Life Without Friction

You wake up and the room is already warm, not because anyone tended a flame or listened to the weather and planned ahead, but because a system noticed the temperature before you did. The lights settle into whatever palette you prefer, the coffee is already ordered, the phone has already sorted the day into a neat stack of tasks, and each task has a shortcut attached to it like a handle. Directions appear before a wrong turn is possible, messages arrive already filtered, a playlist begins without asking, breakfast is delivered without a kitchen ever becoming a place, and when boredom flickers, the screen offers a remedy so quickly that the boredom never has time to become anything. By afternoon the feeling is relief, the shoulders unclench, the mind stops bracing for delays, and nothing demands patience, repair, or practice. By night there is an aftertaste, small yet stubborn, because the day is hard to claim as lived, hard to retell as a story that belongs to anyone, hard to remember with weight, and strangely difficult to receive with gratitude, since nothing appeared to cost, nothing appeared to be given, and nothing asked for return. Convenience feels like relief, but it removes the effort that turns experience into ownership, memory, and gratitude.

When everything works, nothing sticks

Convenience is usually spoken of as a simple good, and the simplest definition is adequate, convenience is the reduction of burdens, delays, and effort in reaching outcomes. Within limits, that reduction is merciful, because pain, disability, scarcity, and needless waste are real, and it is not a moral achievement to suffer from an avoidable obstacle. Yet convenience is rarely only a tool that a person picks up and sets down at will, because repeated relief trains expectation, and expectation becomes a quiet metaphysics, a background belief about what the world should be like. Once that belief settles in, friction begins to look like an error rather than a teacher, and patience begins to look like an insult rather than a virtue.

Friction, as used here, means resistance, constraint, interruption, and the need for skill or patience. It includes the stubbornness of material things, the unpredictability of weather, the slowness of relationships, the distance between intention and mastery, and the delay between effort and payoff. Friction includes the hard parts of life that feel like problems to solve, and it also includes the hard parts that form a person because they cannot be solved quickly, only borne and worked through.

The argument depends on three goods that are often treated as private feelings, even though they are better understood as human achievements that accumulate across time.

Ownership, in the existential sense, is the feeling that an experience is “mine” because a person entered it, shaped it, or was shaped by it. Ownership is thicker than possession, because possession can be instantaneous, while ownership implies authorship, risk, and contact with resistance.

Memory, in the durable sense, is not a passing impression, it is experience integrated into narrative identity, experience that can be recalled, retold, compared, and used as a stable point of reference. Durable memory requires continuity, context, and some form of inner organization.

Gratitude, in the thick sense, is the recognition of cost, gift, and dependency that invites return or care. Gratitude is not merely a mood of appreciation, it is a posture that forms when conditions and costs are visible enough to be acknowledged, and when relationships have room for response.

The organizing premise is straightforward. Convenience often feels like relief, and relief can be good, yet convenience also removes formative effort, and when formative effort is removed, ownership, memory, and gratitude tend to thin, since these goods grow through contact with resistance, time, and visible cost.

Warmth without the fire

Albert Borgmann’s account of modern technology is valuable because it treats convenience as a cultural pattern, not merely a collection of helpful inventions. Borgmann describes what he calls the “device paradigm,” a recurring structure in which a rich practice is hollowed out and its payoff is delivered as a commodity, cleanly and reliably, without requiring the participant to engage the world that once made the payoff meaningful. The device does not simply make a practice easier, it often replaces the practice, and the replacement changes the kind of life a person is prepared to live.

The most intuitive example is heat. A fireplace is not merely a heat-output mechanism, it is a center, wood must be found and carried, time must be spent tending flame, the room becomes arranged around a shared place, and the warmth arrives with a whole set of cues about season, scarcity, and care. Central heating delivers warmth while bypassing that world. The bypass is the point, because the commodity is the payoff purified, delivered without burden, and made safe.

This pattern repeats in food. A meal, especially a shared meal, gathers planning, preparation, waiting, coordination, and the slow exchange of attention across a table. A convenience meal can deliver calories while dissolving place and preparation into something that can be consumed anywhere, even alone, even while distracted. The outcome is obtained, and the practice that once stored memory, reciprocity, and gratitude is left unused, like a muscle that atrophies because it is no longer asked to work.

Borgmann pushes the logic to a troubling conclusion. “But when commodities have reached the final stage of reduction and refinement, leisure outwardly will no longer be distinguishable from sleep or unconsciousness.”¹ The line is severe, yet it names a recognizable experience, the leisure that feels like dissociation, the evening that disappears into a stream of frictionless options, the rest that provides relief without restoration. The point is not that comfort is wrong, the point is that comfort can be engineered so well that it ceases to call forth a person’s presence, and presence is a condition of ownership and memory.

The device paradigm also alters what people desire. When a payoff becomes available without burden, the expectation grows that the payoff should always be available without burden, and that expectation shapes irritation, entitlement, and impatience. A delay begins to feel abnormal, and because it feels abnormal it is less likely to be interpreted as meaningful. This is one reason convenience can erode gratitude, because gratitude depends on interpreting an outcome as gift rather than as default.

Borgmann emphasizes that devices conceal their background. The machinery must be dependable and foolproof, and when it works it disappears. The user encounters the foreground commodity, warmth, entertainment, connectivity, while the background is hidden, maintenance, extraction, labor, expertise, supply chains, and fragility. This concealment is not merely technical, it is moral, because gratitude requires visibility of cost and dependency. When costs are hidden and dependencies are automated away, outcomes are consumed without being received.

Borgmann also notes that abundance has social and civic consequences, which further complicate the story of relief. “Not only did cars and single family homes lose their glamour when they had become common; the spread of these goods has led to definite harms and inconveniences such as crowding, pollution, waste of energy, loss of public transportation and open space.”² The abundance that begins as convenience can, at scale, create new frictions that are diffused across communities and decades, frictions that are harder to see and therefore harder to feel responsible for.

The moral thinning that results from commercialization is described through Borgmann’s summary of Fred Hirsch. “The detrimental effects of commercialization and of commodity fetishism… have until recently been checked by an unacknowledged but powerful social morality… This moral legacy is now being depleted.”³ The emphasis falls on depletion, because a society can live for a time on inherited restraint, inherited gratitude, inherited practices that once made costs visible and obligations durable, yet those inheritances can be spent down when convenience replaces the practices that carried them.

Borgmann’s alternative is not rejection of technology, it is the recovery of focal things and focal practices, realities that gather a world and require participation. A focal practice does not merely deliver an outcome, it opens space, takes time, and demands perseverance, even when the payoff is delayed or subtle. These practices store recollection and anticipation in the body and the calendar, and they keep goods in their depth, which means they keep ownership, memory, and gratitude possible.

Freedom that feels like a whip

Byung-Chul Han’s analysis deepens the argument by showing that convenience does not only remove burdens, it can also create a new form of coercion that feels like freedom. The older picture of harm often involved external constraint, prohibitions, punishments, and enemies that could be named. Han describes a newer pattern in which harm arrives as overload, self-pressure, burnout, depression, and the steady sense that the self is failing a promise of limitless possibility.

In an environment where everything is available, choice multiplies and the self is invited to treat life as a project portfolio. The language that accompanies this shift is bright and affirmative, productivity, optimization, self-improvement, limitless potential. The world becomes less openly forbidding, and in that sense it becomes more comfortable. Yet the comfort has a cost, because when external limits recede, internal demands can intensify. Han captures the strange structure of this modern pressure by describing the achievement-subject as one that “stands free from external instances of domination forcing it to work and exploiting it,” and yet this freedom does not dissolve coercion, because “The absence of external domination does not abolish the structure of compulsion, it makes freedom and compulsion coincide.”¹⁴ This coincidence is the psychological engine of convenience as pressure, since a life designed to remove obstacles can also remove excuses, and when excuses disappear the self becomes the site where all failure must be explained.

The result is not always a loud oppression. It is often quiet, social, and smiling. Han observes that “Today violence issues more readily from the conformism of consensus than from the antagonism of dissent,” which is another way of saying that the pressure to perform rarely arrives as a single villain, it arrives as the atmosphere of expectation.¹⁵ In that atmosphere, self-demand becomes efficient because it is self-administered. Han’s line is crisp, “Auto-exploitation is more efficient than allo-exploitation because a deceptive feeling of freedom accompanies it,” and the deception is precisely what makes convenience dangerous as an ontology, because the person experiences coercion as preference.¹⁶

This matters for friction because friction once supplied a natural boundary, the world said “no” through distance, scarcity, and difficulty. When many of those limits are engineered away, the remaining limits appear to be personal, and personal limits are easier to interpret as shame. The result is a paradoxical exhaustion, where the person feels free to do anything, and therefore feels guilty for not doing everything.

Han also offers a useful vocabulary for attention. Modern life can cultivate hyperattention, rapid shifting across stimuli, vigilant scanning, constant responsiveness. Hyperattention is well suited to an environment of endless prompts, and poorly suited to durable memory. Durable memory requires depth, which requires intervals, which requires a tolerance for boredom, waiting, and the slow gathering of meaning. When convenience abolishes the interval, when the between-times are filled automatically, experience struggles to settle into story.

Intervals are not merely empty gaps between “real” events, they are the time in which events become intelligible, because reflection needs room. Without room, there is only sequence. A person can accumulate an entire day of sequence and still feel strangely unowned, because ownership is not the same as occurrence, ownership requires contact, choice, and interpretation. When the day is arranged to minimize difficulty, it often minimizes the very pauses in which interpretation would have happened.

This is one way convenience can erode gratitude. Gratitude requires reception, and reception requires a pause long enough to notice dependency and cost. A life that is always moving smoothly from one available outcome to the next can feel full, and at the same time it can lack the stillness in which a person recognizes that the outcomes did not originate in the self.

A world that won’t say no

Matthew B. Crawford’s work clarifies why friction is formative, because it ties friction to competence, attention, and the experience of reality as something that must be met rather than merely consumed. When a person encounters a world that resists, the person must adjust, learn, and act. That process expands the self, not by inflating self-esteem, but by enlarging capability and judgment.

Convenience often reduces cognitive strain, and in limited forms that reduction can be protective. Yet a fully engineered reduction of strain can also reduce agency, because it removes occasions in which a person must pay attention in a demanding way. Attention, in Crawford’s sense, is not only a mental spotlight, it is a mode of participation. A person becomes present through effortful attention, and effortful attention often requires friction.

Crawford is especially useful for describing how convenience can relocate authorship. Modern environments often offer menus, curated options, and choice architectures that allow a person to pick without having to build. The person is treated as a chooser more than a doer. Choosing can feel empowering, and still be a form of passivity, because the most significant work, deciding what is possible and what counts as an option, is done elsewhere. The person receives a set of pre-shaped possibilities, then experiences the selection as personal agency.

This relocation also changes how objects are perceived. Convenience teaches the eye to treat the world as a set of compliant props rather than as resistant realities that demand respect. Crawford warns that “This leads to a narcissistic view of objects, where they are merely props for the self rather than real entities demanding attention.”¹⁷ When objects become props, gratitude weakens, because props are assumed, and what is assumed cannot easily be received as gift.

The same pattern can be felt in ordinary competence. Consider driving. Modern systems increasingly aim to insulate the driver from the driving experience, substituting observation for skilled participation, and Crawford notes that “Modern vehicles tend to insulate drivers from the driving experience, preferring a model where the driver is an observer rather than an active participant.”¹⁸ When the body is insulated from feedback, the person becomes less competent and less involved, and the trip becomes less ownable, since ownership grows through attention and action.

Ownership weakens under these conditions because ownership grows through making, maintaining, repairing, and navigating constraints. What can be obtained with a click can be enjoyed, and it is harder to claim as “mine” in the existential sense, because the self did not have to stretch to meet it. A world that never says “no” never requires skill, and skill is one of the ways the self becomes more than preference.

Competence also produces narrative. A person who learns to do something difficult accumulates a sequence of small thresholds, early failure, awkwardness, frustration, partial success, and eventual fluency. Those thresholds form story, and story forms memory. Convenience tends to remove thresholds, and when thresholds are removed, the day becomes smoother and less tellable, because there are fewer moments that divide “before” from “after.”

Gratitude is also shaped by competence. When a person works with resistant materials, tools, and standards, the person learns respect for what exceeds preference. That respect is closely related to gratitude, because gratitude is easier when the world is encountered as gift and limit, rather than as a stage set that exists to serve desire.

Gifts that push back

Marcel Mauss’s account of the gift offers a social grammar for thick gratitude, because it shows that gifts are not simply objects handed over, gifts are actions embedded in reciprocal structures that bind persons across time. Mauss describes how gifts in many societies create obligations, to give, to receive, and to return. These obligations can feel constraining, and they also create belonging, because they place persons within ongoing ties rather than isolated transactions.

This matters for convenience because convenience often presents outcomes as detached from relationships. A frictionless transaction ends cleanly, payment is processed automatically, delivery happens without contact, and the exchange is designed to have no afterlife. The efficiency is real. Yet the efficiency also removes the temporal space in which gratitude would have grown, because gratitude grows when reception creates a claim, a responsibility, or a return.

Mauss’s famous question is why gifts compel return, and his answer refuses the modern assumption that objects are inert. “What imposes obligation in the present received and exchanged, is the fact that the thing received is not inactive.”¹⁹ A meaningful gift does not sit in the corner like a neutral tool. It presses on the receiver because it carries relationship.

Mauss intensifies the claim by describing the giver’s presence inside what is given. “Even when it has been abandoned by the giver, it still possesses something of him.”²⁰ That sentence is not merely poetic. It describes why a gift can feel heavy, why it can summon memory of the giver, and why keeping it without response can feel wrong. In this account, gratitude is not a mood added to an otherwise complete transaction, gratitude is the recognition that the exchange has not ended because the persons have not ended.

This is why Mauss can also write, “Hence it follows that to make a gift of something to someone is to make a present of some part of oneself.”²¹ The gift is not only an object, it is a piece of the giver’s time, status, intention, and vulnerability made material. When modern convenience removes return pathways, when it designs exchanges to be purely consumable and instantly concluded, it does not only save time, it dissolves the very structure that would have made gratitude thick.

Mary Douglas, reflecting on Mauss, warns that modern fantasies of the “free gift” can be corrosive. When a gift is framed as requiring nothing, the receiver may be placed outside mutual ties, and the exchange loses its continuity. Without continuity, the gift becomes a moment that vanishes. This parallel matters because convenience often removes return pathways, and when return pathways are removed, gratitude becomes thin and short-lived.

Thick gratitude therefore depends on structures that make return possible, even when return is not demanded as payment. A thank-you note, a meal returned, hospitality reciprocated, time given back, these are small practices that keep a gift from dissolving into mere consumption. Convenience can make these practices feel unnecessary, and when they are abandoned, relationships become lighter, and lighter relationships tend to produce lighter memories.

News you can’t carry

Neil Postman’s critique of modern media provides a direct account of why memory fails under convenience. Postman argues that television shapes not only what people see, it shapes the form in which seriousness is presented, and when seriousness is presented as entertainment, the viewer is trained to receive without integrating.

Postman states the core diagnosis plainly. “We do not refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember, Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember.”⁴ Fitness implies training, habits, and environment. If the environment delivers information as fragments designed for immediate consumption, the mind adapts to that delivery, and adaptation can become incapacity.

One mechanism is the collapse of historical depth into a narrow present. Bill Moyers, quoted by Postman, captures the embarrassment of this posture. “We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years.”⁷ The problem is not that the recent is unimportant, the problem is that the recent becomes the only thing presented as real, and without a sense of the long past, the present becomes a sequence without context.

Postman’s mirror image is a sharp way of describing the same condition. “A mirror records only what you are wearing today, It is silent about yesterday, With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.”⁶ A continuous present can feel safe because it contains fewer demands for judgment, responsibility, and integration. Yet it is incoherent, and incoherence is hostile to memory, because memory requires connection and narrative.

Postman emphasizes continuity and context as the conditions of integration, and he offers a supporting quotation through Terence Moran. “In the absence of continuity and context, he says, ‘bits of information cannot be integrated into an intelligent and consistent whole.’”⁵ This is a practical description of why modern knowing often feels weightless. If facts are delivered without the labor of connecting them, they remain external, and what remains external cannot be owned.

Convenience is therefore epistemic. It favors immediacy over context, speed over continuity, fragments over argument. It supplies “knowing of” rather than “knowing about.” The viewer receives many impressions, and receives little responsibility. Without responsibility, gratitude becomes difficult, because gratitude depends on recognizing dependence, and recognizing dependence requires a mind trained to see backgrounds, causes, and costs.

Buying back the moment

Pine and Gilmore offer a market signal that memorability has become scarce enough to be staged and sold back. Their example is deliberately domestic and ordinary, which makes it revealing. “Now, in the time-starved 1990s, parents neither make the birthday cake nor even throw the party, Instead, they spend $100 or more to ‘outsource’ the entire event… Welcome to the emerging experience economy.”⁸ The claim is not merely descriptive, it is diagnostic. The outsourcing is a symptom of time pressure, and it is also a training in passivity, because the family becomes an audience to its own ritual.

Pine and Gilmore insist that experiences are distinct offerings. “Experiences are a distinct economic offering, as different from services as services are from goods.”⁹ They go further, making experience feel concrete rather than mystical. “An experience is not an amorphous construct; it is as real an offering as any service, good, or commodity.”¹⁰ This is the language of a society that has learned to treat meaning as a deliverable.

Their definition makes the staging explicit. “An experience occurs when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event.”¹¹ The detail about stage and props matters because it implies that ordinary life has become less able to generate memorability on its own. The staging fills a gap. The gap is not merely a lack of entertainment, it is a lack of owned experience, the kind of experience that grows out of preparation, effort, shared labor, and risk.

Their economic ladder expresses the same logic in compressed form. “Commodities are fungible, goods tangible, services intangible, and experiences memorable.”¹² Convenience pushes life downward toward the fungible and standardized. When ordinary life becomes standardized, people hunger for the memorable, and the memorable becomes an industry.

They also capture the economic incentive that drives this trend. “As goods and services become commoditized, the customer experiences that companies create will matter most.”¹³ The market responds to commoditization by selling memorability. The cultural irony is that convenience helps commoditize life, then the market sells back what convenience helped remove.

This does not mean that purchased experiences are always hollow. Some are participatory, immersive, and skill-based, and some can become focal practices in their own right. The point is that memorability is more durable when it is earned through engagement rather than delivered as spectacle. When a person participates actively, takes risk, shares labor, and navigates resistance, the resulting memory carries ownership, because the self was involved in a way that cannot be replaced by passive absorption.

The convenience machine, how ease erodes the human goods

Across these thinkers a common mechanism appears.

First, convenience extracts a payoff from a rich practice and delivers it as a purified outcome, which reduces participation and dissolves the surrounding world that once carried meaning.

Second, convenience conceals background conditions and costs, which makes dependency harder to see, and when dependency is hard to see, gratitude struggles to form.

Third, convenience multiplies stimuli and compresses time into fragments, producing a continuous present that resists integration, and without integration durable memory becomes rare.

Fourth, convenience replaces doing with selecting inside engineered options, relocating authorship to designers of menus, platforms, and infrastructures.

Fifth, convenience standardizes encounters and flattens participation, which makes experiences more comparable, more repeatable, and less tellable.

These moves explain why effort forms the three goods.

Effort forms ownership because resistance invites skill, patience, and adaptation. Competence expands self-boundaries, and when the self expands, experiences become personally claimable, not because they were purchased, but because they were met.

Effort forms memory because duration and interval allow experience to settle. Reflection needs room. Narrative needs connection. The labor of connecting events into a coherent whole is itself part of what makes an experience durable.

Effort forms gratitude because effort makes cost visible, and cost reveals dependency. Gratitude thickens when a person can see what was given, what it required, and what relationships made it possible. Obligation and return then keep gratitude from evaporating.

The paradox is that relief can be real and erosive at the same time. A life can become easier while the self becomes less agentic, less storied, and less thankful, because the conditions of formation have been removed.

When ease is mercy, the case for convenience and the limits of friction

Convenience has legitimate goods that cannot be denied without cruelty. Accessibility technologies, medical advances, safer transportation, reduced drudgery, and widened access to information can reduce suffering and expand participation in social life. Some frictions are not formative, they are simply oppressive, and reducing them is a moral gain.

The crucial distinction is between convenience as a tool and convenience as a default ontology. When convenience is a tool, it is selectively applied to serve focal commitments, it frees time for practices that matter, and it reduces burdens that deform rather than form. When convenience becomes a default ontology, it becomes the assumption that what matters should be instantly available and unresisting, and under that assumption resistance begins to look like injustice.

This distinction prevents romanticizing hardship. Not every difficulty forms a person. Some difficulties crush, distract, or degrade. The criterion is “focality”, effort that guards a central thing in its depth and identity, rather than effort that exists only because systems are poorly designed or unjust.

The counterargument therefore does not defeat the thesis. The thesis targets the kind of ease that removes formative effort, not relief that supports meaningful effort. A society can reduce suffering and still preserve friction where friction makes human goods possible.

Chosen resistance, rebuilding ownership, memory, and gratitude

If convenience can become a metaphysics, then the remedy must be practical and intentional. It cannot be achieved by vague appreciation of “hard work,” and it cannot be achieved by nostalgia for older hardships. It must be achieved by choosing forms of friction that cultivate ownership, memory, and gratitude.

One route is the recovery of focal practices, practices that require time, place, and perseverance. Cooking a meal with others, tending a garden, repairing what breaks rather than replacing it immediately, reading long books rather than fragments, walking routes that are learned by memory rather than always outsourced to navigation, these are small choices that reintroduce resistance in ways that can form rather than deform.

Another route is designing attention against hyperattention. The between-times can be protected, commuting without constant stimulation, waiting without immediately filling the gap, leaving certain rooms screen-free, placing reading and reflection into the calendar rather than hoping they happen spontaneously. The goal is not deprivation, the goal is space for interpretation, because without interpretation experience remains sequence.

A third route is reclaiming doing from choosing. Competence-building activities, music practice, woodworking, mechanical repair, sustained athletic training, writing that requires revision, are forms of friction that expand the self, and because they expand the self they produce ownership and story.

A fourth route is restoring reciprocal structures that make gratitude thick. Giving that anticipates return, hospitality that creates future hospitality, letters and visits that cost time, shared projects that require mutual dependence, these practices keep gifts from becoming inert outcomes. Gratitude becomes action, and action stores memory.

A fifth route is repairing narrative continuity in a fragment world. Sustained reading, extended argument, and contextual learning cultivate the capacity Postman says is being lost. They train the mind to integrate bits into coherent wholes. A mind capable of integration is also more capable of gratitude, because it can see background causes and human dependencies.

Finally, experiences can be evaluated by participation and immersion. If a staged experience invites active engagement, shared labor, risk, and real presence, it can become owned and memorable. If it invites passive absorption, it tends to vanish, leaving the consumer hungry for another stimulation and another purchase.

The price of a life that’s yours

The opening frictionless day can be imagined again, only revised. The day still contains relief where relief is needed, and it also contains chosen resistance, visible backgrounds, and intervals that allow reflection. There are fewer experiences, and the experiences are thicker. There is less novelty, and more belonging.

Convenience’s relief is real, and when convenience becomes the default form of life it erodes the effort that forms ownership, memory, and gratitude, because it detaches payoff from practice, hides cost, fragments attention, and relocates agency away from doing. What is often called “inconvenience” may be the medium through which a life becomes one’s own, since a life becomes ownable through contact with resistance, through time that allows integration, and through costs that can be seen and returned.

The remaining question is simple enough to be uncomfortable, because it does not ask for a slogan, it asks for a reckoning. What parts of life are being made so smooth, so instantly available, and so neatly delivered, that they can no longer be carried as memory, no longer be claimed as owned experience, and no longer be thanked for with anything thicker than a passing feeling?

-Hank

Endnotes

1. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), quotation provided by user.

2. Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, quotation provided by user.

3. Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, summarizing Fred Hirsch, quotation provided by user.

4. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking, 1985), quotation provided by user.

5. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, quoting Terence Moran, quotation provided by user.

6. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, quotation provided by user.

7. Bill Moyers, quoted in Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, quotation provided by user.

8. B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, “Welcome to the Experience Economy,” Harvard Business Review (July–August 1998), quotation provided by user.

9. Pine and Gilmore, “Welcome to the Experience Economy,” quotation provided by user.

10. Pine and Gilmore, “Welcome to the Experience Economy,” quotation provided by user.

11. Pine and Gilmore, “Welcome to the Experience Economy,” quotation provided by user.

12. Pine and Gilmore, “Welcome to the Experience Economy,” quotation provided by user.

13. Pine and Gilmore, “Welcome to the Experience Economy,” quotation provided by user.

14. Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, quotation provided by user.

15. Han, The Burnout Society, quotation provided by user.

16. Han, The Burnout Society, quotation provided by user.

17. Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), quotation provided by user.

18. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head, quotation provided by user.

19. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, quotation provided by user.

20. Mauss, The Gift, quotation provided by user.

21. Mauss, The Gift, quotation provided by user.