Tela Network

' This is why friendship is often the product of something else: work, school, church, children, sports, errands, waiting rooms. It is produced not by misery, but by enough common friction to make conversation natural. Modern life has spent decades eliminating that friction. We can work without offices, shop without stores, exercise without gyms and communicate without looking anyone in the eye. Each improvement is defensible, some phenomenal. Together they made interaction with people increasingly optional. ' “Hard Things Worth Doing? The Economics of Friendship” by Roland G. Fryer Jr. (The Wall Street Journal, published July 2026) Just as we utilise artificially created physical friction to maintain our physical health (e.g. gym), we perhaps need artificially created friction in our lives to forge friendships.

" I have tamed that savage stenographic mystery. I make a respectable income by it. I am in high repute for my accomplishments in all pertaining to the art, and am joined with eleven others in reporting the debates in Parliament for a Morning Newspaper. Night after night, I record predictions that never come to pass, professions that are never fulfilled, explanations that are only meant to mystify. I wallow in words. Britannia, that unfortunate female, is always before me, like a trussed fowl: skewered through and though with office-pens, and bound hand and foot with red tape. I am sufficiently behind the scenes to know the worth of political life. I am quite an Infidel about it, and shall never be converted. " Charles Dickens, 'David Copperfield', Chapter XLIII, first published 1850.