21.04.2025
Cracked Open: On Social Life and the Gift of Friction.
In the aftermath of the pandemic, many of us became acutely aware of a phenomenon that had long gone unnamed: the “social battery.” After months of isolation, we returned to the world with a heightened sensitivity to our own internal rhythms. The solitude imposed by lockdowns — though difficult — offered a rare opportunity to recalibrate our relationship with time, energy, and presence. For a moment, we were no longer synchronized to the external clock of productivity, but instead attuned to what the French call idiorythmie — the idea that each individual carries their own rhythm, unique and irreducible.
This return to idiorythmie made re-entering social life feel like a form of friction. Being with others — navigating conversations, environments, and shared experiences — felt suddenly overwhelming, not because we had become less social, but because we had become more sensitive. More aware of what it costs to remain present. And perhaps for the first time, we could name that cost.
But this friction is not a flaw. On the contrary, it may be the very essence of what social life is. We are conditioned to associate ease, smoothness, and comfort with goodness — and discomfort, tension, and slowness with failure or dysfunction. But this binary reveals more about the pathology of modernity than it does about the nature of social existence.
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in Saving Beauty, critiques this modern obsession with smoothness. In his view, the contemporary world increasingly seeks to eliminate resistance, conflict, and even complexity. The ideal object — whether it’s a smartphone, a body, or a social interaction — is designed to be smooth, frictionless, and instantly consumable. “The smooth,” he writes, “is the signature of the present time.” It is the aesthetics of a world without edges, without pause, without pain. A world that reflects the values of neoliberal capitalism: speed, transparency, comfort, optimization.
But in eliminating friction, we also eliminate depth.
Friction is the texture of real life. It is what allows for contact, transformation, and encounter. When we are in true relation — with another person, with an idea, with a place — something rubs. And in that rubbing, there is heat, vulnerability, even pain. But there is also growth. The ego, confronted with another worldview or presence, develops fissures. The smooth façade cracks. And through those cracks, something new can emerge — humility, insight, a softening, a shedding.
This smoothness is seductive because it mimics safety. But true safety — the kind that nourishes — does not eliminate friction; it holds space for it. It allows for disagreement, rupture, contradiction. It values the uncomfortable pause, the awkward silence, the unresolved tension. Because it knows that these are the very sites of becoming.
If we listen closely, our desire for solitude may be less about misanthropy or escapism, and more about a longing for integration — a need for time and space to metabolize experience. Modern society, structured by the logics of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism — that three-headed monster — has no place for integration. Its tempo is relentless, and its values are externalized: produce, perform, progress. There is no built-in pause for the internal work of digestion, reflection, or repair.
But integration is not a luxury. It is essential. It is how we learn from experience rather than repeat it. It is how we alchemize wounds into wisdom, interaction into understanding. Without integration, social life becomes noise.
The architecture of self doesn’t evolve through harmony alone. It reshapes in the collision zones — where old frameworks no longer hold, and new ones haven’t yet formed. Stepping back after these collisions isn’t about disconnecting. It’s a temporary decompression chamber, where incoherence can be lived with long enough to reconfigure into insight.
In his work on racialized trauma, somatic therapist Resmaa Menakem writes:
“Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. Trauma decontextualized in people looks like culture.”
When we fail to contextualize our exhaustion, our reactivity, our withdrawal from social life, we risk internalizing them as flaws or pathologies. But what if these tendencies are actually the echoes of collective wounds? The product of inherited, unresolved trauma stored in the nervous system — shaped over generations by systems of violence?
We are social creatures, not in spite of this friction, but because of it. We need each other to grow. We need the discomfort of being seen, the risk of being misunderstood, the courage to speak even when our voice shakes. These are the soft eruptions that erode the ego and open us to one another.
To live socially is to agree to be disturbed.
And in that disturbance, we participate in the larger, cosmic collaboration of which we are a part — not just human to human, but human to non-human, to landscape, to atmosphere, to time itself. The space between us is not empty. It is charged. Alive with the potential of transformation.
If we are all one, then we need each other to become ourselves.
And if fissures appear — if we crack, if we shatter — that may be the truest sign that we are doing the work. The work of unlearning. Of transgressing. Of dying and becoming.
Of growing.
Humanity has been sculpted by violence in slow, deliberate strokes. Generation after generation, our bodies and minds have been shaped by the machinery of patriarchy, colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism. These systems did more than organize economies or govern laws — they reprogrammed our relational instincts.
They taught us to distrust. To suppress what’s tender. To tie our worth to what we produce. To brace instead of soften. To fear stillness. They rewired us for survival, not connection. They normalized disconnection — from the land, from each other, from ourselves.
And yet, within this rupture lives a memory. A pulse of something older, wiser, more whole. Beneath the architecture of domination, something else endures — an ancestral intelligence, waiting to be felt again.
“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
— bell hooks, All About Love