We have a friction problem

We need more friction in the age of AI, not less

Friends,

For about 10 years, almost every app and process has promised us the same thing: less friction. Fewer clicks. Faster checkout. Smoother everything. Take out the speed bumps and let people glide. (Think Amazon one-click ordering.)

A lot of that is good, and I’m all for it. The 6 approval signatures when one would do. The form that asks for information you already gave them twice. The meeting that should have been a message. The password reset loop that locks you out of your own account. That kind of friction just burns time and goodwill. We should hunt it down and kill it wherever we find it. That’s bad friction.

But somewhere in the last decade, we started treating all friction as the enemy. And that’s where we got it wrong.

Because there’s another kind. The kind that takes real effort, the kind you have to push against. Remove it and bad things start to happen.

An analogy from the gym

Last year I did something a bit wild. I committed to doing 1,000 push-ups in a single day as a fundraiser for my church’s community youth programs. I called it the EPIC 1k Push-Up Challenge.

It was brutal. I broke it into sets of 100, and my arms were shaking by the afternoon. I seriously questioned my life choices somewhere around push-up 600. But I got the eye of the tiger and kept going until I hit 1,000. I was sore for days.

Now imagine if I’d wheeled in a robot to do 990 of the push-ups for me. It would do the hard the part—the first 990—and I would knock out the last 10. And I announced “1,000 push-ups, done” at the end of the day.

Did 1,000 push-ups technically get done? Sure. Did I accomplish anything meaningful? Of course not. The whole point was the personal strain. The resistance of my body weight against gravity was what made the effort worth something. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, and get stronger in the process. Take that away and all I’d be left with is a hollow number.

Our minds work exactly the same way. If you don’t work out your body, you get a fragile body. If you don’t work out your mind, you get a fragile mind. Ignore it long enough and you get something worse: your mind begins to atrophy.

Rotting on one end, frying on the other

There’s a name for this process of your brain turning into mush—brain rot. The term was originally coined to describe what happens to the brain after mindlessly scrolling through social media for long periods. It applies equally to overusage of AI. When we stop using our brains for the effortful thinking that keeps them sharp, the machinery softens, and in younger people it may never fully form in the first place. Less challenge leads to less capacity, which makes us reach for the easy option even faster, which means even less challenge. Round and round it goes. That’s the brain rot cycle.

Here’s the cruel twist. We’re getting squeezed from the other side at the same time. AI doesn’t only tempt us to think less. It also floods us with more stimuli: more drafts, more options, more slop, more output to check than any human was built to process. Researchers writing in Harvard Business Review gave that its own name this year. They call it brain fry. In their survey of nearly 1,500 workers, 14% of AI users described a foggy, buzzing fatigue, a point where they could no longer tell whether their own AI-assisted work made any sense. And the high performers using the most tools got hit the hardest.

So our brains are rotting on one end and frying on the other. Underused and overwhelmed at the same time. The answer to both challenges is the same, and it runs straight through the thing we keep trying to remove: friction.

The difference between an answer and understanding

When you spend 7 hours inside a hard book, you’re not just collecting facts. You’re spending 7 hours with your mind grappling with the ideas, drawing connections, having thoughts you would not have had otherwise. That’s the point. The book gets inside you. It impresses itself on you. It changes you.

That’s what reading, writing, and thinking are supposed to do. Help you gain understanding.

This is the part that should give us pause in our AI-fueled world. You can now get almost any answer in under four seconds. Skip the 7 hours of reading. Skip the struggle. But answers don’t equal understanding.

A team at MIT’s Media Lab tested this directly. They wired people up with EEGs while they wrote essays. The group that used an LLM showed the weakest brain activity and the lowest sense of ownership over their own output. Some described the work as “robotic.” Here’s the most troubling part: 83% of them couldn’t quote a single line from the essay they’d finished minutes earlier. Almost everyone who wrote with their own ideas or just a search engine remembered theirs fine.

They produced the essay. But they never absorbed it.

If you don’t do the hard work of thinking, you don’t earn the understanding.

So here are three kinds of friction worth protecting, at work and at home.

1. Cognitive strength: friction builds a mind that thinks well

Good judgment is one of the rarest things I know of, and you can’t download it off the Internet. You’re not born with it either. You build it slowly, by wrestling with hard problems and living with the bad calls you made along the way. The good calls teach you a little. The bad ones teach you a lot.

That’s the practice. Sitting with ambiguity long enough to see the real problem under the surface one. Writing the first ugly draft before anyone gives you feedback. Doing the analysis yourself instead of asking a machine to fast-forward you straight to the conclusion. Every one of those moments is a small workout for the part of you that decides, weighs, and chooses. Hand them all away and that muscle gets soft without you noticing.

The research confirms these concerns. An Oregon State University study found that each additional unit of AI use was associated with a 66% decline in reflection and a 41% drop in critical thinking. Even more troubling, MIT researchers (the same ones I mentioned earlier) found that lower neural engagement from AI usage leaves a residual “cognitive debt.” The brain’s reduced activity patterns can persist even after you stop using the AI tool. The more you let the tool think, the less you do it yourself, and the gap compounds over time. The trap is that the output looks great, which is exactly why nobody catches the decline until a real decision goes sideways.

Perhaps the most concerning thing is the impact on young people. Research from SBS Swiss Business School found that the youngest users, who leaned on AI the most, scored the lowest of any age group on a standard critical thinking test. Their thinking is still under construction, which changes the stakes entirely. An older adult offloading to a tool is letting a built muscle soften; a teenager doing the same may never build that muscle in the first place.

Remove the friction, skip the rep, and you get shallow confidence. Something sounds right, so you move fast…just in the wrong direction. Over time, you develop a brain that isn’t able to push when the thinking gets heavy. And a mind that can’t push is a mind that can’t perform.

The tenet for this one: if it’s important, I earn the first draft.

2. Emotional strength: friction builds an inner life

There’s a gap between what happens to you and how you respond. That gap is where your emotional intelligence lives and your freedom lies. The only way to widen it is to sit in discomfort instead of running away from it.

Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes the two systems that power your mind in his seminal book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 1 (the fast system) is instant and reactive, built to handle threats. System 2 (the slow system) is deliberate and rational, and it takes real effort to engage. Both are useful. If you’re walking through a dark alley and someone lunges out of the shadows, you want the fast system to drive you—no deliberation, just run or fight. But if you’re sitting in a meeting and your manager says something that ticks you off, you probably don’t want to say the first thing that comes to mind. That would likely be a career-limiting maneuver. So taking a breath and engaging the slow system would be beneficial.

This was one of the hardest things I ever had to learn. Feeling something uncomfortable (or even painful) and not immediately tossing it out. Naming it honestly, even when “I’m overwhelmed” or “I’m disappointed” felt far more vulnerable than the easy default of “I’m fine” or even “I’m angry.”

What makes the slow system so hard to choose is that we’ve trained ourselves on shortcuts. What’s the fastest way to get what I want? Where’s the path of lowest friction? AI is one of the most powerful “shortcut machines” ever built, and it constantly tempts us to take the bypass.

Marcus Aurelius saw the flaw in this approach almost 2,000 years ago. “The impediment to action advances action,” he wrote. “What stands in the way becomes the way.” Said differently: the obstacle is not in the way. It is the way. The discomfort you keep trying to route around is the exact thing that will help you grow.

This is really a contest between immediate and delayed gratification, and we have decades of evidence on which one builds a more successful life. The Dunedin Study tracked 1,000 children from birth into adulthood. A child’s self-control, exhibited by their ability to delay gratification, turned out to be one of the strongest predictors of who thrived later in life. The high-self-control kids grew into healthier, wealthier adults who stayed out of trouble, and the effect held even after researchers accounted for IQ and family wealth. The children who could sit in the discomfort of waiting became the adults who could handle what life threw at them.

AI makes all of this harder. Researchers built a benchmark called Elephant to measure how much AI models flatter us. Across 8 major models, they handed out emotional validation 76% of the time while humans did it 22% of the time. When users described behavior that real people judged as clearly out of line, the models endorsed it in 42% of cases. Don’t ask AI the AITA question because you have a 4 out of 10 chance you’ll be deluded.

So the most available voice in your life is one that agrees with you almost no matter what you do. That feels wonderful. It’s also how you drift into self-deception and become more certain of ideas that deserved a harder look.

Here’s the hopeful part, and it’s the reason I do the work that I do. The skill underneath all of this is learning to sit with emotional discomfort and manage it well, instead of tossing it away the second it shows up. AI is seductive because it makes everything feel good, fast. But the discomfort you naturally want to avoid is the exact thing that makes you stronger.

So the next time you feel an unpleasant emotion—in a meeting, in a tense text thread, or just in your own head, resist the urge to make the feeling disappear. Stay in it for one more beat. Name what you’re actually feeling. “I’m experiencing frustration.” Or disappointment. Or fear. Then choose your response from there, instead of letting the raw emotion choose for you. That’s the rep. Do it enough and you become someone who can hold hard feelings without being ruled by them. That’s the basis of self-control, and it’s a valuable skill in a world filled with uncertainty and complexity.

The tenet for this one: learn to sit in the discomfort rather than immediately toss it out.

3. Social strength: friction builds relationships that can handle pressure

Real trust comes from having survived something hard together. Niceness can look like trust from a distance, but it’s definitely not the same thing.

One of the most powerful social skills is the ability to stay connected while you disagree. To have the hard conversation vs. sending the politely worded message that dodges the real issue. To repair the relationship after a misunderstanding vs. letting things fester. To seek to understand someone else’s perspective when your instincts scream at you to defend your own.

This is empathy under pressure, and it’s the kind of empathy that matters most. Many people can be empathetic under pleasant circumstances. But when your boss shoots down your idea, a colleague seems to undercut you, or your partner is upset with you (and you’re certain you’re the one in the right)? Those moments create social friction. And every time you push through with empathy and clear thinking, you strengthen your interpersonal skills and build a relationship that can handle more weight.

When it comes to team performance and creativity, friction between people—the disagreement, the awkward pause, the need to actually understand someone who sees things differently—is the exact thing that increases a team’s collective intelligence. Harvard innovation expert Linda Hill calls this “creative abrasion.” Take it out and you don’t get harmony. You get sameness.

A meta-analysis of 19 studies found that when people create alongside generative AI, their ideas measurably drift toward each other. The work gets more similar, more homogenized. There’s a simple reason for it: when everyone leans on the same handful of models, trained on the same giant pile of data, the tool keeps nudging people toward the same statistically likely answer, so distinct voices end up sounding more alike. Teams that agree too fast just produce groupthink with the illusion of seeking diverse perspectives.

This issue is bleeding into how we relate to each other. Upwork found that among the highest-performing AI users, 64% said they have a better relationship with AI than with their human teammates. I can certainly understand the appeal. AI is always pleasant and amenable...unlike humans.

But there is cost to always choosing the easy social option. A study of nearly 1,000 people run by MIT and OpenAI found that people who leaned on a chatbot heavily every day for 4 weeks came out the other side lonelier, socializing less with actual humans, and more emotionally dependent on the bot. The frictionless companion felt good in the moment but left them more isolated. We were built to connect with and be sharpened by other people, and machines cannot replace that.

The tenet for this one: choose the person over the easy agreement.

So what can you do about it?

You don’t fix this by throwing your AI tools out the window. I use AI every day, and it makes me faster and better at a host of things. The solution is to intentionally keep (or reintroduce) the friction in places that strengthen your cognitive, emotional, and social skills. Here are six ways to start.

1. Draft first, AI second. Do the first 10 to 20% of the thinking yourself. The outline, the core argument, the rough decision memo. Then let the tool sharpen it. You keep the judgment reps that actually matter. The tenet, again: if it’s important, I earn the first draft.

2. Use AI as a challenger, not just a helper. Instead of “make this easier,” ask it to push back on you. “Steelman the strongest argument against my position.” “What are the failure modes and the early warning signs?” “What am I assuming that could be wrong?” This is how you avoid agreeing with your own brilliance too quickly.

3. Pause for 10 seconds before you outsource. Before you hand a task to a tool, ask one honest question: am I solving a real problem, or just escaping discomfort and overwhelm? What’s the rep I’d be skipping? Sometimes the discomfort is the work.

4. Do one hard thing by hand every day. Pick a daily rep you refuse to outsource. Write a paragraph from scratch. Work a problem out on paper. Read 5 pages without switching tabs. You’re training attention and your tolerance for friction, both of which are silently eroding in all of us.

5. Have the real conversation. Use AI to prepare if it helps. Role-play the tense moment, get clear on your goal and your boundaries, find your words. Then close the laptop and talk to the actual human being. That’s the only place trust and empathy actually grow.

6. Practice some mindfulness. Neuroscientist Amishi Jha teaches a simple practice. Sit up, close your eyes, and place your attention on the feeling of your breath moving through your nostrils. When your mind wanders off (and it will), notice it and bring your attention back. Do it for 12 minutes. If that sounds like a mountain, start with 2 and build from there. You’re literally rewiring your brain to be more focused, clear-thinking, and resilient.

One frame to carry with you

Not all friction is created equal.

Reduce the friction that wastes your time and drains your energy. The redundant steps, the approvals that exist for no reason, the meeting that should have been a message. Be ruthless about that.

Protect the friction that strengthens your mind, your heart, and your relationships. The cognitive strain that builds judgment. The discomfort that builds self-management. The hard conversations that build trust. That friction is the path.

Both your IQ and your EQ are built the same way—by facing resistance. That’s what I teach leaders all over the world in my EPIQ leadership sessions.

The next time something feels a little too easy, ask what it’s costing you. Then decide, on purpose, whether that’s a price worth paying.

Be EPIQ,

Rich

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P.S. Strengthen these skills with by taking my EQ masterclass, Emotional Intelligence for Resilient, Adaptable & High Performance Leadership, on Sep 12-13. The class has been a smashing success with 5-star ratings across the board.