The friction between reality and perception
An article about why the map never matches the terrain.
In the analog notebooks in which I write down ideas for stories or articles, first drafts and outlines (and the occasional shopping list), I also jot down quotes that I find interesting. Last year, I watched a few video lectures given by the famous tech and business writer Michael Lewis (of “Moneyball” and “The Big Short” fame, among others).
And in one of the lectures, he said: “A storyteller should always be looking for friction between reality and perception.” And I rewound the lecture to hear him say it again, and I thought about it, and then I wrote it down. And later I forgot in which of my notebooks, but it doesn’t matter: I don’t have to look it up, I still remember it clearly.
I just can’t get over how perfectly he summed up the “Why” of storytelling.
I’ve spent the last decade writing in different registers: scientific papers, whitepapers, straight-forward articles and how-to books on tech, non-fiction essays, speculative fiction. My work was about humans, about digital infrastructure and about the ethics that govern how they work together, or fail to do so. In fiction, I’ve followed characters trying to navigate the strange emotional weather of techno-futures that feel just adjacent to our own.
Promises and outcomes
What these modes of writing share, and where they sometimes collide, is this: the tension, the friction, between how a system claims to work and how it actually affects the people inside it.
We see this everywhere:
The patient portal that claims to empower users, but requires a PhD in bureaucratic design.
The hospital AI that promises diagnostic equity, but replicates old bias in new code.
The wellness app that promises “calm” and delivers compulsive self-monitoring.
The digital governance platform that claims transparency, while the real decisions happen elsewhere.
In every one of these, there’s a visible narrative (often backed by funding, legal frameworks, design sprints), and then there’s the lived story, which is messier, more emotional, and far harder to diagram.
That’s the friction Lewis is talking about.
Mapping the silence
And I think storytelling doesn’t have to solve anything. In medical terms, it can just be a diagnostic tool, it doesn’t have to propose a specific therapy (though it can hint and make suggestions). A story is good enough if it manages to really break open the problem, to show it in all its gory detail, and make it as hard as possible for the reader (or watcher or listener) to look away. The reader may want to look away because the tension makes them uncomfortable, but good storytelling keeps them anchored to the story.
Good storytelling can ask:
Why doesn’t this system feel the way it says it does?
Why does this beautifully designed tool make me feel anxious, small, or surveilled?
Who gets to tell the story of progress?
And what realities get erased in the name of “innovation”?
In my fiction, one thing I am trying to do is tracing how small personal decisions get shaped by larger systems: how a startup founder rewords her story for investors, how a consultant keeps revising a whitepaper until it sells the future just right, how an individual, caught in the thicket of algorithms and economic incentives, starts to doubt their own preferences.
This is the kind of friction that we increasingly have to deal with in our tech-dependent world, and at the same time the kind of friction that has not yet been sufficiently explored in stories.
Behind every smooth interface today, there’s a claim: “This is what the world is like.” It suggests a clean decision tree, a clearly delineated set of options, a logic that claims to be fair and neutral.
But often, someone’s silence is paying the price for that claim: Those whose worlds look different, they are silenced in different ways, by making them feel helpless or stupid, or by rewarding them with comfort for their silence, or in other ways.
Fiction lets us map that silence. It lets us sit with what doesn’t fit neatly in a UX flow: the unspoken guilt, the slight unease, the joke that only half lands. The feeling of being misread by a form, the moment a “seamless” interaction reminds you of your own invisibility, the soft constraints that shape our choices before we notice they’re even there.
It lets us show the systems we internalize, and the little ways we resist them: The polite no, the quiet workaround, the email never sent. The things we cannot say in professional settings but carry in our bodies. Fiction gives us a language for those moments… not always to resolve them, but to notice.
Friction doesn’t just live between what’s true and false. It lives between what is felt and what is sayable.
Why friction matters in tech
This matters in tech, and in digital health especially, because too often, we confuse modeling the world with improving it. But a digital twin is not a life, a dashboard is not an outcome, even the most precise diagnosis doesn’t always mean there is a therapy.
In stories, we have to look at individual lives, and how they are improved (or not). Without telling stories and listening to stories, systems lose their soul. They become zombiefied - powerful, automated, and unable to listen.
So, part of our job - whether we’re working as technologists, clinicians, researchers, or writers - is to ask, occasionally, where the story feels wrong, to find and follow the friction, and to notice when a sleek explanation rubs raw against lived experience.