Human beings are inconvenient. Get used to it

Real relationships are messy, awkward and inefficient but avoiding that friction is leaving us increasingly isolated

My observation of many under 35 is troubling: fewer close friends, fewer intimate relationships, less connection to workplaces, churches and community organizations, but lots and lots of digital connection.

Social media is part of the problem. But something bigger has happened. We have spent the past two decades designing friction out of everyday life. Trouble is, some of that friction forced us to deal with other people.

Upon waking, a firehose of digital noise awaits on our nightstand. We swipe a finger across the glass to silence the alarm, then check messages without speaking to another person. Breakfast is cobbled together from groceries ordered online. By nine, we’re in our home office, speaking into a camera and nodding at postage-stamp-sized faces performing a digital pantomime of engagement.

At noon, we don’t walk to a local diner; lunch arrives at the door. In the evening, we don’t meet friends at a pub or go to the movies; we stream something from the couch.

None of these conveniences is inherently bad. That’s precisely why they’ve become so successful. Taken together, however, they’ve created something unprecedented: you can now survive for days, even weeks, while barely confronting the unedited reality of another human being.

We’ve become remarkably good at eliminating inconvenience. Unfortunately, some of what we’ve eliminated wasn’t inconvenience at all.

It was human contact.

The frictionless life is marketed as the ultimate luxury. Why stand in line when you can order online? Why commute when you can work from home? Why talk to a cashier when there’s self-checkout? Why go to a restaurant when dinner can appear at your door?

Faster is better. Easier is better. On demand is better. Contactless is better. Except when it isn’t.

Think about the interactions we’ve quietly eliminated: the nod to the letter carrier, the wry exchange with the barista, the shared complaint with a stranger in a slow-moving line, the conversation with a colleague while making coffee, the server at the diner who eventually knows how you take yours. None of these people is necessarily going to become your best friend, but that’s not the point.

These small, low-stakes interactions remind us that we belong to a world populated by people other than ourselves. They force us, however briefly, to acknowledge another person, read a face, respond to a joke, tolerate an annoyance or simply say hello. Individually, these encounters seem insignificant. Collectively, they form much of the fabric of daily life.

And they’re disappearing.

We tend to underestimate these casual encounters because much of our connection to other people has always been informal and accidental. You went somewhere. Other people were there. Eventually, you talked to them.

Friction created encounters. Now we’re systematically removing that friction.

We’ve filled some of the gap with texts, DMs and group chats. But communication isn’t necessarily connection. The problem isn’t simply that we’re spending too much time looking at screens. It’s that screens, apps and on-demand services increasingly allow us to bypass the places and circumstances where human relationships once developed naturally.

Consider work. Whatever the advantages of working from home, something disappears when the workplace disappears. A commute may not be missed, but let’s not pretend an office consisted solely of desks, meetings and fluorescent lighting.

There was the shared eye roll across a table, the impromptu coffee run, the conversation before the meeting started and the post-meeting debrief about everything except spreadsheets. Those encounters weren’t scheduled, and that was their value.

Nor is work the only place where these encounters have disappeared. We’ve turned our homes into offices, gyms, restaurants, stores, banks and cinemas. We’ve gained extraordinary convenience, but we’ve also lost reasons to leave.

That matters because social skills aren’t something you’re simply born with. They’re developed through practice: starting conversations, navigating awkward pauses, reading expressions, disagreeing politely, asking for help, offering help and risking rejection.

Those skills require friction. You can’t edit a face-to-face conversation before pressing “send.” You can’t mute the person standing across from you. You can’t scroll past an awkward silence. You have to deal with it, and that’s how we learn to deal with people.

Avoid enough of these encounters and ordinary social discomfort starts feeling threatening. So we retreat to the places where we have maximum control: behind our screens and inside our homes. The frictionless life becomes a self-reinforcing loop.

Then we wonder why we’re lonely.

But if we want connection, we have to participate in creating it. Community doesn’t descend like morning mist simply because thousands of people share a postal code, a mayor or a hockey team. You can live in a high-rise surrounded by hundreds of people and remain virtually invisible if your daily life never requires you to interact with them.

Meeting people who share your interests, forming meaningful friendships and finding a romantic partner require sweat equity. You have to repeatedly place yourself where other people are and allow the unpredictable to happen.

Choose the cashier occasionally instead of self-checkout. Walk to a neighbourhood restaurant rather than having dinner delivered. Join a bowling league. Volunteer at a community garden. Have breakfast at the same diner often enough that someone recognizes you. Start small talk. Invite someone for coffee.

None of this is efficient. That’s the point.

We’ve spent years treating friction as something technology should eliminate. But we’ve failed to distinguish between pointless friction and human friction.

Human relationships are inherently inefficient. Friendships take time. Conversations wander. People misunderstand each other. Plans change. Strangers can be awkward. Colleagues can be annoying. Restaurants make you wait. Community organizations hold meetings that run too long.

Human beings are inconvenient but remove enough inconvenience from life and eventually you start removing the human beings as well.

That doesn’t mean abandoning technology or giving up the conveniences that make life easier. It means recognizing what we’ve traded for that convenience and making the effort to put some human friction back into our lives.

The frictionless life may be remarkably comfortable, but it may also be making us remarkably lonely.

Nick Kossovan decodes the psychological impact of AI and social media, helping us make sense of our evolving digital landscape.