Sean Pyles

Well, let us know how much money you save by not doing that online shopping when you're at your most vulnerable after a day of working in parenting.

Kids are out of school.

You guys are kind of selling me on this brick thing.

I'm tempted to get one, but we use scrolling and spending as a way to self-soothe a lot of the time.

And this actually gets me to what I'm doing in February, which is creating more friction in my life, especially around spending.

I read this article in The Cut that is titled, in 2026, we are friction maxing.

Did you guys see this?

Very good read.

It was a great piece.

So for those who didn't read it, the gist is that we as a society have really let ourselves become kind of overly coddled by technology, much to our detriment.

We're offloading our thinking and our creativity to AI chatbots.

And we're so desperate for entertainment at all times that we're scrolling social media while we're watching a Netflix show while we have an iPad up and we're like playing with our kids at the same time.

And, you know, the article does talk about parenting, too.

I'm sure you guys could relate to this and how it can be tempting to just shove that iPad in front of your kid just to get them to kind of calm down.

And I realized that we are doing the same thing to ourselves.

Like we are iPad kids without even realizing it.

So the idea with friction maxing is that you are intentionally rebuilding some of the friction in day to day life to actually enjoy what it means to be a person learning and growing and sometimes struggling as we're alive, because that helps you grow over time.

I'm taking this principle and applying it to my money in February.

I'm doing it in a kind of chaotic way just so I don't get bored.

This week, the first week of the month, I'm not going to buy anything online, even books.