Mental Friction

Friction isn’t automatically bad — it depends whether it’s in your way or it is the work.

The bad kind is just drag: confusing tools, unclear instructions, decision fatigue over stuff that doesn’t matter, getting interrupted mid-thought. Nothing good comes from this — kill it wherever you can.

The good kind is what actually makes you sharper: struggling with a hard problem before peeking at the answer, pulling something from memory instead of googling it, sitting with a claim long enough to poke holes in it. This is uncomfortable on purpose. Smooth it away and you get someone who “knows” things they never really learned.

Where this bites hardest right now: AI. When you read an answer and just take it, you’ve skipped the one step that catches mistakes and builds understanding — the checking. And the danger is that AI output reads trustworthy: clean, confident, well-organized. That’s a writing style, not proof it’s right. It’s easy to mistake the two.

Keeping the friction doesn’t take much:

• Ask what would make this wrong
• Check one specific claim somewhere else
• Try explaining it back in your own words — if you can’t, you didn’t actually get it
• Use AI to pressure-test your thinking, not replace it