It’s thrilling when you first start to use AI tools – just paste in the messy notes and a clean summary comes back. Describe the email you can't face writing and a draft arrives in seconds. The friction is gone. And friction, we have all been taught, is waste. Friction is the thing we identify in order to remove it. Right?

I want to make the case for friction. Not because AI does things badly, but because of something deeply unsettling for those of us who use our minds for a living. When researchers measured what happens to people who lean heavily on AI tools, they found a negative relationship between frequent use and critical thinking, via a mechanism called cognitive offloading that’s been hardwired into our ape brains since forever. Put simply; effort builds capacity, so if we hand over the effort, the capability dissipates.

A team at the MIT Media Lab wired people up while they wrote (some with an AI assistant, some without) and the assisted writers showed weaker neural signatures tied to memory and ownership. They produced the essays, they just didn't seem to own them; asked afterwards many couldn't quote themselves. The words had passed through them without leaving a mark.

Researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon asked knowledge workers how they actually use AI tools, and found something telling: the more someone trusted the AI, the less critical thinking they did; the more they trusted themselves, the more they did. The tool didn't remove the thinking, it relocated it away from making, and towards judging what the machine had made. The work moved up a level, to the part where you decide whether the output is any good, whether it's true.

This balance is the whole point. Some of what we hand over, we should. Plenty of the friction in a working day is just grit in the gears - formatting, transposing, collecting research links. Giving those away is a relief, and it buys back time for something better.

The skill, with the pace of AI increasing exponentially,  is telling the difference. Knowing which friction is grit, and which friction is growth. The truth is, effort is necessary to tune up your brain. The hard draft is how you find out what you actually think. The argument you test again and again is how you come to believe it. The difficulty is the work.

We are sold frictionless as a kind of freedom. But a life with nothing to push against isn't freedom; it's a vacuum. And in a vacuum, nothing grows. Choose the gravity that grows your judgement, your voice, your sense of what is true: keep that close, and do it by hand, because it’s hard.

That is what The Productive Struggle has always meant.