The Prompt
A prevailing message in our commoditized social sphere is to avoid hard things because they will break you. And yet today we are left more fragile than ever.
If only trees could talk. They would tell us as they show us that flourishing requires friction. Bending with the headwinds forces trees to develop stress-wood in their core, making them resilient to breakage. Paradoxically trees that are grown in calm, artificial and controlled dome environments frequently collapse under their own weight.
As humans, we too are designed to become resilient in the face of life's challenging headwinds. For mysterious reasons, our flourishing requires a character call to deal with friction.
In his article "Friction-maxxing is a labour of love" Samuel Tranter positions the 2026 buzzword friction-maxxing - the intentional embrace of inconvenience in a world of technological ease - into the interpersonal sphere:
'It would be callous to disregard the many hurtful experiences of interpersonal interaction that could lead someone to prefer the company of a chatbot... When the people who actually love us respond to our prompts and attend to our needs, they do not simply give us what we think we want, on demand and without delay. They do not blandly affirm our intentions and our plans... The people who actually love us are unpredictable and inconvenient.'
It is true that attending to relationships demands a huge amount from us. It was like this before the digital age of LLMs and is more challenging now as strategies of avoidance and dismissal take hold. But what if we step up, 'finding ourselves called to love's demanding work - discovering that we are ourselves the cause of much of the friction'?
As artists, how can we bend into today’s prevailing headwinds ~ for flourishing ~ where friction-maxxing is a labour of love?