“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 arm.
“It’s just computationally very costly for [the] brain and body to do stuff,” says computational social scientist Hause Lin of MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
That’s why social scientists often recommend removing obstacles to reach goals. Want to go to the gym in the morning? Put your workout clothes out the night before, or just sleep in them. Similarly, Zohar and her coauthors acknowledge, few would willingly part with washing machines, spell-check or power steering.
Computational costs affect both body and mind, researchers noted in the 2025 book Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. Humans, for instance, create mental shortcuts to comprehend vast amounts of information, often at the expense of accuracy.
In recent decades, many social scientists have pivoted to investigating the “paradox of effort,” or why humans do hard things, often for fun. In a 2012 study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, researchers reported that people value items they made themselves more than premade items — a phenomenon they called the IKEA effect.
Subsequent work has made clear that working toward a goal provides people with a sense of mastery, meaning and purpose: key ingredients for a good life.
Here’s why AI hacks friction at a higher level
How much friction, then, is optimal? The answer is complicated, in part because some societal forces today devalue hard work.
Consider the app TaskRabbit, says social psychologist Haesung “Annie” Jung of Texas Tech University in Lubbock. It has made it easy for people to hire someone for almost any job. Yet Jung’s work, appearing in 2025 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, shows that people also derive joy and meaning from everyday tasks.
Chatbots are taking outsourcing to new, dangerous heights, Jung says. “With AI, you’re now even delegating how you think.”
Earlier technologies largely simplified physical and visible tasks. People know when they’ve replaced washing dishes by hand with putting them in the dishwasher. But they don’t always know when they’ve forfeited their thinking to an algorithm.
That lack of awareness can show up in instances where users seek relationship advice from “sycophantic” chatbots, psychologist Anat Perry noted in a March perspective in Science. People may fail to consider others’ perspectives when bots simply validate their experiences. Yet working through such social frictions is necessary for a healthy society, says Perry, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “Sometimes we need to hear that we’re wrong.… That’s how we grow.”
People can overcome the sloth default
Promisingly, people can be trained to resist sloth’s siren call, Lin and colleagues reported in 2024 in Nature Human Behaviour.
They asked over 750 people to choose between hard and easy tasks. Some people received more points for selecting harder tasks while others received more points for correctly completing either task as fast as possible. Then, the researchers stopped awarding points, so they could see which participants picked a harder task simply because they could. On average, participants rewarded for correct answers continued picking easier problems; those rewarded for effort continued picking harder problems.
Lin has observed this phenomenon at MIT, where first-year students receive pass or fail grades as encouragement to avoid gravitating toward classes where they can get easy A’s. That emphasis on doing hard things persists, so that older students often tease classmates taking easy classes, Lin says.
How AI tools muck with people’s competing desires for ease and effort remains to be seen. Some researchers worry less about chatbots taking away friction than their tendency to dole out dodgy answers with absolute certainty. “When I look at our children’s generation, I don’t worry that their lives will be too easy. I worry that their lives will be too hard,” says motivation scientist Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Others say that chatbots’ rapid societal penetration means people ought to consider protecting their brains. The Industrial Revolution took manual labor out of many workers’ lives, Lin notes. Nowadays, people whose ancestors probably met their physical needs through farming sweat it out in gyms and other exercise studios.
“What is being taken away is not physical now. It’s cognitive,” Lin says. “Are we going to have versions of cognitive gyms?”
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