Lately I’ve been thinking about productivity.

Not as a work habit.
As a cultural atmosphere.

Everything feels optimized now.

Optimized calendars.
Optimized morning routines.
Optimized feeds.
Optimized routes home.

We’ve spent the last decade designing for convenience.
Removing friction from everything.

And we celebrate it.

Faster delivery.
One-click checkout.
Seamless onboarding.
Coffee at your door in fifteen minutes.

I’ve been living in China for the past six months.
If there is one thing that captures this era, it’s delivery.

You can get almost anything.
In minutes.
Left at your door.
No interaction required.

People praise it constantly.

“It’s efficient.”
“It saves time.”
“It’s the future.”

And maybe it is.

But a question keeps appearing in my head.

At what point did walking 200 meters become inefficient?

No one declared it so.
It’s just a thought I can’t shake.

When did stepping outside start to feel like wasted time?

There’s something quietly absurd about ordering a coffee from a place you can see from your window.

About carefully structuring your day to reclaim control over your time,
while outsourcing the smallest physical effort.

Perfectly aligned schedules.
Minimal interiors.
Everything in its place.

All optimized.

Except for the part where you move.

We’ve removed friction from life.

But friction is what makes things real.

Effort.
Waiting.
Boredom.
Interaction.

These aren’t design flaws.
They’re part of being human.

Convenience might be the most successful product we’ve ever designed.

And maybe the most seductive.

Friction isn’t just inefficiency.
It’s resistance.
And resistance is how species evolve.

Discomfort pushed us forward.

Now we design against it.

As designers, we are trained to remove friction.
To smooth edges.
To reduce effort.
To make things seamless.

Good design should remove unnecessary friction.

Broken systems.
Confusing flows.
Clumsy interfaces.

That’s not what I’m questioning.

But what happens when we start removing meaningful friction?

The kind that makes you walk.
The kind that makes you wait.

It’s easy to say we’re just responding to demand.
It’s harder to admit we’re shaping it.

Did people truly demand coffee delivered from a store 200 meters away?

Or did we build a system so convenient that not using it now feels inefficient?

If we eliminate every minor inconvenience…

If we design a world where nothing requires movement or patience…

If we optimize life down to pure efficiency…

What exactly are we optimizing for?

If we remove friction to save time, what are we doing with that time?

Working more?
Consuming more?
Scrolling more?

Or simply becoming better at avoiding effort?

I’m not against productivity.

I optimize.
I value efficiency.

But sometimes I wonder whether we’ve confused comfort with progress.

A frictionless world sounds like evolution.

Until you realize friction is what made us evolve.

So I keep coming back to this:

If we design a life without friction,

what kind of humans are we slowly becoming?