I was sitting in my kitchen the other morning, watching the steam rise off a cup of coffee that I’d spent way too long making. I don’t mean a quick press of a button or a plastic pod. I mean the whole ritual—grinding the beans by hand, waiting for the water to hit that specific temperature where it doesn’t scald, and pouring it over the grounds in slow, steady circles. It’s objectively inefficient. It takes ten minutes when it could take thirty seconds. My phone was buzzing in my pocket with emails that needed answering, and for a second, I felt that familiar, sharp pang of guilt. Why am I wasting time on a cup of coffee?
But then I took a sip. And I realized that those ten minutes weren’t wasted. They were probably the only ten minutes of my day where I wasn’t trying to “optimize” my existence. I wasn’t multitasking. I was just… making coffee. It’s a small thing, almost trivial, but it got me thinking about how much we’ve sacrificed at the altar of convenience. We’re so obsessed with getting to the finish line that we’ve forgotten how to enjoy the walk. We want the result, but we’ve come to loathe the process.
I think we’re all feeling a little burnt out by the “fast” version of life. We’ve automated our schedules, streamlined our workflows, and hacked our habits until there’s almost no friction left. But friction is where the heat comes from. It’s where the texture of life actually lives. I want to talk about that today—the quiet, slightly stubborn joy of doing things the hard way, and why I think it’s the only thing keeping me sane lately.
The strange itch to optimize everything
It’s everywhere, isn’t it? This pressure to be a more efficient version of yourself. You see it in those “day in the life” videos where people wake up at 4:30 AM to squeeze in a workout, a meditation session, and a three-course healthy breakfast before the sun is even up. It’s exhausting just to watch. We’ve been told that if we can just find the right shortcut, the right system, or the right “hack,” we’ll finally have enough time to be happy. But the more time we save, the more we seem to fill it with more tasks to optimize. It’s a loop that never really ends.
I remember a few years ago when I tried to turn my entire life into a series of spreadsheets. I had a spreadsheet for my reading list, one for my gym progress, even one for how many glasses of water I drank. I thought I was being productive. In reality, I was just turning my hobbies into chores. I wasn’t reading books because I enjoyed the stories; I was reading them because I wanted to see the “percentage complete” bar move on my screen. I’d lost the plot entirely.
We’ve become afraid of “dead time.” You know, those moments when you’re standing in line at the grocery store or waiting for a friend, and you immediately pull out your phone because the thought of just standing there with your own thoughts for two minutes feels unbearable. We’ve optimized away the boredom, but in doing so, we’ve also optimized away the daydreaming. Most of my best ideas don’t come when I’m staring at a screen trying to be brilliant. They come when I’m washing the dishes or walking the dog—tasks that are slow, repetitive, and decidedly un-optimized.
The value of a little friction
There’s something about physical effort that grounds us. I’ve noticed that when I write things down with an actual pen on actual paper, I remember them better. It’s slower, sure. My hand gets a little cramp if I go too long, and I can’t “search” my notebook with a keyboard shortcut. But that’s the point. The slowness forces me to think about the words before I commit them to the page. There’s a weight to it.
Think about the difference between a hand-knit sweater and one bought from a fast-fashion rack. The hand-knit one has mistakes. Maybe a stitch is a little loose here, or the color varies slightly there. But that’s what makes it feel real. It has a history. It has the “friction” of the person who made it. When we remove all the difficulty from our lives, we often remove the soul, too. We’re left with a world that is very smooth, very fast, and incredibly bland.
Why we need to get our hands dirty
I’m not saying we should all go back to churning our own butter or living in the woods (though some days that sounds pretty good). But I do think we need to find areas in our lives where we intentionally choose the harder path. For me, it’s gardening. There is nothing efficient about growing your own tomatoes. You have to weed, you have to water, you have to fight off the squirrels, and after three months of work, you might get a handful of fruit that you could have bought for three dollars at the store.
But those tomatoes taste like sunlight and hard work. And the process of growing them—the dirt under my fingernails, the frustration of a sudden frost—teaches me a kind of patience that I can’t get from an app. It reminds me that some things simply cannot be rushed. You can’t “hack” a tomato into growing faster. It has its own rhythm, and you either respect it or you fail. There’s a deep, quiet satisfaction in that.
- Physical connection: Using your hands reminds you that you’re a biological creature, not just a brain in a jar.
- Mental clarity: Slow tasks act as a natural filter for the noise in your head.
- Retention: We value things more when we’ve put effort into them. It’s basic human psychology.
Learning to love the “Messy Middle”
We’re a results-oriented society. We celebrate the graduation, the promotion, the finished house, the marathon finish line. We don’t talk much about the messy middle—the part where you’re tired, confused, and wondering why you started in the first place. But the middle is where the actual life happens. The “hard way” forces you to stay in that middle a little longer.
I’ve started trying to embrace the parts of my hobbies that I used to find annoying. I’ve taken up film photography recently, which is the ultimate “hard way” to take a picture. You only get 36 shots. You can’t see them immediately. You have to wait days or weeks to get them developed. Sometimes, they’re blurry. Sometimes, you messed up the light. And yet, I find myself more excited about those 36 photos than the 4,000 digital ones sitting in my phone’s cloud storage. Because I had to wait for them. The waiting added value.
Maybe it’s okay to be a beginner at something for a long time. Maybe it’s okay if your kitchen isn’t perfectly organized or if your projects take twice as long as they “should.” Who decided how long things should take, anyway? Usually, it’s someone trying to sell us a way to make it faster. But if we’re always rushing to the end, we’re essentially rushing through our lives. And I don’t know about you, but I’d like mine to last as long as possible.
The subtle art of being present
I think the real reason we’re so obsessed with speed is that it allows us to avoid being present. If we’re always moving, we don’t have to sit with the discomfort of our own thoughts. We don’t have to notice the things that aren’t working in our lives. The “hard way” stops us in our tracks. It demands our attention. You can’t plane a piece of wood or bake a loaf of sourdough while your mind is in three other places. Well, you can, but you’ll probably cut yourself or end up with a brick of inedible flour.
I’ve noticed that since I’ve started being more intentional about these “slow” activities, I’m a lot less anxious. My brain isn’t buzzing at that high, frantic frequency all the time. I’m learning to be okay with silence. I’m learning that a productive day isn’t necessarily one where I checked off twenty items on a list, but one where I felt connected to what I was doing. It’s a shift in perspective that is hard to maintain, especially when the rest of the world is screaming at you to hurry up.
It’s not about being perfect. Lord knows my life is still a mess of notifications and deadlines most of the time. But it’s about carving out those little islands of slow. It’s about choosing the stairs even when the elevator is right there, just to feel your heart beat a little faster. It’s about writing a letter by hand to a friend instead of sending a text. It’s about the friction.
Where do we go from here?
I don’t have a five-step plan for you. That would be too efficient, wouldn’t it? But I do have a suggestion. Sometime this week, try to find one thing you usually do quickly and see what happens if you do it slowly. Maybe it’s your morning commute. Maybe it’s cooking dinner. Maybe it’s just sitting on your porch without your phone for fifteen minutes.
Don’t try to “get something” out of it. Don’t try to turn it into a mindfulness exercise or a way to increase your focus. Just do the thing. Notice how it feels. Notice the frustration that arises when you want to speed up, and see if you can just let that feeling sit there without acting on it. It’s uncomfortable at first. We’re conditioned to move, to produce, to achieve. But on the other side of that discomfort is a version of yourself that is much calmer, much more observant, and a lot more human.
We only get so many mornings. We only get so many cups of coffee. I think I’d rather spend ten minutes making one that I actually taste than thirty seconds making one I just gulp down while staring at a screen. It’s a small rebellion, but in a world this fast, maybe it’s the most important one we have. I think I’m okay with being a little bit “inefficient” if it means I actually get to be here for my own life.