Living requires friction

Meaning, life, and truth are not static states of being, they all are dynamic verbs, they are actions of overcoming. Without any friction in life we have no traction, no agency, no will, so to exist and live is to exert force against something.

Our vitality is a dynamic state where being is defined by the movement against gravity, it is not resting at your destination. Being is OVERCOMING, and overcoming is the engine of consciousness, of mind. Human life has become a life without obstacles, which in turn creates a slip n' slide effect, all movement with no direction. We need the weight of reality to push against in order to feel our own strengh.

 We have erroneously assumed that happiness is a destination, a state of being achieved after we have removed all obstacles, but in reality it is the arrival that creates the slump. Happiness is not the goal, happiness is the result of meaningful exertion, of intentional effort.

So we have arrived en-masse to the point of understanding that the sensation of being fully alive only can occur while we engage with difficulty, with discomfort.

We have failed at outsourcing our living attempting to automate ourselves, trying to delegate the act of living to meaning-less algorithms and structures of convenience, we found ourselves deep in the delusion that removing the process, the struggle, leaves the meaningful substance of our lives. We were in psychosis.

We became ghosts in our lives while we watched the machines doing our living for us, and so we lost our will, we lost our capacity to choose and our capacity to build because the path is smoothly prepaved. We built a world optimized for speed and we lost our grip on reality. We forgot that without friction, without the struggle, we cannot stop or steer our lives in the right direction. We found out that all we got was passive momentum when we wanted active agency. We slid where gravity took us.

We are renegotiating life now... we are realizing that tasks that don't require our soul, our thoughts, our emotions, our synthesis and compression, those we can give to the machines. And all tasks that generate the spark of life, creativity, taste, empathy, judgment, craft, is what we need to protect. We realize that living requires us to refuse to let the machines optimize our lives and our human bonds.

We are taking our rightful place back as the intention and direction force behind the vision of our lives, while the machines can keep the efficiency. The closer we get to who we are the more friction and struggle is required. Our art, our love, and even our deaths demand our struggle, the handmade, the analog, the presence of the body, embodied...

We are reframing inefficiency and difficulty as part of what it means to have a meaningful life, we are rediscovering the wheel. By choosing the harder path we are choosing reality, we are choosing life.

Then, we are re-understanding that to be human is to exert force, that our existence is our refusal to slide into complacency with the meaningless. We have started to climb back, we have stopped sliding and life meaning is returning with us in our climb.

We finally are moving from the era of consumption and passive getting to the era of exertion and active creation. We are in search of the imperfection, in search of humanity, in search of life.