Choose Rough

Paraphrasing a lesson from Oliver Burkeman

‘Smoothness’ (aka ease) of life is not a great target. The ‘roughness’ of life comes from places where we humans rub against each other. When we remove all the friction from life, we rob it of meaning because we remove the opportunity to interact with other people. Convenience leads to emptiness.

The smoother life gets, the more we feel like weirdos amongst each other. We never take the time to get to know each other, because technology takes away the need for us to interact. To make time for what matters, we need to give up things that make life easier. And that can feel radical and even misguided in a world that seems to value convenience and speed and efficiency.

I’m not recommending to throw away all your appliances or cutting up your credit cards to pay in person with cash. But maybe there are a few opportunities in your life. Going to a restaurant versus ordering food online. Working face-to-face versus all-day zoom meetings.

Author: johnny88keys

Optimistic idea enabler mindfully seeking rapture

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: