I am a software engineer, and I am very good at making things efficient. So when I moved to London for a new job, I optimised my life the way I’d optimise anything else. I removed the friction.

Groceries delivered. Work from home most days. Food at the tap of an app. Everything I needed could arrive at my door without me speaking to a single human being. I was proud of it, honestly. I’d built a frictionless life.

It took me about a year to understand that I had optimised away the one thing I actually needed: other people. The friction was the point, and I’d deleted it.

A perfectly efficient loneliness

On paper I was thriving. Good salary, good code, a flat I liked. My calendar was full of meetings, so I felt busy, and busy felt like a life.

But the meetings ended at six and the flat was silent. My entire social interaction most days was a standup call where we each said what we’d done and what we’d do next. I’d go whole weekends speaking to no one, just me and the glow of a monitor, telling myself this was fine because I was an introvert and I was getting things done.

The truth crept up slowly. I’d feel a strange flatness on a Sunday evening. I’d notice I was the only person in the team who never had weekend plans to mention on Monday. I had hundreds of contacts and nobody to text “you around?” I had moved to one of the greatest cities on earth and built myself a very comfortable, very efficient cell.

The thing about loneliness when you’re good at coping is that you can run it for a long time before it crashes. But it does crash.

The most inefficient thing I’d done in years

I didn’t have some big revelation. I just got tired of the flatness. And in a very on-brand move, I tried to solve it, which led me to a directory of clubs, which led me to a local running club that met on Wednesday evenings. Free. Beginners welcome.

It was gloriously inefficient. I had to leave the house at a fixed time, travel to a fixed place, and do something I wasn’t good at, in front of strangers, with no way to mute myself or turn off my camera. Every instinct I’d trained said no.

I went. I was unfit and slightly embarrassed and the first kilometre hurt. But somebody ran next to me, a guy who asked what I did and then, mercifully, talked about something other than work, and the conversation just kept going because we were doing a thing together and it filled the silences for us.

For the first time in a year, I closed the laptop because I wanted to be somewhere. Not because a task required it. Because people were expecting me.

Re-introducing the friction

That was the unlock. Not the running, really, though I’ve come to love that too. It was the friction. The fixed time, the same faces, the low-grade obligation of people who’d notice if I didn’t show. The exact things I’d spent a year engineering out of my life were the things that brought it back.

The Wednesday group are proper friends now. We get dinner. They take the mick out of my pace and my posture. One of them helped me move flat. None of it was efficient and all of it was the point.

If you’ve optimised yourself into a corner, here’s what an unfit first kilometre taught me:

  • Convenience and connection pull in opposite directions. Every bit of friction you remove is often a tiny human interaction you’ve deleted. Add some back on purpose.
  • A recurring, in-person club is the highest-value thing you can put in your calendar. Same time, same place, same people. Running clubs are perfect because the activity carries the conversation. Start with the beginner-friendly ones if, like me, you’re starting from zero.
  • The obligation is a feature, not a bug. Being mildly expected somewhere is how a stranger becomes a friend.
  • You can’t deliver community to your door. You have to go and stand in the room.

I built a life with no friction and called it freedom. It was actually a very well-designed way of being alone.

If your life has become a little too frictionless, add some back. Find a running club near you or browse clubs by your borough. Put it in the calendar. Then, the hard part for people like us: actually go.