“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 ends up mattering most to us, giving texture and substance to our lives.”
Digital Aspiration: A Life Without Resistance
What would life be like if we could eliminate all friction? If we could do away with resistance? If fulfilling our desires were as simple as pressing a button, so the gap between what we want and what we experience shrinks to nothing?
“This is the aspiration of the digital,” Barba-Kay argues. It’s “to make the world fully pliant to [our] will.” The goal is to reduce the resistance between desire and fulfillment. And in theory, this should make us happier. If we could eliminate struggle, wouldn’t joy be easier to come by?
It hasn’t worked out that way.
Imagine going back a hundred years and showing people today’s ease of life. They’d be astonished.
Consider a simple example from my years in Romania. The house I stayed in on weekends, in a village outside the city, had no indoor plumbing and no central heating. In the winter, we relied on a large, tile-covered, built-in stove to heat two rooms. We’d start a fire in the evening before retiring to our beds, but by 4 a.m., it would go out. At that point, you had a choice: get up in the freezing dark to throw another log on the fire to keep you warm until sunrise or burrow deeper under the blankets, hoping someone else would tend it.
Today, I press a button and my home stays at the precise temperature I desire. No work is required to get the house to a comfortable temperature for the whole family, aside from the bills we pay to the electric and gas companies. The effort of chopping wood, starting a fire, and keeping it going—once an essential task—has vanished.
Life of Instant Gratification—and Growing Discontent
This kind of convenience defines nearly all aspects of the digital age. Communication happens instantly. Smart devices anticipate our needs. With every innovation, we reduce resistance and friction, removing obstacles between us and our desires.
But are we happier?
Barba-Kay reveals an insight that seems counterintuitive, yet we know it to be true:
We are made by trial and tried by what is trying.
Difficulties aren’t interruptions to our formation—they are our formation. Friction and resistance polish our souls. Suffering forges our character. If getting what we want in the fastest and easiest way possible were the ultimate good, then life in the modern age should be overflowing with joy. Instead, we often feel restless, dissatisfied.
It is a strange paradox that having things our own way might not be everything we’re after, that getting everything on our own terms would condemn us to lonely desolation—a perfect hell.
Drop someone from a hundred years ago into our world, and they’d be astounded by our luxuries. Despite Thomas Jefferson’s immense wealth and status, his grand Virginia mansion was so cold in winter that the ink in his pen sometimes froze, making it difficult for him to write. Queen Elizabeth I of England struggled to make her palace habitable, contending with overwhelming stench, rampant vermin, and unsanitary conditions that forced her court to constantly relocate. (To cope, they relied on perfumes, aromatic herbs, and flowers to mask the odors and shield themselves from contamination.)
The further we move away from even a cursory knowledge of the friction we’ve overcome—the longer we go without realizing what a marvel it is that we can step into a shower and enjoy the refreshing feel of (clean!) water at the temperature we desire (something most people throughout history never dreamed of experiencing), the more likely we are to lose sight of these developments. We turn our attention to other elements of friction and resistance yet to be conquered, and the remaining obstacles take on an outsize role in our imagination. We fixate on the next inconvenience to be overcome.
The Faster Life Gets, the More We Resent Slowness
Barba-Kay observes how this cycle plays out:
The faster things can go, the slower others feel; the more convenient things are, the more salient are inconveniences; the more engrossed we are in novelty, the more boring it becomes.
We prize speed because we think it will free up time, Barba-Kay writes, and we want to devote that freed-up time to what “really matters.” But in the end, we don’t feel freer. Instead, we develop an ever-sharper contrast between what we like to do and what we prefer not to do. The more we expect life to be seamless, the more frustrated we become when it isn’t.
Ironically, the kings and queens of history—whose every whim was met by servants—likely had lower expectations of ease than we do today. We all live like royalty now, and our standards of comfort have grown to match.
Why We Need Resistance to Be Happy—and to Be Good
Here’s the paradox: We need a measure of resistance and friction in our lives, not only to be happy but to be good.
We instinctively know that hardship shapes character. Parents who remove all restraint and difficulty from their children don’t produce a happy family—the kids are miserable. When we eliminate friction from our lives, when we get whatever we want whenever we want it, we become spiritually and emotionally fragile. We’re all spoiled children now.
This truth has profound implications for the Christian life. We often carry over the same expectations of efficiency and ease into our walk with God.
- We struggle with Bible reading because it makes demands of us. God’s Word doesn’t shift and mold itself to our every whim. It requires effort and submission.
- We struggle with prayer because sitting still before the Lord requires us to embrace the discomfort of opening our hearts before his holiness. Focusing our minds on a glory not our own is an act of resistance against self-centeredness.
- We struggle with fasting because we only value self-denial when it serves another self-focused goal—like shedding pounds to look better or keep up with our friends at the gym.
- We struggle with church attendance because deep relationships bring resistance, inconvenience, and imposition. They take time to grow. True friendships aren’t easy, at least not as easy as self-isolation.
Gift of Limitation
Without resistance, without friction, we will not be happy. Neither will we be good.
Restraints are essential. Limitations remind us of our creatureliness. Obstacles cultivate gratitude, helping us appreciate the warmth of a fire we had to stoke, the depth of a friendship we had to fight for, the joy of a truth we had to wrestle with.
The digital age offers us the illusion of a frictionless life. But a life without friction is not a life of joy. It is, as Barba-Kay warns, a life of desolation.
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