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As writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton framed it, and as a recent Fortune piece argued, we shouldn’t think of these micro-moments of awkwardness as glitches to be smoothed away. Instead, we should see them as reps. They're strength training for the hard work of human connection, relating with other people and experiencing community.
The Fortune article, written by Unify America's Michelle Sobel, makes the case in career terms: the skills that don't get automated are the human ones. [1] Working through disagreement. Making your case calmly and then actually listening to the pushback. A 2025 survey she cites found that 96% of employers say the ability to work through disagreement productively matters at work — but only 34% think recent grads are ready to do it. Her prescription is practice, and lots of it: every awkward phone call is a rep, every conversation you didn't bail on is a rep, and discomfort is the whole point.
I think she's onto something much bigger than career readiness, though. Because the friction that's been designed away isn't only the friction of ordering coffee or booking a dentist appointment. It's the friction of being honest with the people we care about. And that's a muscle that almost nobody is training.
At SeekHealing, we've had a name for friction maxing long before the internet gave it one. We call it Rule Zero.
Rule Zero is our bold addition to Don Miguel Ruiz's Four Agreements, which outline four life-changing practices for strong communication with others:
When I first started working with these agreements early in a substance use recovery journey, and tried practicing them in my relationships, I quickly realized that Ruiz must have just mastered a first step that precedes these agreements and doesn’t come quite as naturally to me: knowing what to say at all in the first place. Being authentic didn’t come naturally to me. I was raised in a world of superficial conversations and conflict avoidance that was so unbearable I figured out how to escape it with drugs.
Rule Zero says: if something feels awkward or uncomfortable to say, and you're not saying it because you're afraid of the other person's reaction, you must find a way to say it.
At first pass, Rule Zero means leaning into being real: which is sometimes just saying the thing that’s off-script in a social setting, or being more honest than the next social cue anticipates in a casual interaction. And in closer relationships and friendships, it means naming the proverbial elephant in the room. It means having the courage to bring up the thing that's sitting between you and someone else – the small hurt, the unspoken assumption, the appreciation you never voiced – because leaving it unsaid slowly creates distance, and distance is how relationships die (or never get a chance to live in the first place).
It is not easy. I tell people that plainly. Speaking your truth doesn't guarantee it will be met well. Hierarchy makes it hard. So does a lack of trust that your feedback will land, or a lived experience outside the dominant culture that has taught you, reasonably, that speaking up isn't safe. Rule Zero doesn't pretend any of that away. What it offers is a practice: notice the discomfort. Pause. Decide whether this is a connection you want to keep or deepen … and if it is, find the words. Whether it’s in the moment, or 3 days later, or a month later, or a year later. Ask for consent to have the conversation. Watch your tone, and then fumble your way through saying the thing. On the other side of that awkwardness and friction is a kind of closeness you simply can't reach any other way.
This is the part the current conversation about friction-maxing is missing, in my opinion. Friction isn't just good for your resume. It's the raw material of real intimacy.
If being real with other people feels harder than it used to, that's not a personal failing. The conditions have changed.
In 2023, the former U.S. Surgeon General issued a landmark advisory naming loneliness and social isolation a public health epidemic. Roughly half of U.S. adults report measurable loneliness. The health toll is staggering: a lack of social connection can raise the risk of premature death about as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. And the sharpest decline in time spent in person with friends between 2003 and 2020 was among young people aged 15 to 24, who saw that time fall by roughly 70%. [3]
Read that last number again. The generation now being told to friction-max is the same generation that has been handed the fewest chances to practice connection in the first place. As Sobel puts it, this isn't a generation that's afraid of hard conversations or real connection. It's a generation that hasn't been given anywhere near enough chances to practice them.
Modern scholars have offered a range of explanations for rising social isolation, generally emphasizing structural and cultural change rather than individual failings. Frequently cited structural factors include the growth of single-person households, greater residential and job mobility that separates people from extended family, longer working hours and commuting, suburbanization and car dependence, declining participation in religious congregations and civic and labor organizations, and increased consumption of television and mass media for entertainment rather than entertainment previously sought or created in social gatherings. [2]
For the young people we’re asking to friction-max, it’s largely due to the wholesale displacement of in-person interaction by digital technology, social media, and most recently, AI replacements for human interaction.
I see the same erosion close to home, here where I live in Western North Carolina. The relational fabric that used to catch people – the neighborly, intergenerational, Appalachian traditions of showing up for one another – has thinned. Every frictionless convenience, however genuinely useful, removes one more small, ordinary occasion to practice being a person among other people.
None of this is an argument against technology. It's an argument for being more intentional about connecting with each other than we’ve ever had to be before. If the world will no longer hand us discomfort by default, we have to go looking for it on purpose.
Here's the reframe worth holding onto: awkwardness isn't a sign you're doing social connection wrong. It's a sign you're doing it at all.
Anything worth building with another human being – trust, honesty, repair after a rupture, the simple act of letting yourself be seen – is a direct result of discomfort. There's no frictionless path to a friend who really knows you. The vulnerability of saying "I felt hurt when that happened" or "I'd love to get to know you better" or "can I tell you something that's been on my mind?" is not a bug in the system of relationships. It is the system. The people who build rich, durable relationships aren't the ones who feel less awkward. They're the ones who learned to let the awkwardness be there and speak anyway.
It’s true for friendships, workplace relationships, romantic connections, marriages, neighbors, and mentors. It’s a universal skill for a universal need. And like any skill, it gets easier with reps and practice.
The catch with friction maxing on your own is that the highest-stakes conversations (your partner, your spouse, your boss, your best friend) are the hardest place to start practicing. You wouldn't learn to swim by jumping off the high dive. This is exactly why SeekHealing and other social health organizations facilitate experiences of connection for participants to take a walk in the shallow end. These are structured, psychologically safe spaces where the whole group has agreed to lean into a little discomfort together, and where a facilitator holds a trauma-informed container so you can take the risk. We call them “Connection Practice” meetings.
We also teach “Listening Training” classes where you can learn the actual mechanics of authentic expression, non-defensive communication and reflective listening: how to stay in someone else's thinking long enough to understand it before you jump to your own take. How to really listen without just planning what you’re going to say next. It’s a social mindfulness practice that’s like yoga for conversation. And through “Authentic Relating” games (structured, playful exercises that take minutes to create the kind of connection that can otherwise take years) people discover that vulnerability can be light, even fun, and that a room full of strangers can become a room full of people who feel seen.
SeekHealing programs are, quite literally, a gym for the social muscles the Fortune article says the workplace is crying out for. Other programs, like Unify America's "Civic Gym," pairs students to work through hard topics with someone who sees the world differently – same idea, aimed at civic dialogue. The reps you get in facilitated spaces — asking two follow-up questions before offering your own opinion, naming a feeling out loud, sitting with a perspective you disagree with — are the same reps that make the harder, higher-stakes conversations in the rest of your life possible.
So try it. Make the phone call. Introduce yourself. And then, take it a step further: say the awkward thing to the friend you've been avoiding it with. Name the elephant. Ask the question you're a little afraid to ask.
And if practicing that alone feels like too much, too fast: don’t worry. That's normal, and that's exactly what facilitated connection is for. You don't have to be good at it. You just have to be willing to feel a little awkward in a room full of people who've agreed to feel awkward with you.
The friction is not the obstacle to connection. The friction is the connection. Lean in.
Jenesis Nicolaisen is the co-founder and Executive Director of SeekHealing, pioneering a novel “social health” protocol for treating addiction and addressing the opioid overdose crisis through human connection.
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