Encounters In The Real

In modern life, it’s easy to drift towards eliminating all friction. Go monk mode and lock yourself away to build your next start-up. Code day and night until you emerge from your dungeon, reborn through discipline and deprivation, ready to scale your new empire. Or dive into therapy in isolation, retreating from community until you can re-enter society as the butterfly you’ve been sculpting in the chrysalis of self-work.

None of these are inherently bad. But what unites them is the attempt to remove the friction that comes from actually being in the world. It’s the same logic that drives us to optimise every minute of our routines, or to curse the people slowing us down in traffic or in the queue for your morning coffee.

But it runs deeper than that. What about hunger? What about sleep? What about the tedium of showering or the frustration of needing rest?

These are everyday frictions that remind us of the Lacanian idea of the Real as it knocks against Reality. The limits of our control, the body that ages and resists, the fact that we will die. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

For the philosopher and social psychologist Erich Fromm, however, this goes beyond lifestyle. It’s an orientation toward life itself in which we prefer order to spontaneity, manipulation to growth and mechanical precision to organic vitality. It’s visible in the man who tends to his car more tenderly than to his partner. In corporations that value productivity over creativity. In dating apps that sterilise unpredictability through the logic of algorithmic compatibility. In aged-care facilities that hide the natural decay of life behind sterile walls and outsourced compassion. In architects who privilege glass towers and symmetrical grids over irregular, breathing forms. In AI systems replacing human judgment with metrics of “fit.” In the iPhone, where nature becomes a filtered image and faces are smoothed into porcelain replicas of humanity.

All of this, says Fromm, reveals what he calls our necrophilic orientation, an unconscious love of death. Not death as an event, but as an attitude. A desire to eliminate everything that makes life alive. Vulnerability, unpredictability, spontaneity, decay. We fear these, so we freeze them out through machines, systems, and sterilised environments. The more lifeless our objects, the more we seem to worship them. The gleaming, perfect surfaces of our devices become the sacred symbols of a culture that confuses cleanliness with transcendence. What we truly venerate is not life, but lifeless perfection. A world scrubbed free of nature, mess, and the human.

What we end up with is a world obsessed with abolishing resistance and roughness. And this obsession isn’t just aesthetic, it’s existential. It reflects the erasure of the Other, of what is not me.

The presence of the other introduces friction, depth, and difference into our lives. It disrupts our control. But we don’t want that. So we dissolve everything into sameness, into the frictionless comfort of the smooth.

Smoothness erases the wrinkles, marks, and textures that make things and people alive. It’s another form of necrophilia, mistaking the absence of resistance for the fullness of life. But a resistance-free existence is no life at all.

Real life requires encounter. Encounters with the strange, the resistant, the negative, the unpredictable, the uncomfortable, the spontaneous, the alive. It’s defined not by control or convenience, but by friction, depth, and alterity. In other words, life begins where smoothness ends.