I was in class this past weekend, continuing the work on my Business Analysis Certification, and the topic we were discussing was “solution design.” One thing led to another and we were going round the table talking about interfaces and user experience and people-centric innovation.

This all came to me bringing up my current desktop computer setup, specifically that I’m using an eclectic and expensive mechanical keyboard and running Ubuntu Linux as my operating system.

Both are interesting choices, and the instructor called them out, not to question the choices but to forward a discussion and drive a point.

“Why do you use a mechanical keyboard?” he asked.

I fumbled through a reply that manifested in my brain, a jumble of words that I’d heard on keyboard video reviews about typing sound profiles and tactile feedback.

“So why do you run Linux?” he followed up with.

Here I said something about it being a better coding platform and free and so on.

Neither of my responses were wrong, but I got to thinking later that they didn’t really tell the whole story. And the reasons are not disjointed, either. Sure, mechanical keyboards are aesthetic choices and Linux is a fairly mature platform with particular benefits, but both are costly to me in either money spent to buy them or time spent to understand them.

So why did I use them?

Here’s what I think: both the keyboard and the operating system–and a dozen other things I could list if I were to wander around my house and point at my eclectic choices–have a higher “friction” associated with them.

Or, simply, they are slightly uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable to acquire. To use. To maintain. To explain.

I realize that I often choose interfaces and tools that bring me mild discomfort because it forces me out of complacency. Discomfort breaks the surface tension of the world, just a bit, and makes everything a bit more interesting. There are dozens of so-called benefits, as well as any number of disadvantages to these choices, but the tension of those things is really, deep down, my personal allure.

And there is lesson there, isn’t there?

Some things need to be simple, frictionless, and invisible.

But, too, we should try to do things that challenge us. We should do things not because they are easy, but exactly because they are not.