Our ancestors' craft

Hello stranger. Or maybe not a stranger—either way, I’m Viola!

I’m a health foodie who recently fell deeply in love with the tactile, messy art of baking. But the truth is, this all started with a feeling of static.

I live in a world that is miraculously, relentlessly comfortable. If I want dinner, I don't have to track and hunt for weeks—I just walk into a brightly lit store, pick up a perfectly plastic-wrapped piece of meat, and swipe a little plastic card. My house rests at a perfect twenty-one degrees Celsius year-round. If it gets too cold outside, I don't have to brave the elements; I can just run in place on a machine indoors with a TV slapped in front of my face for constant entertainment. My evenings can easily dissolve into sitting on the couch, endlessly scrolling and debating whether a Netflix series is actually good enough to commit to (spoiler: it rarely is).

And my reward for living the most frictionless life that has ever existed was a low-grade, untreatable restlessness. A quiet, persistent feeling that something was deeply missing. Because when you already have everything at your fingertips, the dopamine threshold breaks. You no longer feel the hit of actually achieving something; you just end up wanting more, and more, and more. Author Michael Easter calls it “comfort creep.”

After reading his book, The Comfort Crisis, I realized the disconnect wasn’t just in my head; it was in my DNA. Our genetic makeup, our deepest human roots, simply weren’t built for a life completely devoid of friction.

The antidote, I’ve found, isn’t about selling everything and running away to the woods (though the urge strikes). It’s just about choosing to do the thing. It’s choosing to take the stairs instead of the elevator. It’s running outside in the freezing air instead of staring at a screen on a treadmill. It’s reading a heavy, physical book instead of letting a podcast passively wash over you while you do the dishes. It’s walking to your destination instead of driving. It’s sitting in the actual, quiet silence of nature without always needing music to fill the void. It’s learning a difficult new skill. It’s making a homemade meal instead of tapping a glass screen to have it magically appear at your door.

And for me, one of those things is baking.

Frodough Bakes is a solo home bakery—just me in Calgary—born out of this exact pursuit of friction. It was born out of the desire to actually feel something. Because baking from scratch is beautifully, stubbornly inefficient. Whether I’m waiting patiently while a staple dough cold-ferments for 36 hours, or mixing up batches of homemade granola, you simply can’t rush it. You have to get your hands messy. You have to stretch, shape, mix, and wait.

It is the exact opposite of the grocery store aisle.

But doing the hard things always yields happiness. Always. When you pull a blistering loaf out of a roaring oven, or smell toasted oats filling the kitchen, the time and effort make it taste entirely different. You worked for it. You made something real, something alive, with your own two hands.

I hope this little corner of the internet inspires you to embrace a little friction in your own life. To turn off the music, take the long way home, or maybe try your hand at baking from scratch. But if you don’t have the time to spare this week, I would be absolutely honored to bake something for you.