Once upon a time there was a story people liked to tell about the future that went something like this: When technology will be good enough, life will become frictionless. The commute disappears. The tedious parts of work dissolve. Sweat and strain, bother and bottlenecks—all of it, automated away. What remains is only the part we enjoy. (But what is that part?)

It is a seductive narrative. It is also a story about how to build an exquisitely comfortable kind of emptiness.

Effort Is Part of Our Happiness’s DNA

What separates people who crumble under failure from those who move through and grow from it? The growth mindset—which has become such a fixture of popular psychology that it is easy to forget how radical it originally was. People who understood their abilities as fixed tended to avoid challenge. People who understood them as developable sought it out. And the seeking was not painful in the way the fixed-mindset people feared. It was where they eventually found themselves.

Research on post-traumatic growth found that a significant proportion of people who experience severe adversity report meaningful positive change in its aftermath. Their personal growth is not despite the difficulty but through it. Like diamonds require polishing to shine, our deepest sparks require friction to be revealed. Treasures are rarely lying around for the taking.

None of this is an argument for gratuitous suffering. But it is a serious argument against systematically........

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