The 24-Click Funeral for Human Creativity
The true cost of friction is measured in lost momentum, not just wasted minutes.
Rhythmic Violence
Slamming the left button of a generic optical mouse 24 times just to approve a 4-dollar expense is a form of rhythmic violence. You can hear it from the hallway-a staccato, frantic burst of plastic hitting plastic that sounds less like productivity and more like a Morse code plea for rescue. I watched a colleague do this for 104 consecutive minutes yesterday. She wasn’t building a cathedral or solving the climate crisis; she was navigating a labyrinth of drop-down menus and ‘confirm’ buttons that had been designed by someone who clearly hates their own species. We talk about the Great Resignation and the quiet quitting phenomenon as if they are grand philosophical shifts in the zeitgeist, but more often, they are the logical result of 24 clicks when 4 would have sufficed.
24
Clicks
[The mouse is a metronome of misery.]
The Primal Satisfaction of Precision
I just parallel parked my car into a space with 4 inches of clearance on either side, and I did it on the very first try. The alignment was so perfect it felt like a cosmic alignment. There is a deep, primal satisfaction in precision, in a tool-in this case, a steering wheel and a set of mirrors-that responds exactly how

















