# Switching Costs

**Published by:** [jer979](https://paragraph.com/@jer979-2/)
**Published on:** 2025-04-03
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@jer979-2/switching-costs

## Content

Try moving your money from one bank to another. Or changing an airline reservation from one airline to another. Or porting your cell phone to a different service provider. All of these processes-and many, many more- are full of high friction. Overcoming friction requires energy. Companies and institutions know this so they purposely create high-friction environments to make it difficult for you to escape the system. Our personal lives exist within “high friction” systems as well, mostly out of our own doing, and the result of years of inertia or sedimentary accumulation. A good example of this might be not leaving a job you hate because of a fear of losing health insurance (in the US, at least) or giving up a pension. Friction and the barriers that support them reduce optionality, which reduces choice, which, if you ask me, reduces the ability to pursue your own version of happiness. Lao Tzu once said that he has three things to teach, “patience, compassion, and simplicity.” Simplicity is a friction killer.

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