it's not easy
but it does make all the important things easier
Everything I’m about to say, is NOT a list of suggestions for anyone else.
I’m just sharing my current process for consciously adding in more friction and enacting small rebellions.
Like you, I am doing the best I can with what I know now.
Maybe also like you, I am really seeing all we’ve traded away for “convenience”.
I’m only sharing because I think my example might inspire you to add-in some friction and/or play with small rebellions of your own variety.
A little while ago I watched the documentary Buy Now and was especially interested in the description from Maren Costa (former Amazon UI designer for 15 years) about how they tested and redesigned their “buy now” button over and over again in order to make the Amazon buying process more and more friction-less over time.
This made me realize that I needed to re-configure my personal relationship to friction. After contemplating my relationship with convenience, I realized that actually I deeply was ready to ADD more friction to my life.
Fortuitously, I came to this conclusion just as artist and writer Anna Fusco (Lord Cowboy) opened up her 5 week Tune In, Drop Out Instagram detox accountability container. I don’t think I could have stayed off Instagram without the group that gathered in the space Anna created. I also found it VERY INTERESTING that I thought I would use the “extra time” being off-Insta created for me to do my usual CREATIVE THINGS. But, after being inspired by others in this container, I actually started using the “extra time” (and there is a lot of it) to also do all the not-fun things on my list: tax prep, finding a new doctor, cleaning the house etc.; basically everything that I used to avoid doing by scrolling. I believe Anna is going to continue this group in some way if you want to join. Her excellent Substack is here and I think this is where she will announce the next iteration of Tune In, Drop Out.
I am off of Meta and Amazon for moral reasons. I won’t lie, seeing those specific billionaires all lined up in the front row of the Republican inauguration was galvanizing for me.
Again, this is my little process, I’m not telling any of us we “should” do this or that. Almost all of my family and friends still are on Insta and use Amazon, and I don’t blame anyone for doing so. We all have our good reasons and I love everyone just the same. In fact, on the day I deleted Instagram from my phone I half-jokingly offered a prayer to Meta and reminded them that they “still have my husband and child”, so they’ll always have some access to me.
All of this to say that I’ve been in a good space to create some friction. Here’s what I’ve done so far:
I have been off of Instagram for about four weeks and also have bought nothing from Amazon over that same time period. I intend to keep both of these practices going as long as I am able.
I have been dragging my “old lady cart” to the grocery store instead of driving my car.
I’ve been walking more and driving less and tracking how many miles per month I drive. (271 miles in January – for someone who lives in L.A. this is I think an extraordinarily low number.)
I have been using cash more.
I have been seeing my sisters, life-long friends and neighbors much often in person. These visits have been deeper and more connective than normal.
I have been calling people (say on their birthday) instead of texting.
I have been making an effort to get news from places like this.
I’ve also been crying more, because being off Instagram leaves me to more time to feel my feelings and at the moment, the Republican Administration is making me sad and scared and angry.
I also have felt cut-off from the mirage of “easy” socialization that is available through “social media” and am currently brainstorming other ways to be social. This is a majorly friction-y endeavor due to the network effect, but I’m going to persevere.
Everything that I avoided by scrolling is coming up for processing. I’m feeling lots of feelings. I’m thinking lots of thoughts.
Most days I’ve felt quite lonely; like everyone disappears into phone world and I’m just here with the birds and the trees.
I am staying on the look-out for an “Insta-relapse”.
I have a stack of books ready for when I feel lost.
I am working magically with the lunar cycle again.
I’ve also gone back to meditating with an old-fashioned timer instead of using my phone because, for me, that device diminishes (or outright erases) the benefits of my practice as soon as I pick it up.
I made a little cardboard “bed” for my phone where it rests most of the day. Wonderfully, my nice friend Allison made some cute bedding for the phone and I’ve come to love “tucking it in” for hours at a time. (Pro tip: to make your smart phone more like a landline, turn off as many notifications as you can AND then leave your ringer on a low volume. When anyone calls, the phone rings, but I choose to walk over and answer it. Just like an old-fashioned telephone. I have the sound notifications for texts and emails turned off because I am already good at checking them regularly; I don’t need to be notified. I also deleted many apps from my phone. Making my “smart phone” dumber has had really nice effects for my nervous system. I highly recommend creating this kind of friction.)
little bed for my phone, with pillows and blanket made by my friend <3
Now, I’ve got FRICTION for DAYS…
And, let me tell you, so far the friction grass is a lot greener than the frictionless grass.
I know it seems incredible in a world where companies have been telling us for decades that they are “solving problems” for us through innovation, when really, they just want to make more profit and they really don’t care about the natural world at all.
Corporations want you to have “problems”, eternally. That way, we’ll interface with their interfaces and buy things we don’t need or maybe even want; whose production and shipping and disposal costs are literally ruining our own chance to keep living as a species on this planet.
Corporations want you to not even spend one moment in friction on your way to purchase something, because you might wake up from the fugue state of frictionless consumerism.
I’m not sharing any of this as a call to action for you. I’m still in the early stages of my own process and like when we leave all addictive things – it’s still a tight rope walk every day.
In the past, when I’ve left Instagram, I’ve made less money. That’s probably happening to me right now, but this time around I am determined to figure out other ways to make my way.
I am pretty sure your current call to action (from your soul) will look different than mine. But, I know the over-culture will try to convince you that to make your changes, you’ll invite too much friction into your life.
I’m sharing my process/practice to inspire you to find some place where you are willing and able to create a little friction.
Remember, friction is what makes sex feel good.
Until next time,
Jess
p.s. Speaking of friction - meditating with a book and a timer instead of with the phone does add some friction, but in my experience its an easy, generative, positive, life-enhancing kind of friction. Through midnight next Tuesday get 25% off all books in my shop with code FEB2025.
“Hello. I feel like I’m shouting up from the bottom of the well. But there’s a circlet of blue sky way above me. There is sunshine on snow. There are people who have given me so much love. I hope I can grow it bigger and return it someday along with my own heart.”
- Sophie Strand, Make Me Good Soil
“more scrolling, more apps, more ten second videos masquerading as ‘information’. shrink into yourself. yes, like that. google that word because you can’t even remember the last time you saw a physical dictionary, and watch as we condition you to accept the first AI aided summary as a definition. watch the machines we are draining the world’s resources for get smarter as you get dumber.
watch as you start to become afraid of that which you do not understand. regress, regress, regress until you are making the same mistakes your parent’s generation did. people used to be lead by their moral compass; now, it is our algorithms that lead us.
we’ve been reduced to jaded lines, all softness eroded. the tools we we would use to fight this persistent culling of personhood have been stripped from us. back home, the tribe’s poet had more power and respect than even the clan chief. mayors and political advisors like my grandfather shared their titles with men and women twice their age who had never had any ‘formal’ schooling but who still knew more than the council did. they were responsible for swaying the heart, for bearing testimony to their people all because they were keepers of history and poetry.
can you remember the last time you committed something to memory? in school we would inhale textbooks and pass it off as ‘learning’, in truth only copy and pasting passages on myosis and the Weimar republic so that we could pass our exams- but even empty, shallow remembrance has died. even the intimate act of remembering someone’s phone number has become a lost art.
convenience. how much it has stolen from us. we don’t just want more than we ever have, not only do we consume mindlessly like never before but now we want everything to be easy. we want that package to be here tomorrow, never mind that that sweater is being shipped from the other side of the world.”
- Ayan Artan, Rent Free
“When I say “on my phone” I of course mean the feed. The feed is perfect for idling because it provides constantly renewing entertainment so I don’t have time to think about what else I might be doing (calling my doctor, making a grocery list, texting everyone back) and also because the experience isn’t at all diminished if I look up from it every 10 seconds. In fact, it’s designed for that.
I use the word idling to suggest the stubborn heft of a car pulled over—not driving, not switched off, just sitting there, humming in place, going nowhere while imperceptibly poisoning the air.
…
The irony of the phone as the siren song for the restless is that it feeds and starves us both. Scrolling shortens our attention spans, which lowers our tolerance for stillness, which inspires us to scroll more. It also makes us feel guilty, which makes us more avoidant, and more likely to seek out rotting when we need a breather. It’s no surprise that when I reflect on my most satisfying experiences of rest, they all concern recovering from intense physical or social activity: eating lunch after a long hike, getting home after a busy day, “recharging” in a hotel between activities on a trip (heaven). Distinct from the overstimulation of digital brain drain, rest in these cases feels earned. I don’t avoid it because, finally, I feel worthy of it. In reality, I’m worthy of it far more often than my conscience suggests. But also, I probably need to get out more.”
- Haley Nahman, Maybe Baby
“You could find that courses of action appear to you out of nowhere just the way the next moment does. Your navigation could unfold by itself, and the universe might provide the beauty and happiness you seek. When you forget your carefully assembled fiction of who you are, you can find a natural delight in people, in the planet, the stones, and the trees. There is no observable limit to this beauty, and no one is excluded from it.”
- John Tarrant
"We are earthbound creatures. No matter how tempting the sky. No matter how beautiful the stars. No matter how deep the dream of flight. We are creatures of the earth. Born with legs, not wings, legs that root us to the earth, and hands that allow us to build our homes, hands that bind us to our loved ones within those homes. The glamour, the adrenaline rush, the true adventure, is here, within these homes. The wars, the detente, the coups, the peace treaties, the celebrations, the mournings, the hunger, the sating, all here."
- Thrity Umrigar
“For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the answer for everything. No one chip stays in the same place throughout your entire life. The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you're lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you're alive."
- Ann Patchett
"If I had the influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, sterile preoccupations with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength."
—Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder
"I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over."
- Henry Miller
Note for new folks and also those who’ve been around for a while; I currently have two different membership offerings:
1.The first is the Streamers membership via my site - youaremagicla.com. This membership gives full streaming access to the 135+ meditations in our library. This membership was started in 2017. This is (and always has been) a recurring membership until the customer cancels it. The instructions to cancel your Streaming membership are on the Streamer’s log-in page.
2. In 2023, I joined Substack. On Tuesdays you get the free Substack (that you are reading now) and the paid Friday Substacks cost $5/month or $50/year. With the paid option, every Friday you get two pieces of audio - one inspirational talk and one meditation practice - as well as access to the full archive of over 200 Substack posts. To join the Friday space click the button below…
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“It is your duty in life to save your dream.”
- Amedeo Modigliani
I’ve been off Instagram since November! I think the hardest adjustment was being in social settings where everyone was scrolling and I was just… there existing. I must say my anxiety and comparison depression has completely gone away!
The phone bed is beautiful genius. And more practical than shooting my/the phone into the sun, which is what I really want to do with it. Vive le frisson!