I was sitting at my kitchen table this morning, just staring at a stack of mail and a half-empty cup of coffee, and I realized I hadn’t actually breathed—like, a real, deep, intentional breath—in about three days. I’d been moving, sure. I’d been “productive.” I’d cleared my inbox, I’d checked the boxes, and I’d optimized my morning routine down to the second. But I felt like a ghost in my own life. It’s a weird feeling, isn’t it? That sensation of being incredibly busy while simultaneously feeling like you aren’t actually doing anything at all.
We’re living in an era of peak convenience. Everything is designed to be frictionless. If I want food, a person I’ve never met will bring it to my door in thirty minutes. If I want a book, it appears on my nightstand by tomorrow morning. If I want to know something, I don’t even have to finish the thought before the answer is staring back at me from a screen. It’s amazing. It really is. But lately, I’ve started to wonder if all this friction we’ve removed from our lives was actually the stuff that made life feel real.
I’m not a luddite. I like my hot water and my high-speed internet. But I’ve started to suspect that when we outsource the “doing” of life—the cooking, the fixing, the waiting, the figuring out—we’re accidentally outsourcing the meaning, too. So, I’ve been trying something different. I’ve been trying to do things the long way. And honestly? It’s been kind of a disaster, but a really beautiful one.
The Frictionless Life and the Loss of the Tinkerer
There was a time, not that long ago, when if something broke, you had to fix it. My grandfather had this old workbench in his garage that smelled like sawdust and WD-40. He wasn’t a carpenter; he was an accountant. But when a chair leg got wobbly or the toaster stopped popping, he didn’t just hop online and order a replacement. He took it apart. He looked at the guts of the thing. He got frustrated. He probably swore a little bit. But eventually, he’d figure it out.
We’ve lost that. Now, things are built to be un-fixable. They’re glued together or held with proprietary screws that no human hand was ever meant to turn. And because it’s so cheap to buy a new one, we’ve lost the incentive to understand how our world works. We’ve become consumers of black boxes. We press a button, and magic happens. When the magic stops, we throw the box away and buy a new one.
I decided a few months ago that I wanted to be a person who fixes things again. I started with a leaky faucet in the bathroom. I could have called a plumber. I probably should have called a plumber. Instead, I spent four hours on my back under the sink, getting hit in the eye with lukewarm water and realizing I didn’t have the right sized wrench. I had to go to the hardware store twice. I was annoyed. My back hurt. But when I finally tightened that last nut and the dripping stopped? That feeling of competence was better than any “one-click” purchase I’ve ever made. It wasn’t just about the faucet. It was about knowing that I could interact with the physical world and actually change it.
The Subtle Magic of a Messy Garden
Then there’s the garden. I am not a natural gardener. I have a history of unintentional plant homicide that would make a cactus nervous. But last spring, I decided to plant some tomatoes and a few herbs. Nothing crazy. Just a couple of wooden boxes in the backyard.
In a world of instant gratification, a garden is a slap in the face. You can’t speed it up. You can’t “hack” a tomato into ripening faster. You have to show up, every day, and do the boring stuff. You pull the weeds. You check the soil. You wait. And wait. And then you wait some more. It’s incredibly inefficient. If you calculated the hourly wage of the time I spent growing those tomatoes versus just buying a pint of cherry tomatoes at the store, I’m probably paying about forty dollars per tomato.
But that’s not the point, is it? The point is the connection to the seasons. The point is the dirt under your fingernails. There’s something grounding about touching the earth. It reminds you that you’re a biological creature, not just a data point in someone’s spreadsheet. When I eat one of those tomatoes, it tastes like the sun and the rain and my own patience. You can’t buy that in a plastic clamshell at the supermarket.
Why Slow Hobbies Aren’t a Waste of Time
- They force you to disconnect from the digital noise.
- They build “frustration tolerance”—a skill we’re all losing.
- They provide a tangible result you can see and touch.
- They remind you that “quality” and “speed” are rarely on the same team.
Reclaiming the Kitchen from the Efficiency Experts
I think the place where we’ve lost the most “life” to convenience is in the kitchen. We’ve been told that cooking is a chore to be minimized. We have meal kits, pre-chopped onions, and frozen dinners that promise “homemade” taste in five minutes. And look, on a Tuesday night when you’ve had ten meetings and the kids are screaming, those things are a godsend. I get it.
But when we treat every meal like a problem to be solved as quickly as possible, we miss out on the ritual. Cooking is one of the few things left that engages all five senses. The sound of garlic hitting hot oil, the smell of fresh basil, the texture of bread dough under your palms—it’s a sensory feast before you even take a bite. It’s a form of meditation, if you let it be.
Lately, I’ve been making bread. Not with a bread machine—just a bowl, some flour, water, salt, and my hands. It takes all day. Not all day of work, but all day of being there. You mix it. You let it sit. You fold it. You wait. You can’t rush the yeast. It has its own schedule. It’s taught me a lot about the difference between being busy and being present. While the bread is rising, I’m not scrolling through my phone as much. I’m just… around. I’m noticing the way the light moves across the floor. I’m listening to the birds. I’m existing in the gaps between the doing.
The Art of Doing Nothing (On Purpose)
This leads me to the hardest part of this whole “slow living” experiment: learning to be bored again. We are terrified of boredom. The second we have a spare moment—waiting in line at the grocery store, sitting at a red light, walking to the mailbox—we pull out our phones. We fill every crack in our day with “content.”
I think we’re killing our creativity by doing this. The brain needs white space. It needs those moments of idle wandering to process things, to make connections, to just rest. When we eliminate boredom, we eliminate the very environment where our best ideas are born. I’ve started leaving my phone on the kitchen counter when I go for a walk. The first ten minutes are usually itchy. I feel like I’m forgetting something. I want to check my email. I want to listen to a podcast. I want to be “productive.”
But then, something happens. My brain stops looking for external stimulation and starts looking inward. I notice the architecture of a neighbor’s house. I remember a joke someone told me three years ago. I start thinking about what I want my life to look like in five years. It’s not “efficient,” but it’s deeply necessary. We aren’t machines. We aren’t meant to be “on” twenty-four hours a day. We need the static. We need the silence.
Practical Ways to Introduce a Little Friction
If this sounds like a lot, don’t worry. I’m not suggesting you sell your car and start churning your own butter (unless you really want to, in which case, let me know how the butter goes). It’s about small, intentional choices. It’s about finding a few places in your life where you decide that the “long way” is actually the better way.
- Buy a physical book. There’s something about the weight of it, the smell of the paper, and the inability to “click” away to another app that makes the reading experience deeper.
- Walk without a destination. No fitness tracker, no podcast, no goal. Just walk until you feel like turning around.
- Hand-write a letter. It takes more effort than a text, and that’s exactly why it means more to the person who receives it.
- Make one thing from scratch. Even if it’s just a jar of pickles or a basic pasta sauce. Just see what it feels like to create something instead of just assembling it.
It’s not about being perfect. It’s not about some aesthetic “slow living” lifestyle you see on social media with beige linens and perfectly staged baskets of lavender. It’s about reclaiming your time and your attention from a world that wants to monetize every second of it. It’s about proving to yourself that you are more than a consumer. You are a creator, a fixer, a waiter, and a thinker.
Some Final, Quiet Thoughts
I looked at my tomatoes this afternoon. One of them is finally starting to turn that pale, orangey-pink color. It took forever. It survived a heatwave and a very determined squirrel. And looking at it, I felt a sense of pride that I haven’t felt from a “productive” day at work in a long time. It’s a small thing. A tiny, insignificant piece of fruit.
But maybe life is just a collection of small things. Maybe when we optimize for speed, we’re just rushing toward the end. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to get things done so I could finally “relax,” only to find that the relaxation felt empty because I hadn’t actually done anything that mattered to me. The work is the point. The process is the point. The friction is where the heat comes from.
So, tomorrow, maybe take the long way home. Don’t use the self-checkout. Talk to the person behind the counter. Spend five minutes longer than you need to making your coffee. Let the world be a little bit slow, just for a moment. You might be surprised at what you find in the gaps.
I think I’m going to go check on my bread now. It’s probably ready to be folded. It’s not going to win any awards, and it certainly won’t be as perfect as a loaf from the bakery down the street. But it’s mine. I made it. And in a world of instant everything, that feels like a pretty big win.