Frictionlessness and the Buddha's Second Noble Truth
Current AI solutions focus on removing friction, but they're just the most modern attempt to give us what we think we want. I hoped if I gave up wanting stuff, I wouldn't have to suffer. I was wrong.
When I heard the Buddha’s First Noble Truth, I could let out a breath I didn’t realise I was holding: ‘Life is hard. That you are finding it hard is not your fault; you are not doing anything wrong.’
What a relief. Stress, discomfort, dissatisfaction (all alternate translations of ‘suffering’) are non-negotiable and unavoidable.
But…maybe if I could figure out the cause of this suffering, and get to the root of that, maybe then I could find freedom? That would dial down the stress and discomfort. That sounded good.
And yet, suffering kept re-emerging, even when I’d dedicated all my practice to trying to stop it. So what the f*@k was going on?
Well, I’ve figured out it’s two things. The first is that the cause of suffering—craving—is still everywhere in my life.
And two: I’d fundamentally misunderstood. I thought by redefining happiness as ‘freedom from suffering’, I wouldn’t have to suffer anymore.
Whoops.
If only I could fix this one thing, then I wouldn’t have to suffer
The Buddha’s Second Noble Truth says this: the source of suffering is craving. Yesssss. This is so true for me. I spend almost all my time wanting something. Which means I’m always slightly itching for things to be just a little bit different. This twitchy feeling is uncomfortable, distracting, undesirable. It’s suffering, from low- to high-level, depending on the circumstance.
And this is the truth of the origination of suffering: the craving that makes for further becoming, accompanied by passion and delight, relishing now here, now there…craving for sensual pleasure, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming.
The Buddha uses these three categories to split up craving, which helps me see how they play in the minutiae of my daily life, and in my macro-view of spiritual evolution.
I mean, craving for sensual pleasure is pretty constant. I want dinner to be ready. I want the sex to last for the longer. I want the Booja Booja hazelnut truffle to be as tasty as I’d been imagining for the seven minutes before I put it in my mouth. I want to be on holiday in Majorca. I want to be back in my own bed in Norwich. I want my husband’s parents to not be dead. I want my mother to go home now.
Beyond these every-second cravings is the over-arching craving for becoming. I want to affirm myself as me, not anyone else. And I want ‘me’ to be really, really great. I want people to love and adore me. I want to be an amazing writer with 10,000 followers on Substack (scroll up and click ‘subscribe’, pls). I want my spiritual practice to emanate out of me in a humble and unassuming way so that people are drawn to my simple, everyday approach to Buddhism while recognising I’m not enlightened (yet).
But even more insidious is the craving that I constantly forget, misunderstand and misattribute: the craving for non-becoming. Because here’s the rub. I also want this all to stop.
I know that craving, whether for a chocolate or constant affirmation, is a bit annoying. This rustling tendency manifests in physical restlessness: being on the go from one thing to another, constantly tidying my house, emptying my inbox, reaching for my phone, filling up my water bottle. It also shows up when I’m trying to be more me: when I take five selfies before selecting which one to post. When I write a CV, or an annual appraisal, or a LinkedIn article. When I over-share in the hope of forming a strong bond with this person I just met so that I can feel more seen, more witnessed, more met.
I want these cravings to stop. I want to find inner peace. I want to sit still for ten minutes without reaching for my phone. I want to see through the self so I stop trying to become anyone in particular. I want to escape existence, which I find so painful. And there are many, many blogs and podcasts and books and led meditations and retreats that support the endless project to be more spiritual, to cultivate peace, to connect with the world with a boundless heart, to get enlightened.
I can dress it up as spiritual practice, but all this is driven by the same delusion. It’s still craving.
And when I buy into this craving for non-becoming, I’m right back to where I started.
Frictionlessness, craving and delayed gratification
Craving is wanting—but it’s also not wanting. I spend most of my life wanting each moment to be different than it is: I don’t want to be at work, I want the weekend to last longer, I want to be entertained, I don’t want to be bored. In each of these moments of wanting/not-wanting, I’m experiencing suffering. Sometimes it’s a small twitch of distraction as I reach for my phone for an app-check; sometimes it’s hours of pain as I wait for my sciatica to release so I can stand up straight.
The obvious way to alleviate this suffering is to fix the reason I’m feeling it.
And that’s the premise underlying the modern concept of removing friction. Every app, add-on, website pop-up and AI-solution arises out of the promise of frictionlessness.
I feel friction in my body. It used to be easier to spot: remember the sound of 90’s dial-up internet? The bing-bong tones, the long screech, the three dings. When I hear it, or even remember hearing it, my shoulders tense, my fingers tap and my teeth clench.
I have to wait.
It’s exactly the same when I wait for a website to load, when I click through to the next screen and find one more form to fill, when I swipe down for new content.
In those moments of waiting, there is nothing I can do to speed up the process. I cannot click to make it move faster, I cannot manifest a new reel, I cannot make the person respond to my WhatsApp message.
Every ‘gap in the market’ is an opportunity to reduce friction. There’s a ‘pain point’ (a ‘suffering point’, but with better alliteration), and people will pay—either with money or with themselves as the product—so they don’t have to feel it.
Modern solutions to friction pretend to solve craving on two fronts: they give something we want (more content, a quicker click-through, an auto-fill, an app for a smoother user experience) and take away something we don’t want (the bodily discomfort of experiencing the friction).
But there’s a problem.
If I never experience friction, I lose tolerance to discomfort. When my online and phone experience becomes so tailored I never have to experience waiting or wanting, I lose my ability to handle it in real life.
I start avoiding walking into rooms at a conference where I don’t know anyone so I don’t have to feel the stomach-lurch of the possibility of being ignored. I use AI to answer a question or give me the TL;DR rather than reading, thinking or—the worst—not searching to find what film I saw that actor in twelve years ago.
And if I never experience friction, I never experience waiting, or its extended counterpart: longing. I start associating longing or missing or not-having with an undesirable experience. I miss the sweetness of pining, the poetic nature of longing and the euphoria of delayed gratification.
So in that way I don’t want freedom from craving. I want the freedom to feel the feeling— ‘to feel the love, the longing, and the fear in your bones’ as John Welwood would have it— without wanting it to be different than it is.
Craving by another name
What is it, then, that I want to stop? If I don’t want to stop feeling—because that’s not possible— and I don’t want to stop life being difficult, or sad, or depressing—because these fundamental experiences, of stress and suffering, are the truths of life, then…what? The Buddha said, ‘life is hard’. And that’s not going to change.
For awhile I thought, well, I want to stop being upset by all of it. I want to be tranquil, content. I want to see reality and not be ‘blown about by it’.
I hear a lot of Buddhists—me included—define the goal of practice as ‘freedom from suffering’. And then we set about doing ten thousand things to free us from suffering. I meditate for hours until I recognise pain as impermanent, and see my relentless thoughts as nothing more bothersome than clouds passing through blue sky. I practise compassionate beneficial activity and cultivate a boundless heart so that I can open to any experience, any person’s frustration or discomfort or anger or fear, with equanimity and a placid, non-judgmental awareness. I do all of this to get away from the suffering of being human.
And then, when despair descends like a fog, a grey cloud with no bottom or sides, I am surprised. When my suicidal ideation returns, when my black-dog days of depression recur, when I wake at 2am, 3am, 4am with spinning anxious thoughts, and no matter how many times I scan my body, no matter how many times I come back to the sensations of breath, I cannot fall asleep, I am wracked with doubt.
The doubt asks: ‘Where is my freedom from suffering? Why is this suffering still arising? What have I done wrong?’
When I fall into these askings, I have missed the point. I have tripped into craving for non-becoming. I’ve redefined craving in pseudo-spiritual terms so I can get around being uncomfortable.
I have forgotten the First Noble Truth, and I have misunderstood the Second.
The First Noble Truth reminds me that life is hard. That there will be pain, and death, and disappointment, and depression. Because this is what happens to us all. Not all of us, all the time. But again and again.
The Second Noble Truth explains that craving is not only wanting to be on holiday all the time and never have to wait for a website to load. Craving is also wanting this all to be different. A deep desire to not have to feel the hard stuff: mine or anyone else’s.
The innocent mistake that keeps us caught in our own particular style of ignorance, unkindness, and shut-downness is that we are never encouraged to see clearly what is, with gentleness. Instead, there’s a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, then we would be happy.
The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself. Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives. It’s about not trying to make them go away, not trying to become better than we are, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness.- Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape
This is the secret teaching that lies beneath the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth. The source of suffering isn’t only the craving for the ‘right’ job, the people, domestic situation. It’s the craving for trying to get away from painful things.
It took me years to start to see how I’d tricked myself. That I’d misunderstood. That redefining ‘happiness’ as ‘freedom from suffering’ only served as a delusion that I’d no longer feel the interminable craving to get away from myself.
Instead, I have to get comfortable with all of this, forever. To, as Bruce Tift says, ‘give myself permission to feel [this feeling that you really don’t like to feel] off and on for the rest of my life.’
It’s not comfortable, or enjoyable. It shoves me right up next to suffering and discomfort in a way I hoped I’d never have to feel again. But instead, whether it’s a family member that makes my jaw ache, or the weight that settles on my chest one Wednesday morning without warning, or sitting with a person in grief who won’t let me touch them, I feel suffering more deeply each time.
Craving for non-becoming means I keep trying to get away from painful things.
And I need to keep remembering that the only freedom I get is when I stop believing it should be different.