’s environment are essential for wellness. I was told the other day I have a relatively calm and balanced attitude to life, and I’m sure this is encouraged by the fact I still don’t have a smartphone! Recently my non-digital evenings have been occupied reading ‘Nocturnes’, which I love. How fascinating to discover the world of John Field and how it interleaved with his great successor Chopin. Your prose style seems ideally suited to the subject – reflective and crystal clear. Thank you so much for signing my copy.
Thank you James for your kind message. I’m happy to know you’re enjoying the book.
Um……… no “high tech” smoothness trying and failing to buy my ticket for the FA Cup semi final on the Southampton FC website today!!
I totally agree that “modern life” does provide a lot of challenges but I don’t really think IT offers a alternative to genuine interests and hobbies other than making things more convenient when it works as originally intended. It seems obvious to me that having “old-fashioned” hobbies will always be rewarding, especially when things like reading and music mean so much to me. I find it strange when people have no curiosity about what is going on around them , whether it is politics, nature, history or the arts. The more I see, hear or read things, I often feel a need to find out more. This is why I love sight reading music these days. It is just a matter of how something is presented so that it piques your interest. If it is presented in a stimulating fashion, there is no reason why so many things cannot be made interesting.
At the moment I am struggling through Peter Godfrey-Smith’s book “Metazoa” which is supposed to be popular science and endeavours to explain consciousness in animals and the different ways in which various life forms perceive things. The concept is interesting and I was provoked to read this book after seeing seals at a sanctuary in Cornwall who were clearly enjoying themselves swimming quickly towards human spectators standing at the underground window of a swimming pool. They were clearly doing this to startle their human audience and for their own amusement. In a broader context, I am fascinated by the idea that mammals in particular can have this kind of consciousness and to enjoy things which have no practical benefit. By contrast, I often wonder why Homo Sapiens are unique insofar that we produce art and enjoy sport whereas no other animal does this. Taking this a step further, it fascinates me at what point in evolution a species of human started to be stimulated by art and when music became something more than making noise. I believe that Neanderthals produced jewellery and appreciated things for their intrinsic worth.
I am not surprised by the conclusions of the study and think that the digital age is leading ourselves to become detached from what genuinely makes us human. The science behind this is well beyond my 1980s A level biology. I do feel that the original post hints at a broader and fascinating set of questions.
Yes and… I feel extremely queasy about the reductionism in the remarks from BBC Future: ‘Although scientists are still trying understand why, research suggests effort can often feel intrinsically meaningful. Brain scan studies have found that the part of the brain that processes rewards is more active when the payoff requires effort to achieve’. I do not play music (mostly very badly) in order to activate my reward-processing brain-structures. That would imply (see Wittgenstein) that if I could stimulate them with an electrode, I could do without the music. And as Wittgenstein says: ‘There must be something wrong with that.’ (In Wittgenstein, I think it goes: ‘People say that we listen to music in order to arouse certain feelings. In that case, IF we could arouse the feelings without having the music, THEN we wouldn’t need the music. There has to be something wrong with that.’) What is wrong is hard to say: but I’m sure that Wittgenstein has caught something important by the tail.
That is a great Wittgenstein quote, Rob, thank you! I’ll be thinking about that for a while.
Susan, I’m sorry. I spent half an hour trying to track down the Wittgenstein quotation. I can’t find it. That’s not unusual for me. I’m rarely mistaken in what I remember of the substance of something said, but I don’t always know what path to follow to find it again. I’ll keep looking. The thought seems to me to be an illuminating one.
What a fascinating discussion! I get immense pleasure from listening to music while ironing…simultaneously one activity being stimulating while the other is meditative.
Rob
I think that listening to music is like eating. No one eats food consciously to stoke our metabolism but we are stimulated by things like taste. It is a sensory reaction just like listening to music. We are extremely complex mechanisms and the summit of what has been evolving since the times of sponges.
For me, the interesting question is how these experiences first manifested themselves. I seem to recall reading about a Paleolithic bone flute being discovered (in a book about a British Museum exhibition) , whilst I have no doubt that inventions like this were associated with ritual, you still have to have the notion to blow through a hollow tube and equally space the apertures to alter the tones. All this relies on a thought process but there must have been a point when this happened without any idea of a conclusion.
I think the other issue from the original post that needs to be developed. I totally agree that putting greater effort into something is more rewarding . However, the issue of taste was not mentioned. Why is it that something that is technically brilliant is not rewarding? Is there a biological reason as to why I don’t appreciate Brahms? About 20-odd years ago I bought my Mum a present to hear a recital by Margaret Fingerhut where she played a Bax piano sonata. Afterwards, we discussed the performance and we both agreed that this music seemed like an awful lot of effort to get to performance level yet , to our ears, the music did not seem worth it. Why would you learn a difficult work which was not particularly great when you could go to the same effort and learn something that truly resonates ? Bax was someone my piano teacher had met and was a composer I was intrigued by and was hoping would be something of a revelation. Both of us were disappointed by the music. We we perplexed my a brilliant pianist would be so attracted to a mediocre composer – although I subsequently learned that she is an authority on Bax so probably can find something in his music that appeals!
It is fascinating that we are all different and, deep down, there must be a chemical / electrical process within our minds which determines what or whether we find anything stimulating. I also think that culture may have a part of play albeit I do think it might be minimal. My wife loves ironing but has little interest in music other than Karoake.
Ian Thumwood: I can see that we would have things to talk about. I’ve a bad feeling when you say, ‘We are extremely complex mechanisms’. You may be a mechanism. I would rather say, ‘I am a living organism’. There is a reduction here: you seems to treat the metaphor of mechanism as if it is simply a fact that humans are machines. I think Charles Dickens disposed of this idea pretty finally in ‘Hard Times’. Then my bad feeling stirs again when you add that ‘deep down, there must be a chemical / electrical process within our minds which determines…’, as if the chemical level of analysis is in some sense ‘deeper’ (more real?) than the experiential level. It is exactly this point which Susan Stebbing disputed long ago in ‘Philosophy and the Physicists’. The word ‘deep’ I would always wish to handle with care. Though as for the word ‘real’, which I just used myself, by the time John Austin has laughed at it as ‘a trouser word’ (a word whose negative form ‘wears the trousers’) I’m not sure that there’s much left of it.
Rob
Good evening
Thanks for your reply.
For me, I think that the problem is with philosophy which always seems to me to be best defined as the thing the French did whilst we had an Industrial Revolution in the UK. I am not sure that it really has a real point and can remember this becoming quite a heated debate on a jazz website where an argument was presented that there was some philosophical process going on with improvisation even though it was something that was happening in the moment. When you are considering this from a philosophical it is difficult to lose sight of the historical context as to why something evolved or happened. This is the “true” question.
When you are dealing with living organisms, it is a question of chemical /electrical processes because everything is down to how information is passed between cells. There is genuine science to be considered along with the historical experience. In my opinion, I don’t find philosophy helpful as it is ignoring both the science and history. Darwin is quoted above and whilst I think science as enabled us to understand his theories more fully and to question elements too, it does seem to me that philosophy is something that perhaps needs to be confined to history rather like religion. You need to establish the reason “why” something happens as opposed to searching for an often intangible meaning. If you like, there must be a biological reason as to why we have a consciousness. I am not sure who Wittenstein, Austin or Stebbing are other than they sound even less of my “bag” than Brahms! Ages since I have read “Hard Times” and amused to see it prised into this argument. Not one of Charles’ best novels.
To revert back to the musical argument of the original post, I think that there are certain elements in music which make music more appealing even if the listener may be oblivious of the theory behind it. You probably need to differentiate between “difficult / challenging” music like Schoenberg (even if 12-tone rows were thrown into Scott Bradley’s musical arrangements for the excellent “Tom & Jerry” cartoons. More my kind of culture!! ) and the kind of musically “intelligent” ideas which make music appealing. I think that elements like rhythm, counter-melodies, key changes, bass lines , time signatures, arrangement / orchestration are all components which can be used to make music more interesting. I am not a fan of pop music yet I think it is apparent that these are the ingredients which stimulate our ears unconsciously to render a piece of music more appealing. I am guessing that people who like pop music may find these elements are what makes a tune appealing even if they may not actually understand what is happening in the music nor recognise it either.
Ian: Thank you for your thoughtful response to my comments. I’m sorry to be so annoying: when I’m very tired I get to be obsessional and very argumentative. (You can ignore everything that follows, if you like…)
My mother was a moral philosopher and her teacher was Susan Stebbing, who was chosen to be the new Professor of Philosophy in Cambridge by the Faculty, but rejected by the Senate on the grounds that that would mean having a woman on the Senate. Horrors!
I don’t think there would have been an Industrial Revolution without the philosophers who came up with a conceptual framework and ways of doing science and technology.
Francis Bacon rejected the approach of deduction from first principles and made the case for inductive reasoning: hypothesis > observation and experiment > general laws. And he called for the founding of a scientific and technological institution, which came into being in due course as the Royal Society of London, the hub in its day of British innovation in science and technology.
René Descartes treated the universe including human physiology and psychology as one vast machine ruled by mathematical laws. He came up with coordinate geometry. His work led to the first attempts to design programmable machines and his Cartesian coordinate system is essential in all modern engineering (as best I understand it).
Newton, Leibniz and Fermat all came up with versions of calculus. Einstein says that he could not have come up with the General and Special Theories of Relativity without Spinoza. Galileo Galilei brings together mathematics, physics and philosophy in the famous experiments which led to better clocks and later to the development of governors for steam-engines.
Isaac Newton introduced a universal mathematical framework: his three laws of motion and the idea of universal gravitation. The entire science of classical mechanics is Newtonian. His methods enabled engineers to calculate forces, masses and accelerations.
So it goes on. Adam Smith made the blueprint for the Industrial Revolution: for example, he invented the production line; he described the ‘invisible hand’ at work in economic life; he made a case for free markets and capital accumulation. Jeremy Bentham thought out ways to maximize efficiency in factories and laid the foundations for scientific management.
I think it’s fair to say that we could have no Industrial Revolution without the work of the philosophers.
And it seems false to say that ‘philosophy… is ignoring both the science and history’. There’s a long tradition in philosophy of science and of history: from Thales in the Presocratic period to Popper and Collingwood and their successors today.
When you say, ‘there must be a biological reason’, I’d rather say, ‘there is of course a biological account’: because I don’t want to privilege the biological account by saying that it is in some sense more ‘basic’ that the human experience. Certainly we have to have both. You can’t have a biological account without a human being to give the account, after all.
I love Brahms. And indeed ‘Hard Times’. To me it seems the best thing in Dickens but I’ve not read all his novels. ‘Had Times’ definitely belongs here, since the central thrust of the novel is a fierce opposition to any mechanistic idea of living beings.
Ian: I guess we may have large areas of agreement about music. I wish we could meet and talk. And I’m sure, as you say, that the many elements in music have their effect, even on people who don’t consciously know how the song works. Music affects us in such complex ways.
Too much already. Once again: my apologies!
Rob
Thanks for the response which raises some fascinating points.
I remember reading about consciousness in early humans and how studies of fossilised brain cases had allowed scientists to recreate the brains of some of the other species of humans that existed before us. A statement which really registered with me was about Homo Erectus. I think the owner of the shin bone found at Boxgrove in the 1990s was this species. The comment went long the lines that although they would have looked not dissimilar to a modern human, if you stared him in the eyes, there would be no empathy. (Or her, is it was a lady Homo Erectus! ) I would be no dissimilar to meeting an ape.
That statement made me think about human consciousness and the point at which they started to have empathy, explore tool making, learn about food and cooking as well as the origins of culture. Apparently Neanderthals were no to dissimilar to Homo Sapiens in this sense. Ultimately, we evolved to the extend that we could appreciate and compose music among other things
I am familiar with some of the names you quote but think that the Industrial Revolution probably owes little to philosophy. Not sure how many industrialists would have read “The Wealth of Nations” or been familiar with Descartes . My understanding was that it was the ease with which coal and iron ore could be extracted that was crucial in the British isles and this had been aided by the modern ideas of banking inherited from the Dutch in the 17th century.
Of course, the Industrial Revolution was not the first “spirt” in human endeavours . There was the famous Renaissance in the 15th century and a similar “push” in 12th century too. (There was a debate on another website in March which tried to discredit Hildegard of Bingen and credit her work to a whole community of nuns but which ignored that she was very much part of the new thinking in that century which also took on architecture, sculpture, writing and music by the likes of the troubadours.) I think that we are going through something similar now with IT and AI.
I think that the hard question is to understand how consciousness works biologically. I am not sure we will ever find an answer. There are clearly cultural / nurture influences which have a huge bearing. I would suggest that, prior to the Enlightenment, religion / beliefs had a huge influence. Luckily, written evidence from the past can assist and give us an idea of how people thought in the past. I would love to know when this first happened in animals and whether this is something we share with animals beyond hominids. I must admit to being fascinated by the evolution of humans and whether people thought in the same way even when they were ignorant of science.
I do feel that curiosity is very advanced in humans and that this spurs on innovation. However, I have seen other animals experience genuine curiosity too including the seals that I have seen in Cornwall. I do not feel it is uniform and think some people experience the need to find out why something works or what something is more that others. There are people who will get a lot of enjoyment out of listening to Adele and will not feel compelled to listen to Messiaen as the singer’s music is sufficient for them.
Ian
Thank you for all these very interesting thoughts. I’m going to leave it there, after reading everything you wrote and thinking about it. We got a long way from Susan’s thoughts about the value of ‘long-term effort, discipline and focus’. I guess the opposite of that kind of effort would be the kind of anodyne slavery so appallingly evoked in Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’?