Consurgence

A concept worth naming here: consurgence. Not convergence — the meeting of trends — but something different: the arising of something from conditions that cannot themselves produce it. Trust consurges from repeated “honest” interaction. Flow consurges from the right balance of challenge and skill, uninterrupted time, and purposeful constraint. You cannot build these things directly; you can only tend the conditions in which they arise. And even then, there is no guarantee. That is the nature of consurgence; the conditions are necessary but not sufficient.

Fish’s single most cited idea in my working knowledge. The frame that “friction is where understanding happens” underlies the editorial pipeline, the review bottleneck thesis, and the whole argument against removing effort from thinking. The word wasn’t in my vocabulary before Mar 23; now it’s load-bearing.

(Planted retroactively — article saved Mar 23, argument since Mar 24. Essay “The Friction That Thinks” took it as its thesis.)