Why a little inconvenience can be a good thing
All those little struggles and frustrations we're so eager to eliminate? They're actually building something important, the same way challenging yourself builds life skills that predict success. When we outsource every difficult task, we're missing out on the experiences that help us grow.
Here's why we need friction in our lives.
Struggle builds resilience
"No amount of AI or convenience can eliminate failure, heartbreak or disappointment from life," says Mai Uchida, MD, a psychiatrist and neuroscience researcher. "What protects us in life isn't avoiding pain or failure, it's knowing, from experience, that we can survive it. Resilience isn't something you download or automate. It's something the brain earns through lived experience."
Every time you struggle through a tough conversation or tolerate the discomfort of not knowing something immediately, you're training your brain to handle adversity. Skip those experiences, and you never develop the emotional muscle memory for the really hard stuff.
Problem-solving trains your "brain muscles"
Just as your biceps atrophy if you never lift anything heavier than a smartphone, your cognitive abilities weaken without challenges. Hidenori Tanaka, PhD, a physicist and artificial-intelligence expert, explains that internal problems — specifically mental health and well-being — require us to think through life's complexities ourselves. "To overcome those internal challenges, we cannot outsource the processing."
He adds, "Language isn't just a tool for expression, it's the medium we use to actually think. We need to wrestle with language to sharpen our minds."
Difficulty creates meaning through effort
Here's something that might hit a little too close to home: That meal you ordered? The essay AI drafted? The question you let ChatGPT answer? If you didn't work for it, your brain struggles to register it as meaningful.
"Meaning in life doesn't come only from success," Dr. Uchida says. "It comes from ownership of the experience."
Bobby W. Hutchins Jr., a behavioral and organizational psychologist, describes the mental pathway in terms of a broken electrical circuit, and says it applies to all types of interactions: "Remove the resistance and you remove the signal," he says. "The instant gratification associated with everything from food to academic essays converts individuals from active participants in their experiences to spectators of them."
Inconvenience strengthens your memory
Want to actually remember something? You might need to work for it — similar to how brain health requires consistent effort.
Dr. Uchida points out that without emotional processing, memory doesn't consolidate. "We tend to forget facts more easily when [they are] not stored along with an emotional memory." This explains why you recall every detail of that epic road trip where everything went wrong, but barely remember last year's perfectly organized vacation.
Frustration teaches kids to cope
Kids are losing out on developing fundamental life skills due to society's instant-gratification tendencies. "From a child psychiatrist and parent perspective, resilience is not taught by protection — it's taught by participation," says Dr. Uchida. "If adults or technology absorb all the effort, children lose the chance to build confidence in their own coping." Learning to try, fail and keep going, knowing you'll be OK, is one of the most important developmental milestones.
Pain deepens relationships and sparks creativity
Friction is essential for connection. Hutchins explains that some friction in a relationship — like "a disagreement we need to discuss, a plan we need to negotiate — is what develops the connection."
And remember being bored as a kid? "Boredom is the nursery of originality," Hutchins says. "If we constantly fill each momentary gap with scrolling, we never allow our minds to enter the idle time where new connections occur." Who knows, your best ideas might be hiding behind the discomfort of doing nothing.