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Lately, I've been thinking about how easy everything's become. You can order dinner, hail a cab, or even meet a stranger with two taps of your thumb. Many of the unicorn companies of the last decade were praised as disruptive simply by using technology to create "frictionless" experiences for consumers and enterprises alike. Think Uber, Doordash, Figma, etc. Reducing friction became a calling card of the startup industrial complex. We live in a world optimized for convenience - where waiting, wondering or working for something feels outdated. Frictionless experiences are easy, quick, and usually cheap. But the irony is that the more frictionless our lives get, the less texture they seem to have.

Friction used to be built into everything. It was in the time it took for a photograph to develop, the weeks you'd wait for a letter to arrive, the pause before you knew if someone felt the same way you did. Friction forced patience. It made us deliberate. It made things matter. Now, everything's instant. Messages are delivered, read and ignored in seconds. Plans live in group chats that evaporate by the morning. And love, once an act of pursuit, has become a feed of profiles, optimized by proximity and preference.

In the not so distant past, I used to send spontaneous invitations by email to loved ones. It was a funny little thing I liked to do. Actual date proposals with attached calendar invites, written like event RSVPs. There was something absurd and charming about it, a little performance of intention. It said: I thought about this, and about you. It was my way of slowing time down, of putting some friction back into something that had become intention-less.

In the past, there was the sense that people worked for connection. You wrote your own HTML code to create a MySpace layout, burned your own playlist, and wrote love letters to friends, family and significant others. There was intimacy in effort. Today, we've optimized all that away in favor of algorithms and scrolling. The internet is now something that happens to us, not something we build with each other.

In crypto, “proof of work” is a mechanism for verifying value. It’s the idea that effort itself - computational labor, energy, and time - is what gives a transaction weight. The metaphor fits. Love was our original proof of work. You showed you cared by doing something inconvenient: showing up, writing, waiting, trying again. I think about that now every time I see a “double tap.” We still have proofs. Likes, shares, and reactions, but they’re proofs of presence, not of effort. We’ve turned affection into activity.

The blockchain crowd loves to say, “Don’t trust, verify.” But in human terms, verification used to come through gestures, not code. You verified love, care and affection by showing up. You verified friendship by remembering. You verified intimacy by taking your time. Maybe what we’ve lost isn’t love letters or email invites. It’s verification by effort.

Designers and technologists talk a lot about reducing friction. But maybe the next frontier is designing for good friction, the kind that slows us down just enough to feel the weight of our actions. Friction that reintroduces ritual, presence, and attention into our digital and physical lives.

Lately, you can feel the pendulum swinging back towards this. Dinner parties are back in style. Supper clubs, analog cameras, handwritten notes, private online communities. People are rediscovering what it means to slow down, to show up, to curate, to host. These small countercultures are building friction back into the system, by choice. The point isn't to go backward, but to build systems that honor the parts of being human we've accidentally optimized away.

That's what this newsletter, and much of my professional work, has always been about, in its own way - rediscovering the joy of intentional connection in a world allergic to it. Whether it's a physical party or a digital gathering, it's the same experiment. What happens when you introduce friction back into the flow of the internet? When you make space for slowness, attention, and care?

This is also why I still believe in writing letters. They're powerful for a reason. You can't send one without meaning it. You can't edit one after it's sent. A love letter is a kind of proof of work - a timestamped record of sincerity in a world that prefers simulation. I wonder if love letters will make a comeback. Not because they're romantic, but because they are hard. Because they remind you that love, like anything worth building, is verified not by presence, but by proof of work.

Friction isn't the enemy of progress. It's the texture of being alive, and more importantly, of being intentional. It's what makes things stick. It's what makes moments memorable. The question isn't how to remove it, but how to use it. How to design, build, and love in ways that make space for the slow burn again. So the next time I send an invite, it'll come with a little friction. A pause, a thought, a reason. Maybe it'll say something simple, like "Are you free?" or "I miss you." Either way, it will be proof of effort.