Hi,
We just got back from our annual family trip. We chose Southern Italy for this trip because my Italian grandmother’s family was from that part of the world.
And what I found there gave me a more vivid picture of something I’ve been trying to name with The Calm Society:
The good life is not just about slowing down, checking out, or removing pressure.
It is about pace, yes. But also purpose. Simplicity. Community. Beauty. Mastery. And what I’d call the right kind of friction.
There’s a meme floating around right now called “nonna-maxxing,” which is basically about trying to live a little more like an Italian grandmother: simple food, daily rituals, walking, family, fewer choices, and a life anchored in real things.
At first glance, it’s just a meme. But I think it points to something real.
Because the phrase can also make it sound like the ideal life is retiring - just easing off, doing nothing, and drifting around in linen by the sea.
That is not what I saw.
Italian grandmothers are not optimising for comfort.
They are active. They are useful. They are often at the centre of family and community life. They cook, host, care, clean, organise, remember, insist, repeat, and keep things going. There is purpose in the life. There is mastery in it too. And often, a lot of friction.
That is part of what struck me in the Cilento Coast and later in western Sicily.
There is a simplicity to life in many of those places, but not in the luxury-retreat sense. It is a simplicity tied to place, rhythm, and reality.
In Castellammare del Golfo, we watched tuna fishermen come in from their small boats and sell what they had caught right at the marina. You could smell the salt air off the Mediterranean, a little sweetness coming down from the hillsides, and that unmistakable fish-and-harbour smell all mixing together. Cats circled. People gathered. There were only a few fish. When they were gone, they were gone.
That little scene has stayed with me.
It felt like a reminder that a lot of modern life is built around excess choice, excess convenience, and excess stimulation, and that we often confuse that with living well.
But living well may have more to do with being grounded.
Grounded in place.
Grounded in seasons.
Grounded in local food.
Grounded in ritual.
Grounded in relationships.
Grounded in enough.
That is part of what people are really reaching for when they romanticise Italy.
And yes, there is something there.
This is, after all, the part of the world that helped inspire some of the earliest thinking on what it means to live a good life, and the country where the Slow Food movement began as a reaction against the idea that faster, more standardised, and more industrialised is always better. It also inspired Carl Honoré’s book In Praise of Slow, which has stayed with me since I first read it in 2005. It is well worth reading.
It is also where the Mediterranean Diet was first named and popularised, in the fishing village of Pioppi. You could feel that in the meals. A simple local white wine. Fried anchovies. Buffalo mozzarella from the region. Tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes. Olive oil, greens, bread, lemons. Food that felt tied to the land, rather than built for endless choice. The menus were shorter. The meals were simpler. But somehow they felt richer.
That matters to me because one of the conditions for a flourishing life, at least as I’m exploring it through The Calm Society framework, is pace. Not slowness for its own sake, but a more human rhythm of life. A better speed. A better relationship to time.
Italy even has language for some of this. There is dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing, which is less about laziness than about not treating every moment as a productivity problem to solve. And there is la passeggiata, the evening walk through town, where people come out, pause, talk, and reconnect with the life around them. Both suggest a culture that still makes room for presence, ritual, and relationship.
But I also want to be careful not to make Southern Italy sound like some perfect answer.
It isn’t.
Italy has its own struggles, just like everywhere else. Low wages. Youth unemployment. Economic frustration. Bureaucracy. Plenty of tension. If you spend any time in Naples, or Palermo, the largest city in Sicily, you quickly realise this is not some utopia of effortless bliss. There is disagreement, noise, mess, and intensity. In Naples in particular, there is a lot of passionate communication happening at high volume.
And that is part of the point too.
The good life is not a smooth life.
It is not a life with no disagreement, no effort, no demands, no hardship, and no heat.
A good life has texture and grit.
Honestly, my first instinct after burnout was to move in the other direction entirely. More retreat. More space. Less pressure. And I think that was both natural and necessary for a while. But over time, I started to realise that recovery is not the same thing as the full picture of a good life.
That is one of the things I keep returning to lately, both personally and in the broader Calm Society worldview. The goal is not to remove all friction from life. It is to make sure the friction serves something meaningful. I’ve started thinking of that as good friction.
Good Friction is the idea that progress should not remove every difficulty from life.
It should remove the wrong friction and preserve, or even create, the kinds of friction that make us stronger, more connected, more creative, more disciplined, and more alive.
That may be one reason Southern Italy stayed with me.
It did not just feel slower. It felt more embodied. More local. More rooted. More human.
And underneath all of it was a quiet but powerful reminder:
the good life is not built through infinite choice, endless efficiency, or complete ease.
It is built through rhythm, place, people, purpose, and the right amount of friction.
That feels especially relevant now as AI starts smoothing out more and more of the creative process.
Some of that is useful. But creativity needs friction too: trial and error, false starts, boredom, tension, repetition, time. If everything gets flattened into instant output, we risk losing some of the very process that gives creative work its depth and meaning.
That may be what “nonna-maxxing” is really pointing at beneath the meme.
Not indulgence.
Not idleness.
Not retreat.
A life of simple pleasures, useful effort, strong relationships, and grounded purpose.
I’m still thinking this through, but Southern Italy gave me a more vivid picture of it.
And maybe that is one way to describe what I’m exploring with The Calm Society right now:
Not how to escape modern life, but how to build a version of life that feels more grounded, more meaningful, and more human inside it.
I’m curious - what’s one place or way of living that has made you rethink what a good life actually looks like?
And if the idea of Good Friction resonates, I’d love to hear that too.
Send me an email or a DM, I read them all.
More soon,
Cameron