AI can take the friction out of life, but some effort can be good

AI can ease friction in life, but some effort can be good Skip to content Subscribe today Every print subscription comes with full digital access Subscribe Now Share this: Share Share via email (Opens in new window) Email Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit Share on X (Opens in new window) X Print (Opens in new window) Print Listen to this article This is a human-written story voiced by AI. Got feedback? Take our survey . (See our AI policy here .) “Make life harder” is a strange rallying cry. Yet in January, journalist Kathryn Jezer-Morton at the Cut went viral for touting friction-maxxing. “Stop using ChatGPT completely,” she wrote. “No, it does not have good ideas for meal planning. Buy a cookbook. Text your friends for advice. Go to Trader Joe’s. Come  on .” Jezer-Morton may be onto something, social science research suggests. Letting chatbots write emails or provide emotional support simplifies being a thinking, social being , researchers wrote in February in Communications Psychology . But doing hard things or maintaining life’s frictions, while often frustrating in the moment, is vital for experiencing pleasure and cultivating purpose. “We get a lot of meaning out of work and what we do day to day,” says Emily Zohar, an experimental social psychologist at the University of Toronto. “If you’re offloading all your tasks to AI, you’re not getting the benefit of having this self-accomplishment.” How to balance pride in navigating friction with our desire to take a load off, though, remains elusive. Brains prefer easy. That’s not the whole story  Finding this balance is about more than managing AI. Social scientists have been studying friction in various guises for roughly a century. Classic research from the early 1930s showed that rats plunked in a T-shaped maze with a long arm and a short arm, each connected to a tasty morsel, quickly started preferring the shorter a