The Friction That Builds Us

Mick Jagger gave the New York Times an interview and said something that's been sitting with me. Asked what fame and wealth do to a person, he said you "become disassociated. From other people." His explanation for the mechanism was simple: people in show business spend their time with other people in show business. Year over year, you lose contact with real life — not through any single decision, but through the compounding effect of who's in the room with you. And then he added the part that actually stuck: the damage isn't temporary. It's not a phase you snap out of when the tour ends. His state of mind was permanently changed.

I've never been famous. But I've spent a career in rooms with people who carry a different kind of altitude — extreme wealth and the power that comes with building the platforms a large fraction of the world runs its life through. Across stints at Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, I've heard Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Bezos speak in casual, unscripted settings. What Jagger named, I recognized on contact.

It isn't arrogance — it's separation

Arrogance would actually be the easier thing to describe. Arrogance announces itself; you can point at it, and it usually comes packaged with insecurity you can trace to a cause. What I'm describing is quieter than that. It's a kind of separation — a sense that the ordinary frictions of life have been sanded away so completely that they no longer register as frictions at all.

Going to a store for milk. Applying for a mortgage and waiting to hear back. Starting a new project and not knowing if it will work. For most people, these carry some real effort — logistical, financial, or emotional. Effort is how we learn where the edges of our control are. For the extremely wealthy, that effort has usually been removed for so long that its absence stops looking like a removal and starts looking like the natural order of things. What's left behind is an air of omnipotence — not claimed, just accumulated, from the simple and repeated experience of resistance not showing up.

Some of the people I watched were warm. Some were cold. Some were playful in a way that read as genuinely enjoying the room. But underneath the personality differences, each one carried the same quiet certainty: that the world would rearrange itself around their attention. And — this is the part that's easy to miss — they were usually right. The certainty wasn't delusion. It was calibrated to their actual, lived experience. That's what makes it durable instead of fragile.

Friction is not the enemy

Here's where I want to push past just restating Jagger's point and add something of my own: I think we (myself included, as someone who builds software for a living) have a habit of treating friction as something to be engineered out of existence wherever we find it. Fewer steps, fewer clicks, fewer moments of doubt or waiting. Often that's the right call — a lot of friction really is just waste.

But friction also does something else, almost as a side effect: it keeps you calibrated. Every time you wait for a mortgage approval, or aren't sure a new project will land, or have to actually go somewhere and stand in a line, you're getting a small, repeated update on how the world treats an ordinary person. That update is data. Lose enough of that data, for long enough, and your internal model of "how things generally go" quietly stops matching how things go for almost everyone else. You don't notice the drift because nothing in your daily experience contradicts it.

This is, I think, the actual mechanism behind what Jagger called damage. It's not that money or fame corrupts character in some moral sense. It's that money and fame are extremely effective at removing the very inputs a person needs to stay accurately calibrated to ordinary life. Remove the inputs, and the model doesn't stay put — it drifts toward whatever the new, frictionless environment implies. Eventually the drift stops being a temporary offset and becomes the baseline. That's the "permanently changed" part. There's no natural mechanism that pulls it back, because pulling it back would require reintroducing exactly the friction that's been engineered away.

Not a villain's story

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into a morality tale, and I don't think that's earned. None of the people I watched set out to lose touch with ordinary life. It happened as a byproduct of building something enormous — and building something enormous, almost by construction, removes your exposure to the ordinary frictions everyone else has to live inside. The people who build the platforms most of us live our lives through are, by the time they reach that altitude, among the least equipped to feel what living inside those platforms actually feels like for everyone else. That's a strange and slightly unsettling asymmetry, and it's worth naming plainly rather than either excusing it or turning it into a takedown.

If there's a lesson I'm taking for myself, it's not really about the ultra-wealthy at all — it's about paying attention to which frictions in my own life I'm optimizing away without noticing what they were quietly doing for me. Some resistance is worth keeping on purpose.