I’d best prologue this evening’s post with a by-now-familiar caveat lector: these are notes, still unmortared and, at best “dry stacked” so that I may step back a few paces to consider the view. So sorry about that. Also, the connection(s) I’m exploring is/are still coalescing — sort of slowly and inconclusively — which means that I invite you to reach out with clever ideas.
The most recent inspiration for this rudimentary reflection on slowness and friction was a January 30, 2025 In Conversation podcast with Shumita Basu called, “Social media was supposed to be a force for good. What happened?”. Speaking with Nicholas Carr (whose new book, Superbloom, How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart offers the context and content for the segment) they five into some of the ways that social media has and is destroying us. It’s an unsettling if an increasingly familiar hypothesis.
Although the idea I’m pursuing really isn’t so much about social media, there’s something decidedly germane that I’ll get to in a moment. But first let’s return to my words yesterday, excerpted for relevance. I was talking about the goal that I had set for myself in the summer of 2023 when I initiated this daily old house journaling challenge. 
My original year timeline wasn’t sufficient. I failed to find what I was looking for. So I doubled down. I stretched my horizon further out, another year.
[…]
But [when my deadline arrived] the quest remained incomplete. So I extended again. How long? I wasn’t really certain. But yesterday’s daily dispatch marked the completion of another half year. Still no closure. No conclusion. But with 30 months under my belt, the clouds have cleared, have been replaced with sun-soaked clarity. A realistic horizon has become visible. (Source: 30 Month Milestone!)
Put a pin in that, and let’s flip back to an earlier post aside about slow rehab.
In conversation with staff at The George (all exceptional, by the way), it was mentioned that the full rehab, redesign, and launch took half a dozen years. 6 years to reinvent this property in its current, clever reincarnation. Six years. “That’s our kind of timeline,” I said to Susan. Perhaps rehab, real rehab takes time. Organic and dynamic. Evolving as we live and grow. (Source: Combinatorial Creativity)
In a moment I’ll leave you with another excerpt, this one from xxx and xxx’s conversation referenced at the top of this post. But first a still unbaked glimpse at where I’m going with all this.
I wonder if there’s an opportunity in slowness, merit in delay. I wonder if friction and resistance, false starts and setbacks, are important for growth and adaptation.
Iterate and reiterate. Like sculpting with clay or steel, cutting and carving away, then vice versa. Pressing more clay onto the emerging work; welding more steel where too much was removed. Not errors, per se. Just adding and subtracting. No shame. Just slowing, even stalling. When creation and rehabilitation are the measure of meaning, slowness may well be the currency of work worth doing and life worth living.
One thing that happens when society moves onto a computer network that is run by network engineers and software programmers is that there’s this drive to make aspects of human socializing more efficient. That’s what programmers do. That’s what network engineers do.
They make things more efficient…
[…]
“But what we discover is that friction and slowness is where human judgment and human interpretation comes into the process…
[But when you] take out that little bit of time… to make everything more efficient and better… it actually removes a lot of human judgment and a lot of the kind of nuance of how we make sense of the world, how we make sense of one another.”
(Source: Nicholas Carr, “Social media was supposed to be a force for good. What happened?”)
What do you think?