A few days ago, I came across an Instagram reel that lingered in my mind long after I scrolled past it. It suggested that people with fewer resources who cook for themselves are generally healthier than wealthier individuals who outsource their meals. I do not know if that is entirely factual, and I am certainly not romanticizing scarcity; I like financial security, the comfort it buys, and the freedom to make my own choices. If given the option, I will choose security every time. But the video did make me look closely at myself.
One of the primary things resources buy is convenience, which is the ability to exchange money for comfort. Food can be delivered, errands delegated, and tasks automated.
This loop feels natural to me because I am a software engineer. I genuinely love my job. I love the rhythm of building products, finding bottlenecks, dropping latency, and making things faster. In code, friction is a bug. My entire professional mandate is to make the path from intention to outcome as short as possible, and software is a magnificent force multiplier for that. In the digital world, optimization is exactly what we should be striving for.
But lately, I’ve found myself wondering if I’m letting that engineering mindset bleed too neatly into my personal life.
In software engineering, yes, we need relentless optimization. But for personal life? I’m starting to think friction is actually a feature.
I wrote recently about losing my routine and having to face the heavy, awkward drag of the first pedal stroke just to get moving again. The good news is that the momentum has returned. The wheels are spinning. I’m back in the rhythm of waking up early, hitting milestones, and keeping the pace high.
But if I’m being completely honest with myself, now that the movement is back, I’m struggling with a different kind of drag. I have the how dialed in again. I know how to execute. But under the hood, I keep hitting a wall when it comes to the why.
When a major shift happens in your personal life and the landscape changes completely, your instinct is to look for solid ground. For me, that solid ground is productivity. I can easily optimize my days, clear milestones, and hit deadlines, all while slipping into a quiet psychological drift underneath the busyness. I look at the map I was using to navigate just a few months ago, and suddenly the landmarks aren’t there anymore. It brings a persistent, quiet fog over the path ahead, making me question whether the direction I’m running in is even the one I actually want.
Modern life rewards functioning so aggressively that it’s easy to mistake constant motion for purpose. When you get your momentum back, you want to protect it at all costs, so you look for ways to streamline everything.
I recently read a reflection by a doctor about a 48-year-old man in a hospital stroke unit. He was highly successful, phone in hand even in his hospital bed. Less than 24 hours after his stroke, his main concern wasn’t what caused it. He just wanted to know when he could go back to work.
The doctor wrote about wondering: What exactly was he trying so quickly to return to? And did he even know anymore?
That question hit me hard because I recognize that exact defense mechanism in myself. When I am hurting or confused about where I am going, my instinct is to just move faster. I demand a flawless, 100% output to mask the quiet anxiety of wondering if I am doing the right thing, or trying to force a version of myself that hasn’t arrived yet.
Viktor Frankl famously wrote that human beings can survive almost any “how” if they still have a “why.” But I think modern life tricks us into reversing this completely, especially outside of work. We spend decades perfecting the how, meaning we streamline routines, remove inconveniences, outsource effort, and accumulate raw velocity, all while quietly losing track of the why.
When you use convenience to remove every ounce of resistance from your personal life, your days become weightless. And things without weight tend to drift away.
Maybe that’s why I love cycling. Climbing a steep hill on a bicycle makes zero sense through the lens of efficiency. If the goal is conserving energy, it’s a terrible solution. But the climb is the point. The satisfaction is manufactured by the struggle, the persistence, and the effort itself. If someone could instantly transport me to the summit, they would improve the outcome while completely erasing the experience.
The same holds true for so many of the spaces we choose to inhabit fully outside of work. Tending to a garden when supermarkets exist is an inefficient way to acquire vegetables. Wandering through a city on foot without a map or a destination is a terrible way to navigate. Spending an entire morning meticulously grinding coffee beans and frothing milk at home makes no sense when you can get a hot drink at the press of a button.
But these activities don’t exist to optimize a result. They ask for our active participation rather than our automation. They give us weight.
The doctor who wrote about the stroke unit also shared that during his time living through a war, what kept people psychologically alive wasn’t grand productivity or looking for a clean how. It was the stubborn refusal to let survival become the only thing life was about. It was the deliberate act of anchoring the mind to a why by protecting small, unoptimized human things: reading, reflection, a slow routine, and a shared coffee.
Without those intentional frictions, life becomes purely mechanical. I wake up, work, reply to emails, attend meetings, scroll, and sleep. The years pass in a state of frictionless execution, masking the fact that I’ve stopped pausing to notice if I feel meaningfully alive.
Designing My Own Speed Bumps
I don’t want to change my career, but I do want to change my autopilot. I’m realizing that the goal isn’t just to ride at top speed without ever stopping, or to collect momentum for its own sake. To keep myself from drifting into pure, mechanical execution while I figure out my direction, I am trying to focus on a couple of simple, unoptimized constraints.
First, I want to deliberately protect the personal spaces that resist being streamlined. For me, that means leaning into small, shared efforts like hosting dinners where friends come over, or going on long nighttime walks just to talk about whatever is on our minds. These are things that ask for patience, presence, and attention. They are slow, intentional spaces to occupy, not tasks to clear.
Alongside that, I need to learn how to accept the heavy pauses. Historically, my celebrations have been short lived; I will enjoy a pastry to reward a milestone, but my mind is already getting restless before I even finish, looking for the next mountain. Savoring the pause means learning to stay with the feeling of a cleared climb longer, and it also means accepting the internal drag when I am in a slump. Instead of trying to shift straight into the highest gear from a dead stop, I want to respect the friction of starting over.
Building products and engineering better systems will always fulfill me. I’m not looking to re-engineer my career. But as an engineer, I am trained to ask how something can be done with less effort.
As I navigate this return to form, feeling the wheels turn but still searching for a far horizon that feels entirely uncertain, I have to leave myself with one honest question:
Am I rushing to optimize this next step just to perfect the “how” and prove I can keep moving, or am I willing to sit with the friction until I actually discover my “why”?