Say the awkward thing. (it's good for your health)

One of these new Gen-Z terms is worth pausing on, though – friction maxing. Have you heard it? It means deliberately leaning into the small, uncomfortable moments that technology has quietly engineered out of daily life. Calling instead of texting. Ordering at the counter. Introducing yourself to a stranger instead of looking down at your phone.

This recent Fortune article framed these micro-moments of awkwardness not as glitches to smooth away, but as strength training for the hard, human work of connection & living in community. And I think that's onto something much bigger than just career readiness. Because the friction that's been designed away isn't only the friction of ordering coffee. It's the friction of being honest with the people we care about. And that's a muscle almost nobody is training.

At SeekHealing, we've had a name for this long before the internet did. We call it Rule Zero: 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. It means naming the elephant in the room: bringing up the small hurt, the unspoken assumption, the appreciation you never voiced. The longer I’ve practiced with this, the more I’ve learned that leaving that thing unsaid slowly creates distance, or outright resentment … and distance is how relationships die.

I won’t sugarcoat it: practicing Rule Zero isn’t easy. In my experience, it’s been an almost endless rabbit-hole of getting real. The reframe worth holding onto is: awkwardness isn't a sign you're doing social connection wrong. It's a good sign – a sign that you're engaging in real social connection at all. There's no frictionless path to a friend who really knows you.

If being real with people feels harder than it used to, don’t be too hard on yourself. Conditions have changed – in a big way. Roughly half of U.S. adults report loneliness now, and in-person time with friends fell about 70% for people aged 15 to 24 between 2003 and 2020. With so many recent and rapid changes in culture and technology, we have to go looking, on purpose, for the friction the world used to hand us by default.

Which is exactly what facilitated connection, like what you find at SeekHealing, is for: a gym for your social muscles, so to speak. Connection Practice meetings, Listening Training classes, Seeker Pairs, connection games that you play at one of our socials … these are all experience you can choose to step into where a facilitator holds a safe container for the awkward, so that you can get weird in the shallow end first.

So try it. Make the call. Name the elephant. Say the awkward thing.

The friction is not the obstacle to connection. The friction is the connection. Lean in.

For a world that feels worth living in,

Jenesis Nicolaisen
they/she
Founder, SeekHealing