Friction-Maxxing Gets Hobbies Half Right

In January, Kathryn Jezer-Morton published a column in The Cut arguing that the coming year would be defined by a deliberate return to inconvenience. She called it friction-maxxing.

The term stuck. It now has a Wikipedia entry, coverage in Forbes, The Week and the Washington Post, and record search interest. Along the way it became the standard explanation for the analog hobby boom: people are tired of frictionless, so they pick up a film camera on purpose.

That argument is mostly right. It also has a blind spot, and the blind spot is why so many people who agree with every word of it still never start.

Both kinds of difficulty feel the same from the outside. Only one of them is doing anything for you.

What is friction-maxxing?

Friction-maxxing is the practice of intentionally choosing less convenient options to build tolerance for discomfort and resist technology-driven ease. Paying cash instead of tapping. Navigating without maps. Taking up a hobby that resists you.

Jezer-Morton was careful to say it is not a screen-time detox. It is about tolerating the ordinary difficulty of being a person among other people, in spaces you cannot fully control.

Why is it only half right about hobbies?

Friction inside a hobby is the hobby. The scale that will not come clean for three weeks. Six rolls of film that come back flat. Falling off the same problem eleven times. Remove it and you have removed the point.

Friction in front of a hobby is overhead. Forty minutes on a forum deciding between a 50mm and a 35mm. Eight tabs comparing beginner keyboards. Standing outside the climbing gym on a Tuesday and going home. None of it makes you better at anything. It just burns the motivation you had on the day you decided to start.

Friction-maxxing culture does not separate the two. Because difficulty has been coded as virtuous, the second kind gets quietly laundered into the first. If you could not push through it, the implication goes, you must not have wanted it enough.

Where does hobby re-entry actually stall?

Leisure researchers mapped this three decades ago. Crawford, Jackson and Godbey proposed in 1991 that constraints are hierarchical rather than parallel. You clear them in order.

If the barrier were structural, better gear guides and cheaper starter kits would have solved it. There is no shortage of either. What is scarce is the thing that clears layer two: one person who is already doing it, in front of whom you are not embarrassed.

Nobody takes up friction-maxxing as a route to feeling stupid in a room full of nineteen year olds.

Almost none of the difficulty that stops adults from restarting is honourable difficulty. It is the specific social exposure of being visibly bad at something, at an age when you are used to being competent. That is a real cost, and calling it a lack of grit does not make it smaller.

Who should you actually learn from?

The person two years ahead of you is usually more useful than the person twenty years ahead. They are also considerably easier to book.

What does the evidence say helps?

Gollwitzer and Sheeran’s 2006 meta-analysis of 94 studies found that specifying when, where and how you will act produces a medium to large effect on goal attainment, far larger than intention alone.

Deciding to start piano does almost nothing. Deciding you will sit down at seven on Thursday and work on one specific thing does a great deal. Most people never make that conversion alone, because writing a good first plan requires already knowing what a reasonable first session looks like.

Isn’t this just making hobbies too easy?

It would be, if we removed the wrong friction. Strip out the effort inside the hobby and what you have built is a content platform, and content platforms are excellent at producing people who have watched a great deal about piano and cannot play piano.

So the line is narrow. Rekindle clears the overhead in front of the hobby, not the effort inside it. A Spark Session is one conversation with someone who started where you are and is now a few years in. What happens afterwards is supposed to be hard. The bad weeks are not a defect in the product.

If we ever catch ourselves promising a hobby will be easy, we have misunderstood our own thesis.

Common questions

Is friction-maxxing the same as a digital detox?

No. A detox removes technology for a set period. Friction-maxxing is about raising your tolerance for everyday inconvenience, which usually means keeping the technology and choosing not to lean on it.

Why is it so hard to start a hobby as an adult?

Mostly because of the social layer, not the practical one. Adults have spent fifteen or twenty years accumulating competence, and restarting means setting that down in front of other people. Time and money are the reasons we give. They are rarely the reason we stopped.

Do I need to buy equipment before I start?

Usually not, and the shopping is often the thing that kills the attempt. Deciding what to buy is one of the clearest cases of friction in front of the hobby rather than inside it.

What is a Spark Session?

A single paid conversation with a Rekindle Buddy, by phone or text, that gets you to a concrete first attempt with a plan. It is not a lesson and not a course.

If you have been meaning to get back to something, that is what a Spark Session is for. Our piece on the analog boom covers why so many people intend and so few begin, and the analog photography guide is a worked example of a first session.

And if you are two or three years into a hobby and still remember how disorienting the first month felt, that memory is the qualification. We are recruiting Buddies across photography, piano, painting, climbing, pickleball and tennis. You do not have to be an expert.