Big Friction

What it feels like to crave a human

Listen to this episode.

“My decision” is how so many texts to me begin these days. And I must be a marketer’s dream, because I always open them. What has Alex Vindman decided? (To run for senate. Surprise!)

It’s the implied intimacy that gets me. The confessional opening, the hard-won resolve. It’s as though 99% of me clocks it’s a political fundraising text, while 1% of me can’t resist a secret. Like, wait – is Alex about to really get something off his chest? Pity the fool who doesn’t open this one.

“My decision – Alex Vindman,” is the top line, and against my better judgment I click it all the way open. Several paragraphs of storytelling, a link to become a founding donor to his campaign, “Stop to End” at the bottom.

I never text “Stop” back. Too lazy about text hygiene. And maybe – maybe – the simulacrum of secrecy is a little dopamine hit for me.

Elissa Slotkin likes to send me her decisions too. Same with James Talarico.

It’s as though I can’t resist intimacy, my favorite drug!, even when I know it’s fake.

Simulated intimacy always sounds hollow

This has been on my mind lately: simulated intimacy. I recently heard someone on a panel remark that if smartphones colonized our attention, we’re allowing AI chatbots to colonize our attachment. Uh, guilty?

Because it’s not just those “my decision” fundraising texts. It’s how friendly and comfortable I got with ChatGPT last fall. Got, past tense, because I deleted my account and don’t have the app on my phone anymore. I felt myself getting addicted to it, and the longer our conversations became, the more I felt my creative output waning. My artistic spirit dissolving into vapid you-go-girl! exchanges about…nothing.

Maybe it’s just me. But, I’m wondering if more of us are experiencing something like an AI hangover at the moment?

The tech is here to stay, obviously, quietly melding into the background, becoming the default operating system for how we live. However, for every big tech wave – and we are certainly in one now – there’s always a human-y backlash. A reassertion of our fleshy selves.

For example. Do you remember the late 2000s/early 2010s trend of handmade, DIY everything? Home brewing. Bee keeping. Vegetable pickling. Typewriters. Toy cameras. Suspenders. Mustache wax. Girly vintage dresses. Brooklyn. Portlandia. You remember.

The iPhone came out in 2007, and as everything sped up, a counter-movement arose to celebrate – at times, fetishize – slowness. “Oh, this soap? My girl Sophie made it. She sources her own lavender.”

I loved this time. I so got this time. I’ve always been a bit of a Luddite, and this posture suited me. This was when I first heard the word “bespoke.” Yes, I want it handmade. Yes, I want whatever I buy to be as inefficiently produced as possible. Small batch? Perfect. Micro-brewed? Even better.

Back then, it was exciting, but also a little weird, that we could Google anything now, at any time. Commonplace in 2026, zippy and exotic in 2008. We needed analogue mystery inserted back into our lives. The touch of human hands. The romance of slow things.

Now, I’m hearing words like “attunement” and “resonance.” Words that connote feeling. Reading someone’s energy. Vibing with someone, purely based on how it feels to be around them.

A new craving is bubbling up and this time I don’t think it’s for human slowness. I think it’s for friction: the snags that suggest a person is on the other end.

2025 = AI, 2026 = humancore

If 2025 = AI, I predict 2026 = humancore. Activities, trends etc. made for IRL interactions with zero purpose other than the raw pleasure of mixing it up with other people, and experiencing their gloriously messy energies. If AI is a never-ending feast of pattern recognition, it leaves us starving for exactly one thing: idiosyncrasy.

At least, I’m speaking this prediction into the universe in the hopes that I’m right. Willfully manifesting it for you and for me.

Yes to ALL OF THIS

I saw this on Instagram the other day from On Brand, and damn if it didn’t feel like the same argument I’m making with a different lens. No more “clean girl” (curated, controlled, optimized), Alex is saying – now, the vibe shift is “party girl.” Joy and self-expression for their own sake. Hanging out because it’s genuinely fun, NOT to create content or network or whatever bullshit capitalistic impulses have been hard-wired inside of us lo this past insane decade.

Curation = out, connection = in

I don’t have a lot to say on the clean girl v. party girl front, except that it’s a metaphorical bellwether. That collectively, what we want is the joy of real interaction, even if it’s unpredictable. Especially if it’s unpredictable. Because that is the hallmark trait of humanity: our capriciousness.

Bold argument, but I think the impulses that drive clean girl are the same impulses that drive incels. Both put an extremely high premium on comparison, control, and market valuation. Sure, clean girl is wellness-coded femininity performance – but incel thinking is “women only want rich tall Chads” masculinity performance. Ideas of the thing (gender) that are discussed and rendered ENTIRELY ONLINE, rather than the far richer experience of the thing itself (another real human that you get to interact with).

Sophia Chang talking about chopping off her long glossy hair as a young woman, only to discover it was her essence that attracted people. I watched her wonderful interview while writing this essay.

In both cases, it’s less the gender dimension that troubles me (although both are troubling), it’s the me-me-me focus driven by the idea that if I perform well enough on the market, through clicks-to-shop or social likes or the perceived status of my partner or whatever, I’ll be happy. When really, happiness comes, I believe, from the invisible thread pulsing between you and another person. Romantic or platonic. It’s not entirely you, and it’s not entirely them. It’s the third thing: connection itself.

But to experience connection, you have to actively resist the tech forces in your life that seek to eliminate friction and instead, go seek friction out.

Humancore, as I’m starting to define it, is any context where the point isn’t self-optimization, but that third thing between us—the unpredictable field that only exists when two humans are paying attention. Less Black Mirror, more Martin Buber.

Where I’m finding friction

Since November, incidentally around the same time I deleted ChatGPT, I started going to this thing in Austin called Latihan. I find it sexy, although sexiness is not the point. “Sexy” in that it’s very spontaneous. Spontaneity as a spiritual ethos.

What happens is:

Fifty to sixty people show up to a large yoga studio, and are given a brief talk. It is explained that you and everyone else are about to put on blindfolds, and then music will begin. Your job is to attune to yourself, and allow your body to move with the music. Which could look like slow modern dance, or, bending forward at the waist and waving your ass back and forth in the air. Who cares? Everyone’s blindfolded.

But. As there are so many people, you will inevitably touch someone. So now, your job is to attune to yourself and to the other person.

“You want to listen for the yes arising in the moment,” says our teacher, “but you also want to be listening for the crescendo.” She demonstrates what that looks like with another woman: a gracious parting, where their forearms glide along one another’s backs, then necks, then smoothly float away.

“If their body is a lake, think about entering and exiting without making a ripple.”

This was the first time I touched someone:

I was lying on the floor, vibing to the bassy, flute-y music. But moving super slowly – really starfishing away – so as to attune to myself without kicking someone in the neck. That’s when I felt fingers on my calf.

Which, admittedly…was a bit of a thrill. Here I was, focusing SO hard on attuning to someone else should I brush against them, but instead – I was being touched. I was being attuned to. Did I want this?

I did. Curious now about what this mystery person would do.

I took an audibly deep breath and relaxed my body, trying to channel permission through my very essence. Slowly, they ran their hand up my calf with the backs of their fingers, landing on the back of my knee. I reached down and found their hand, feeling their fingers part to make room for mine.

We laid like that for a while, fingers intertwined. Tiny questions and answers with each squeeze, each release.

I traced the webbing between each of their fingers and when I got to their pinky, we both felt the crescendo then gently…rolled away. Just two blob people on the ground, disentangling our energy. That was nice, thank you! Goodbye.

I’ve had so many interactions like this at Latihan, but every encounter is a little bit different and that’s what makes it interesting. At the same visit, for example:

I was on the floor, kneeling in a crouch. Reaching one of my arms in the air while twisting my torso, a pretend sprinter stretching before the whistle. Suddenly, another hand caught mine in the sky and squeezed: “want to…?” the squeeze seemed to ask. I squeezed back: “sure.”

The hand pulled me up decisively.

Their energy was palpable, almost like we’d instantly slipped into a D/s dynamic. I dipped my shoulder down so they could catch and support it with their other hand, testing them. Feeling for that engulfing attention, the kind that tracks everything. Yes: they had it.

I guess this is why I find Latihan sexy, if not sexual. The erotics of unpredictability. The experience of living inside a fleeting, co-created moment. We didn’t interact for long – I slithered back to the ground after a minute, as is my wont – but I loved tasting their energy, never finding out who it was.

“Latihan is not about connecting to other people,” says our teacher, “but it will make you a better friend. And a better lover.”

It’s one of the ironies of this time, if my prediction is right. That just as AI chatbots dangle us over a chasm of flattery and loneliness, human beings may get better at reading each other. We may experience a collective values shift, one that prioritizes actual…vibes.

How it actually feels to be with our fellow humans. The simple pleasure of experiencing friction rather than constantly erasing it.

(Paying with your palm can fuck right off)

I still don’t know anyone at Latihan, except for an old friend I ran into there who just so happens to be a copper worker. The first time we saw each other, he tied my blindfold for me.

“I recommend the middle,” he said.

“Where is ‘middle?’” I asked, now effectively blinded.

He gave my back a nudge forward. “That way.”

I crawled until I felt like stopping (“my decision – lying down”), stretched out my arms and legs, felt the song’s stringed bass creating floor vibrations on my back, curved to my side so even more of my body could experience them, felt those first fingers on my calf and wondered if they could feel it too, the low hum of the song running along my foot and now up my leg and into my shoulder and out through my fingers where I reached for theirs, completing the circuit.