"Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress"
About this Quote
Eliot lands the line with the calm authority of someone who has watched earnest people confuse motion for movement. Pairing "iteration" with "friction" is a sly demotion: repetition, she implies, isn’t inherently virtuous, it’s just contact. And contact, as anyone who has tried to force a stuck drawer knows, often produces heat - irritation, noise, ego, defensive justification - long before it produces a result. The phrasing is deliberately physical, almost engineering-minded, which gives the warning a practical bite. You can feel the wasted energy.
The subtext cuts deeper: iteration becomes a moral alibi. Keep revisiting, keep revising, keep "working through it", and you get to look industrious without risking the harder leap into change. Eliot, a novelist obsessed with the mechanics of character - how people rationalize, stall, and self-sabotage - is pointing at a psychological trap: repetition can intensify attachment to the old pattern. Friction doesn’t just slow you down; it can polish the same habits until they feel like principles.
Context matters, too. Writing in a Victorian culture that prized diligence and self-improvement, Eliot is pushing back against the era’s faith in sheer effort. Effort without direction becomes its own kind of spectacle: heat as performance. The line still reads like a rebuke to modern productivity theater - the endless meeting, the perpetual rewrite, the iterative "process" that generates urgency and morale-management while the actual work stays stubbornly unadvanced. Eliot’s genius is making the critique feel less like cynicism than like physics: ignore the conditions, and you’ll get warmth, not forward motion.
The subtext cuts deeper: iteration becomes a moral alibi. Keep revisiting, keep revising, keep "working through it", and you get to look industrious without risking the harder leap into change. Eliot, a novelist obsessed with the mechanics of character - how people rationalize, stall, and self-sabotage - is pointing at a psychological trap: repetition can intensify attachment to the old pattern. Friction doesn’t just slow you down; it can polish the same habits until they feel like principles.
Context matters, too. Writing in a Victorian culture that prized diligence and self-improvement, Eliot is pushing back against the era’s faith in sheer effort. Effort without direction becomes its own kind of spectacle: heat as performance. The line still reads like a rebuke to modern productivity theater - the endless meeting, the perpetual rewrite, the iterative "process" that generates urgency and morale-management while the actual work stays stubbornly unadvanced. Eliot’s genius is making the critique feel less like cynicism than like physics: ignore the conditions, and you’ll get warmth, not forward motion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work Ethic |
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