Effort turns information into skill and experience into meaning.

The distinction that matters is between effort that merely delays you and effort that develops you.

In a world where things are too easy, we have to be intentional about keeping difficulty alive.

I loved Simon and Garfunkel as a teenager (still do). But feeding that love was no easy matter. Growing up in Bangladesh, it took serious acts of devotion to find ways of listening to their songs. You had to find someone who owned a cassette tape or make friends with the owner of the right shop, or wait for a friend to bring one back from abroad. And when you finally got your hands on something, you listened to it over and over, because that tape was all you had.

It’s much easier to find music nowadays. The friction has been reduced to virtually nothing. I don’t even have to go to the trouble of typing anything into Spotify; I can just speak into my phone and Siri does the rest. And this is true of much more than music. Really, it’s about every domain where effort used to be the price of experience, where friction was the cost of learning. That price, that cost, has virtually disappeared.

Think about how easy it is today to find new recipes or learn new cooking techniques; on a completely different scale, think of how easy it is to “meet” and judge potential romantic partners. You don’t even have to get out of bed. You just have to look at your phone and swipe this way and that.

Some of this is definitely progress. But let’s be careful, too. Sometimes, it’s important to pay a price for getting things.

Why Paying the Price Matters

We tend to think of effort as a cost, the unpleasant thing we endure to get what we want. This is true, but it’s leaving something important out of the picture. In addition to being a cost, effort is sometimes doing very important things for us.

First, effort makes data functional: It turns information into personal knowledge. Without effort, it’s impossible to grow skill. That’s why watching 20 YouTube videos about mathematics won’t help you learn math by itself. And it’s why Duolingo is really a video game rather than a serious effort to teach languages.

Effort also makes things meaningful. I had to work so hard to find a Simon and Garfunkel cassette that, when I got one, the effort made the songs matter to me in a way they wouldn’t have if I’d just pulled them up on Spotify. The investment created the attachment. That’s not nostalgia—it’s how we come to care about things.

Effort, in other words, is how we turn events into experience and memories. It’s how we turn information into knowledge that we can use. Without it, things pass through us; but when we put the work in, we gain skills and meaning and understanding.

A June 2025 study from Harvard and MIT confirms this picture. Participants who used AI to write essays retained less knowledge, demonstrated less originality, and engaged less deeply with the material than those who worked through the difficulty themselves.

Now, while all of this is true and important, it’s equally true and important to say that we should not romanticize effort for its own sake. Plenty of effort is just drudgery—busywork and unnecessary friction, obstacles that teach you nothing. Not every struggle is sacred. And so, rather than completely rejecting effort or always glorifying it, we need to start understanding when effort matters and when it doesn’t.

Knowing Which Struggles to Keep

The distinction is not between effort and ease but between effort that merely obstructs and effort that forms us. Some difficulties are administrative. They are the incidental burdens wrapped around an activity: typing instead of speaking, formatting a document, scheduling a meeting, hunting through menus, moving files from one place to another. These tasks may consume time and attention, but they do not normally deepen understanding, sharpen judgment, or strengthen attachment. If a tool removes them, little of value is lost.

Other difficulties are different. They are not attached to the activity from the outside; they are part of what the activity is. Writing in your own words is how you discover what you think. Working through a mathematical problem is how you learn to see structure. Cooking without exact certainty, tasting and adjusting as you go, is how you develop instinct. Here, the effort is not a barrier between you and the result. It is the process through which the result becomes yours. Remove the struggle, and you may still get an outcome, but you lose the growth, the skill, and, often, the meaning.

So the question is not: How can I make this easier? It is: What kind of difficulty is this? Does it merely delay me, or does it develop me? If the friction is only procedural, eliminate it gladly. But if the friction is what teaches you to notice, remember, or care, then it is not a cost. It is the point.

Practices to Preserve the Right Kind of Friction

Here are three practices that can help you keep the right kind of friction in your life:

Pause before reaching for the easiest answer. When something feels difficult, it is natural to want relief as quickly as possible. But not every difficulty should be removed on sight. Sometimes a brief pause can help you tell the difference between unnecessary hassle and meaningful effort. Before asking AI to draft the paragraph, try writing a few sentences yourself.

Ask yourself: Is this saving me effort or saving me from growth? This is a useful question because it gets to the heart of the issue. Some tools free us from repetitive, low-value tasks, and that is a genuine benefit. But other forms of convenience protect us from exactly the kinds of struggle that build judgment, patience, competence, and self-trust. When a shortcut removes only tedium, it is probably worth taking. When it removes the part that would have stretched you, it may be costing more than it gives.

Add small forms of active engagement back into daily life. The right kind of friction does not have to be dramatic. Often it comes in small, ordinary acts: taking notes instead of passively highlighting, cooking without relying completely on a recipe, rereading a challenging paragraph instead of jumping straight to a summary, walking without constant stimulation. These moments ask a bit more of us, but they also return more. They deepen attention, strengthen memory, and make experience feel more fully our own.

The goal of these practices is not to make life harder for its own sake. Rather, it is to preserve the forms of effort that help us become more present, capable, and alive.

Convenience is one of modern life’s great gifts, and we should use it gratefully. But we should also be careful not to let it remove the very struggles that teach us, shape us, and help us care. The challenge, then, is not to reject ease, but to become more thoughtful about where we welcome it. And in a world increasingly designed to make everything effortless, part of wisdom may be learning which difficulties are still worth choosing.

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