The Paradox of Ease: Why Friction Is Good for You

“If you had the power to fast-forward through the most difficult times of your life by pressing a button, would you skip them?”That’s a question posed by Antón Barba-Kay in A Web of Our Own Making, his seminal work on the digital age and its effects on how we think and see ourselves. He believes most of us would say yes. We’d be tempted to fast-forward through the difficult moments—though perhaps with a tinge of self-awareness that what’s “tedious, maddening, and unpremeditated is often what end