Cultural Commentary: The Pleasure of Inconvenience

We’ve built a world that runs on ease. Everything from the way we shop to the way we socialise has been engineered for maximum convenience—shorter queues, faster checkouts, one-click everything. Our calendars sync across continents, our groceries appear without warning, our attention is endlessly managed for us. The result is a kind of smoothness that feels, at first, like progress. But beneath the polish, something vital has been eroded. When life asks nothing of us, we stop noticing it. When experience is effortless, it becomes disposable.Increasingly, people are waking up to this absence. The pendulum that once swung toward frictionless efficiency is beginning to arc back in the other direction. Across culture, there’s a renewed appetite for slowness, ceremony, even mild discomfort. It’s right there in the small, deliberate inconveniences people now seek: cooking from scratch, volunteering, choosing the long way home. Each act feels like a reclamation of something we’ve lost—patience, community even. As one Dazed article recently framed it, “inconvenience is the cost of community.” It’s an observation that resonates far beyond friendship or urban loneliness; it touches the entire cultural mood.The truth is that protecting our peace has become an ideology. “Boundaries” and “self-care”—both necessary ideas—have morphed into a broader culture of avoidance. We’ve become so accustomed to minimising effort that showing up, staying late, or extending kindness feels burdensome. But connection, whether between people or with a brand, depends on friction. It requires a little resistance, a degree of investment, something to push against. When we avoid all inconvenience, we flatten our capacity for meaning.Behavioural psychology backs this instinct. The Effort Paradox, a 2018 study published in Psychological Review, showed that while people naturally avoid exertion, they also value outcomes more highly when they’ve had to work for them. The same logic drives the IKEA effect: we prize the crooked shelf we built ourselves because our effort has become part of its story. Similarly, in learning theory, desirable difficulty suggests that the right level of challenge improves retention and mastery far more than easy tasks. More recently, researchers demonstrated that even the imagination of exertion can heighten meaning; participants who pictured themselves putting in effort rated outcomes as more significant than those who didn’t. Across every field, the evidence points to the same conclusion: effort doesn’t just lead to better results—it deepens emotional reward.Luxury, of course, has always known this. Effort is built into its DNA. But in recent years, many brands have confused efficiency with excellence. Influenced by the frictionless ideals of tech, they’ve smoothed away the very qualities that once distinguished them—the rituals, delays, and small demands that made engagement feel like an event. It’s easy to see why: seamlessness photographs well. But in practice, it can hollow out experience until nothing remains but surface. When every interaction is instantaneous, nothing lingers.The most meaningful brands—the ones that still command loyalty in a world of abundance—understand that friction, handled with care, is the architecture of memory. A Savile Row suit that takes months to complete becomes a story of anticipation. A journey to Fogo Island, reachable only through multiple flights and a ferry, transforms inconvenience into immersion. The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, with its formal dress code and multi-course dinners served at fixed times, insists on presence. Even the made-to-order linens of Frette or the quiet protocols of Aman’s arrival rituals remind us that the best experiences don’t happen to us; they happen with us.These aren’t acts of exclusion; they’re acts of respect. They signal that time is being spent for you, not on you. They restore rhythm to a world that has forgotten how to pause. And they reframe effort not as obstacle but as intimacy. When a brand invites us to invest something—our time, attention, energy—it creates a relationship rather than a transaction. That mutual effort becomes a quiet declaration: this was worth doing properly.It’s a principle that extends beyond luxury. In psychology, the Benjamin Franklin effect describes how people grow fonder of those they’ve done favours for, rather than those who’ve done favours for them. The very act of effort binds us to others. The same dynamic holds between people and brands: if an experience requires small acts of participation—learning, customising, waiting—the result feels personally owned. This is why friction should be treated as choreography, never clutter. It’s how a brand can transform passive consumption into active belonging.The shift towards deliberate inconvenience isn’t reactionary; it’s restorative. As the cultural pendulum swings back from maximal convenience, luxury brands are uniquely positioned to model a healthier balance—one where slowness is a sign of care, not inefficiency. A handwritten confirmation instead of an automated reply; a product that takes weeks to craft rather than hours to ship; a ritual of arrival that acknowledges the person, not merely their payment. Each gesture acts as a kind of aesthetic friction—slowing us just long enough to notice the texture of what’s happening.We’ve seen this appetite emerge across society in small but telling ways. People are taking up pursuits that demand patience—baking, gardening, printmaking, cold water swimming—as if to remind themselves that effort and fulfilment are intimately linked. While initially we may see these things as nostalgic acts, they’re really countermeasures against the numbing smoothness of modern life. And that same desire for grounded, embodied experience is what people are seeking from brands. Luxury has the tools to meet it: heritage, craft, ritual, and above all, time.When everything around us accelerates, the brands that ask us to slow down become anchors. They give permission to linger, to savour, to feel. In a culture obsessed with ease, they offer the radical luxury of trying. Not striving or struggling—just engaging. Because meaning, as both science and sentiment agree, is found not in what we skip over but in what we work through.Perhaps that’s the paradox of modern comfort: the easier life becomes, the more we crave effort. We want the friction back—not to make things harder, but to make them matter.If you’re exploring how to build more meaning—and a little healthy friction—into your brand experience, speak with one of our consultants via hello@matterofform.com. Behavioural psychology proves what luxury has always known: effort adds value. As society tires of frictionless living, the most resonant brands will be those that make time, ritual and a little resistance feel beautiful again.

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The Pleasure of Inconvenience