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.