May 13, 2025

Resistance is my friend and teacher

Good morning. It looks suspiciously like spring outside, but I have lived in Nova Scotia long enough not to trust it until I go outside.

I'm thinking about resistance today. Resistance is one of our greatest teachers, isn't she? That which we are ambivalent about has no power over us. But that which we resist…

I would imagine that the degree of resistance one feels about something is proportional to how much one cares about it. In "The War of Art", Steven Pressfield says that "Resistance is not a peripheral opponent… resistance is the enemy within."

That’s a bit dramatic, Steven. Nothing within us can be our enemy—it's all there for a reason. Any of our anti-social or challenging behaviours developed out of a need for protection, and had to have been effective enough to stick.

Resistance is no different. It's like a barricade that crops up around tenderness, urging us to take another path. The risk of loss and failure is too extreme here! Try the next door! But if you take resistance at face value and do keep moseying along, the loss is so much more.

I don't know why this newsletter is coming out like a motivational speech. I just sit down at my little laptop with my little coffee every Tuesday morning and blab whatever comes out, and I guess today I'm feeling fired up.

Anyways, I would risk failing at something I care about over the risk of never trying, the latter being an unfulfilled promise. You never have to know if you're good enough if you don't try. Noticing resistance is the best way I’ve found to root out those deep desires.

I was thinking about that earlier as I read this Substack piece on friction. The author, Kyla Scanlon, describes friction, or lack thereof, as a commodity: something that you can opt out of for a price.

"We have a world where friction gets automated out of experiences, aestheticized in curated lifestyles, and dumped onto underfunded infrastructure and overworked labor. The effort doesn't disappear; it just moves." -Kyla Scanlon

The attention economy is a roiling sea of infinite marketable permutations that all capitalize on our fundamental resistance to…resistance. “It's not just about keeping you glued to the screen anymore,” Kyla writes. “It's about convincing you that any sort of real-world effort is unnecessary, that friction itself is obsolete.”

After dipping into the frictionless pool of Google just now, I have learned that, physically speaking, resistance and friction are not the same. However, for this newsletter, they are.

Resist resisting resistance! Risk something today! It feels good to be alive!

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this newsletter. You can comment using the link below, or just hit reply to this email, and I’ll get it. xoxo

sophie ⊹˚₊