• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, April 27, 2021

Here in North America, we are waging a war on friction. We use technology like a universal WD-40, spraying it on everything that rubs, squeaks or grinds. We want to move faster, more efficiently, rushing through our to-do list to get to whatever lies beyond it.

We are the culture of “one-click” ordering. We are the people that devour fast food. We relentlessly use apps to make our lives easier -- which is our euphemistic way of saying that we want a life with less friction.

Pre-pandemic, I was definitely on board this bandwagon. I, like many of you, always thought friction was a bad thing. I relentlessly hunted efficiency.

This was especially true when I was still in the working world. I started every day with an impossibly long to-do list, and I was always looking for ways to help me work my way through it faster. I believed at the end of my to-do list was the secret of life.

But in the past 14 months, I’ve discovered that friction might be the secret of life.

There are bushels of newly budding life coaches telling us to be “mindful” and “live in the moment.” But we somehow believe those moments have to all be idyllic walks through a flower garden with those we love most, as the sun filters softly through the trees overhead.

Sometime “in the moment” is looking for sandpaper at Home Depot. Sometimes it’s dropping our coffee as we rush to catch the bus. And sometimes its realizing that you’re sitting next to someone you really don’t like on that five-hour flight to Boston.

All those things are “in the moment,” and maybe -- just maybe -- that’s what life is all about. Call it friction if you wish, but it’s all those little things we think are annoying until they’re gone.

Friction has some unique physical properties that we tend to overlook as we try to eliminate it. It is, according to one site, “resistance to motion of one object moving relative to another.” It forces us to slow down our motion, whatever direction that motion may be taking us in. And -- according to the same site -- scientists believe it “is the result of the electromagnetic attraction between charged particles in two touching surfaces.”

Ah hah, so friction is about attraction and our attempts to overcome that attraction! It is about us fighting our social instincts to bond with each to keep moving to accomplish … what, exactly? Free up time to spend on Facebook? Spend more time playing a game on our phones? Will those things make us happier?

Here’s the other thing about friction. It generates heat. It warms things up. Here in North America, we call it friction. In Denmark, they call it “hygge.”

Denmark is a pretty happy place. In fact, last year it was the second happiest place on earth, according to the United Nations. And a lot of that can be attributed to what the Danish call “hygge,” which roughly translates as “cozy.”

The Danish live for coziness. And yes, the idyllic picture of hygge is spending time in front of the fire in a candlelit cabin, playing a board game with your closest friends. But hygge comes in many forms.

I personally believe that Denmark is an environment that leads to hygge because Denmark is a place that is not afraid of friction. Allow me to explain.

The ultimate way to avoid friction is to be alone. You can’t have “resistance to motion of one object moving relative to another” when there is no other object.

As we emerge from a pandemic that has necessitated removing the objects around us (people) and replacing them with more efficient, less friction-prone substitutes (technology) -- whether it’s in our jobs, our daily routines, our shopping trips or our community obligations -- we seem to be finding ways to continue to make the world a more efficient place for ourselves.

This is putting us at the center of an optimized universe and ruthlessly eliminating any points of resistance -- a life designed by a Silicon Valley engineer. And, more and more often, we find ourselves alone at the center of that universe.

But that’s not how the Danes do it. They have created an environment that leads to bumping into each other. And hygge -- with all its warm fuzziness -- might just be a product of that environment.  I suspect that might not be by intention. It just worked out that way. But it does seem to work.

For example, Danes spend a lot of time riding the bus. Or riding a bike. Life in Copenhagen is full of bumping along in a meandering trip together to a destination somewhere in the future. The joy is found in the journey, as noted in this Mediumpost.

It seems to me that life in Denmark, or other perpetually happy countries like Finland, Switzerland, Iceland and Norway, has a lot to do with slowing down and actually embracing societal friction.

We just have to realize that we as a species evolved in an environment filled with friction. And evolution, in its blind wisdom, has made that friction a key part of how we find meaning and happiness. We find hygge when we slow down enough to notice it.