In the new year, we're doing friction

It's been said (by me) that the second worst thing after planning a funeral is applying for a job.

My late grandmother’s piano and worn-out seat. Friction made visible through her pursuit of expertise.

Since leaving my tech job in 2024 and turning towards work in slower paced, often tech-regressive spaces (healthcare documentation and land management) I found that my most recurring thoughts have been about friction: seeking it, inserting it into a process, embracing it when it appears, questioning the removal of it. Being on the job hunt for part of the last year meant I had to be on LinkedIn, a platform that I joined in 2012 (!) when it was little more than a bland professional site with no real benefit other than to demonstrate you were part of the workforce. I completely forgot about it.

Now, some 12 years later, it has become a tragically indispensable tool for job seekers and utilizes what might be the most curse form of AI: the Easy Apply function. Enough has been written and said about the damage this has done to the job market and I bring it up as just one example as to why I’ve become more endeared to friction than ever before. The adoption of a ‘frictionless’ service to ‘help’ you land a job has gone completely awry, removing any sort of ‘connection’ you might be seeking on a site whose mission is explicitly that. Rather than help you accurately assess a career move or job opportunity, LinkedIn streamlines foolish hope, and dutifully records your losing streak. Everyone is sick of it.

Which is why I wasn’t surprised to see friction being discussed directly on LinkedIn. Last week, I saw a post in my feed by Edmond Lau and Mouthwash Studios titled: A Brave New (Frictionless) World that explores and encourages the emerging design trend of inserting friction into cultural products, whether it’s a pop-star performing opera music, maximalist interior design, or producing an anti-viral video to promote a coat.

I’ve noticed friction in the conversation for awhile. Aside from being remarked upon casually by my friends, it’s been explored at length in cultural pieces of much higher quality than I can produce. I also received an MP3 player for my birthday (after having a dream about owning one again, which filled me with a deep sense of pleasure.)

The appearance of the essay on a job site pushed me to finally write something, because while the idea of friction might be reaching critical mass, there is still one area of life where friction is always present and where it is simultaneously always trying to be optimized away, regardless of its cultural cachet.

I am talking about funerals, of course. (Almost) no one wants to insert friction into planning/having a funeral. Why would you? You’ve just experienced a loss and are grieving. You’re already juggling work, family, etc., and now you have to deal with a dead body and other people’s schedules. I’ll make the unpopular argument that the funeral industry’s trajectory, for all its historical evils, has been shaped as much by responding to our demands for frictionlessness as it has by capitalizing on those demands. This has given us the option to simply pick up the phone, arrange for a cremation, and be sent the ashes without ever having to set foot inside a funeral home (or see the body.) Yet, I’ll stop short of making a full-throated critique of direct funeral services because I do believe that with intention, these sorts of options serve a legitimate purpose.

My concerns around ‘funeral optimization’ has more to do with the type of seamless interactions that Lau, et al. characterize as having the qualities of Jankspace, a concept put forth by Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung wherein all this optimization leads to a hollow sort of friction. Friction that doesn’t elevate an experience, but instead frustrates and alienates the person navigating it (think: incomplete 2-factor authentication because your phone screen is shattered, waiting two weeks for a cremation to be complete because you are not the deceased’s next of kin.)

Further contradicting the push for seamless funeral services, for the twenty years that I’ve been a funeral director, I’ve consistently heard people ask for more. Maybe not too much more, maybe they just want to be present during a cremation, but there is a yearning for connection at the end of life that can’t be filled by a tribute detached from the process it took to create it.

Adding purposeful friction into deathcare is largely why I began working in natural burials. Its why I underwent the truly friction-filled process of establishing a cemetery. My co-founders and I are now responsible for keeping a physical piece of land safe, accessible, and thriving so that families can hold burials. The burials themselves insert an immense amount of friction into people’s lives. We are located in a very rural area, at least 30 minutes from the closest town, an hour from a major city. The ground is uneven, the weather does what it wants (hot, mostly), and there are prickly plants and bugs. Despite this, every burial we’ve had has been transcendent. Whether it was a full body or cremated remains, the effort gave way to a deep sense of peace. People came together to in a non-abstract, somewhat inconvenient location and spent time together in their grief, regaining some sense of ritual and community.

Nothing adds friction to a situation like dealing with a dead body. They have to be moved, cleansed, refrigerated, and put to rest somewhere using our own living bodies and resources. If you’ve never had to deal with this, the thought alone might repulse you. If you have done it, perhaps it was an awful experience because of the other pressures of daily living. I’ve done it a lot, as a funeral director but also as a human experiencing the death of someone. This past month, I went to three funerals, one for my grandmother and two for friends. Those personal, painful losses resulted in profound moments of clarity and reinforced the reasons that I have dedicated my career in funeral service to facilitating some level of friction in death. A lot of healing happens in the process. It’s like holding your breath for as long as you possibly can, until it’s so uncomfortable you feel your limbs and face tingle on the edge of explosion, and then gasping in a long, deep inhale that awakens parts of your brain you didn’t know you had. The world immediately looks different. The light is brighter, the air is sharper, the connections are vibrant. Some real work was done and heavy blocks removed.

I am happy to report that you can engage in some of this type of work and relief before you ever have to actually plan a funeral. You can practice. Just like they tell you its easier to get a job when you already have a job, its easier to plan a funeral before you have to actually have one.

I am not suggesting a full-on death meditation (though those are cool and useful). I mean simply thinking about a funeral option (any option, doesn’t matter) that involves an element of friction, that doesn’t avoid a difficult task but embraces it. Friction is “…a tether to patience and effort” as Lau states, and within it a sense of deep appreciation.

My criteria for a friction-filled funeral is based on how engaged your senses are, what you physically endured to complete the service. Take burying cremated remains an example. Earlier this year my cemetery held a small ceremony to bury the ashes of a man. It was a magnificently windy day. The family dug their own hole and then each person slipped on a pair of white gloves. One by one, they reached into the container that held his ashes and placed handfuls into the earth. The wind made this a challenge, so myself and other attendees huddled close together to create a sort of windshield around the person scooping the ash. It only sort of worked. Inevitably, wisps of his remains were set free by the gusts, swirling on and around us and, I am certain, in us. I remember feeling so hyper-present and alive, in awe of a moment that would never again be repeated. It felt like the beginning of something rather than the end.

Practicing planning a funeral for yourself would be the most helpful to your friends and family, but if that’s too close for comfort, you can just practice without anyone in particular in mind. Just start thinking about what would be interesting or meaningful and do some research around how you could get it done. You will be surprised at what is permitted. I have found that when I tell people what I do, it opens them up to share some really personal and creative ideas around what they would like to see at a funeral. While I do encounter hesitation and even discomfort around the topic, more often than not, people are interested and reveal personal desires they don’t typically have a place to discuss.

I’ll wrap this up by sharing a few of the most friction-filled types of funerals that are legal, that you can plan for, and that will most definitely result in a radical change in perspective:

A Norse funeral. I’ve noticed men frequently mention this when engaging in the topic of what type of funeral they want. It could involve a boat trip and flaming arrows but please, not the subjugation of young females. I am actually really keen to do this for someone and have some plans devised for how we could do it at my cemetery. Perhaps I’ll write a separate post about this later.

An open-air cremation on a pyre. As state above,cremation can still be filled with friction! In this case, if you don’t live near Crestone, Colorado, which is where the nation’s only open-air cremation facility is located, you will need to arrange for transportation of the body to the site. You could drive the body yourself by obtaining a burial transit permit, or have it flown in or driven by a funeral home. Either way would be worth it, in my opinion, as the pyre is in a beautiful spot located in the Sangre de Cristo Mountain range. Crestone has been granted a conditional use permit to allow for this unique form of cremation.

Full-body burial at sea. Both coasts in the United States have organizations that offer deep-sea burial packages that include a boat trip off the coast about 70 miles to reach a depth of at least 600 feet (or 1,800 if you’re in Florida). Ashes on the Sea has a great list of FAQs for more information about full-body sea burials. Again, if you’re not in the state where the sea burial is performed, transportation would have to be arranged.

Space burial. I hear this one a lot, too. On it’s face, I don’t think it quite fits the friction requirements. Most (all?) of these services only take cremated remains into space, so you might also consider holding a memorial on earth as well, perhaps one where you can gather to watch the remains fall back to earth ‘as a shooting star.’