Let's Have A Difficult Year

Seeking peace through friction

Somewhere during the last month or so, my daughter started playing. Or, to be more exact, she started constantly knocking shit over. At six months old, she’s awhile away from the euphoric imaginary scenarios that we associate with childhood. For her, the most exciting thing in the world is grabbing a toy, shaking it around a little bit, and then throwing it onto the ground. You’d think that hurling her toy into what is, for a two foot tall baby, an unending abyss would invite some sort of sadness, but each time she turns her cheeky little face back towards me with a big, satisfied, smile.

This behavior is what German psychologist Karl Groos called “The Pleasure At Being The Cause.” The thrill young children experience from play, even something so simple as throwing a toy on the floor, is rooted in a human desire to have an effect on the world around us. That effect is proof that we’re alive, that our existence is not purely the hallucination of our synapses. It’s a reminder that we’re capable of acting on the world outside our body. Why else do we love painting on cave walls or pissing in the snow? It says we were here, if only for a moment.

I became familiar with Groos and his theory while reading David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, in which Graeber asserts that this desire to have an observable effect on the world around us is at the root of why so many people are dissatisfied with their office jobs (the titular bullshit jobs, or what the internet has since come to call “fake email jobs”). The synthesis of Groos and Graeber’s ideas, that human happiness is tied to our ability to have an effect on the world around us, directly confronted a concern I’d had for awhile: that life now didn’t feel as real or vivid as it had just a few years ago.

I’ve felt for a long time that our lives were beginning to take place not in the real, physical world we embody but in a parallel space that exists partially digitally, and partially in the perception of each individual. This other world is not a literal place so much as a sort of bubble that convenience places around us, protecting us from the exertions of other people upon our reality while also giving us the illusion of control over our own. Disruption of this world is often met with confusion, frustration, and even anger as those within it are forced to occasionally reckon with the fact that it’s a delusion they’ve placed themselves in. I call it the Smooth World.

The Smooth World, as it is currently and continually designed, is meant to avoid friction at all cost. In it, food can be delivered to your doorstep by unseen butlers, cars turn every excursion out of the house into an isolating door-to-door commute, and in whatever small ways you’re forced to interact with others, you now all have the option of doing so while simultaneously anesthetizing yourself with an unending stream of short form video content.

But hey, those things are chores! Surely optimizing them out of our lives has left more room for leisure! But the optimization hasn’t stopped at chores. Where once games, entertainment, and hobbies were a way of blowing off steam, now many opt instead to remain submerged in that unending stream of content. Our attention is no longer ours to give, having become a new frontier for those who wish to sell targeted advertising. So often, we look up from our phones during our two hours of free time each day only to realize that one of them is gone, that we’d made a second screen out of our lives.

And now here comes AI, ready to rescue you from the horrific fate of working hard on something for a prolonged period of time. Looking to learn to paint? Screw that, here’s a landscape in the style of your favorite comic book artist. Why write when a chatbot can stitch together a novel from your half baked ideas? Even sex can be optimized! Now instead of having to hunt down a human partner and accept their flaws, you can pleasure yourself to fantasies so bespoke that they could never possibly exist outside the Smooth World.

So what’s left after all this optimization? When your work, leisure, and artistic life has all been simplified away, how can you hope to experience that pleasure at being the cause? How can you effect the world around you?

Well that’s easy. Buy stuff, dipshit. The only effect you have on the world is in helping propel the bloated, fleshy mass of the economy ever closer to the horizon. Buy a shirt that makes you think about TV. Buy a figurine that reminds you of a movie. Get a logo as a tattoo. This is the great language we’ve created together, the apex of mankind’s potential. It is spoken in purchases and plastic.

The Smooth World isn’t real. It’s not a place we can effect and it brings us no happiness. This is why so many of us yearn to leave it. Each year, more of our New Year’s resolutions revolve around escaping from the Smooth World in some way, but the warm glow of convenience is hard to ignore. March rolls around and suddenly we’re neck deep in ease once again.

We’ve found a way to live that feels like dying, that distracts us into oblivion so that we don’t think about what we’ve done with the greatest abundance in resources that our species has ever known. But we don’t have to live this way.

I think the exertion of effort on things that matter to us is what makes life worth living so I’m attempting to put my money where my mouth is. In 2026, this newsletter will be devoted to the deconstruction of the Smooth World. I will be deliberately making my life harder in a new way each month because I think it’s the only way to stop feeling trapped by the prison of convenience.

Here’s what that looks like:

Alongside a general commitment to spending more money on independent art and entertainment while cultivating skills that bring me joy, I’ll start on familiar ground.

In January, I’ll be focusing on bricking my phone and heavily restricting social media. This means completely removing all non-essential apps from my phone and heavily restricting my access to social media and content in general. I’ve already done this (and written about it) to an extent but I think it’s worth taking a more exhaustive approach than I have.

In February, I’ll be adding a return to physical reading and the removal of all non-written/researched content from my life. This means no podcasts where people are just hanging out/riffing/radicalizing me. If something is supposed to be worth hours of my time, the person making it can go ahead and write it down/research it.

In March, as daylight (and hopefully warmth) return to Chicago, I’ll be focusing on getting outside to get my stupid little walks, primarily by eliminating non-essential car travel. I’ve been itching to do this one for awhile as living in Los Angeles made me more car dependent than I’ve ever been before but I’m also not dumb enough to do this one at the height of my first Chicago winter in eight years.

In April, I’ll be saying goodbye to delivery and eliminating all delivery food/packages that I could otherwise acquire by leaving my house and making use of the major American city I live in. This isn’t a major one for me personally but having worked in the Car Jobs world in my 20s, I’m excited to write about it.

This May, I’ll be traveling with a baby which is hard enough! No new thing!!

In June, I want to start talking to strangers. I’ll be attempting to have some small but substantial exchange with a person I don’t know well each day. As a bonafide midwestern yapper, I do a fair bit of this already but I think rebuilding the social expectation of small talk is important. More importantly, I’d like this to take the form of having a more active role in community organizing or volunteering.

After these first six months, my plan is to continue removing or adding things on a case by case basis, trying to identify and excise habits of the Smooth World wherever I can find them while using the latter half of the year to live life in this more thoughtful way and observe what comes of the change.

In debating whether or not I wanted to make a bet this big, it dawned on me that I make the opposite bet every day when I accept these conveniences in exchange for a little bit of joy. It doesn’t feel like a choice when life gets easier, but it is.

My hope is that in doing this, I can improve my connection with myself and with those around me at the cost of the excessive convenience I’ve become accustomed to. Maybe I’m wrong, and I’ll give up three months from now only to sheepishly write an apology about how living without content is actually sooooo hard. But if there’s even a small chance that I’m right, and that the world can feel like a more connected and fulfilling place, I think it’s worth throwing my toys off the table and seeing how it feels.