shortly after my son was born, I noticed how much more inconvenient our roadtrips had become. Packing time (and volume) quadrupled; the number of unplanned stops became a random variable; even stepping out of the car to take a photo could turn into its own mini ordeal.
I called it logistics at the time, and thought that I either learn to enjoy this logistical nuisance or embrace the ritual of seppuku. In retrospect, that may have been Nature telling me that friction is not a bug, it is a feature. Our instincts evolved under friction.
on physical boundaries
Intuition and instinct work well in the physical world. You don't need a physics major to tell you that you shouldn’t jump off a three-story roof. No nutrition degree to understand that eating ten thousand calories in one sitting may not be good (or even possible). And long before my smartwatch started showing recovery and sleep scores, shepherds and farmers knew fatigue wasn’t a suggestion, but a boundary.
The point is: our bodies impose limits, and those limits shaped the instincts we rely on.
Even the more abstract consumption splurge—shopping, hoarding gadgets, buying toys for toddlers—eventually runs into a ceiling (the size of your garage, the limit of your patience) that collapses under its own absurdity.
Physical life has friction. It slows excess. It forces choice. It protects us from ourselves.
Modern money, my friend, is different.
the scale of abstraction
Whenever we see headlines like these, the narrative is typically one of greed:
- Trader loses billions in one week
- Man gambles $100 million away in one trip to Las Vegas
- Hedge fund manager bets against mortgages and earns $4 billion
Greed is cast as the fuel, the daimon-demon that runs unrestrained.
But perhaps these are not stories about greed. Perhaps these are stories about scale and speed. They are what happens when money escapes physical constraints and squares abstraction levels.
Without friction, our instincts fail.
linear intuition
Even though non-linearity and asymmetry are everywhere, we are programmed with linear intuition. That’s because our contact with immediate reality was always pretty linear.
One step carried you one step forward.
One arrow killed one enemy.
One bad winter cost you one harvest.
In the modern world, a single bad winter may cost you more than 1× your harvest. It can cost you 100× someone else’s harvest.
Our bodies (shaped through evolution by scarcity, slowness, fatigue) now interact with systems that allow instantaneous leverage, virtually infinite position sizes, and 24/7 access from the palm of your hand.
The machine exceeds the boundaries of the brain.
frictionless scale and speed: modern examples
Open any trading app today and you have access to:
- Stocks: 3× leverage
- Cryptocurrencies: up to 10× leverage
- Currency markets: up to 50× leverage
- Futures: up to 200× leverage
And once you blow up, you can go shopping and tap the frictionless “buy now, pay later” button.
friction as a design choice
By now, you may have noticed that friction is a risk-management resource rather than an annoyance. Delays, limits, waiting periods... even bureaucracy(!).
Friction prevents catastrophic overreach.
Friction gives you time to reconsider.
Friction stops uncontrollable scaling.
If you don’t inherit friction from the world and are traveling through Extremistan[1], it may be wise to design your own friction: embrace the beauty of logistics; accept multiple stops along the way; say “no” when in doubt; travel slow; study the classics.
on slowness
The irony these days is that slowness (traditionally a curse) may actually be a competitive advantage [2].
He who does not accelerate into abstraction, who refuses to chase “optimized” returns (hi MBA nerd), even he who procrastinates[3], may be the one who ends up with the only thing that matters:
a life that cannot be collapsed by a single error.