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Selective Friction

Selective Friction

On resistance, growth, and the design choice nobody wants to make

The paradox sitting inside most modern products

Something gets stronger by working against resistance. A muscle needs load to grow. A mind needs to struggle with a problem before the solution actually sticks. A craft needs the years spent on its unglamorous fundamentals before anything built on top of it holds real weight. This isn't a metaphor borrowed loosely from the gym. It's closer to a law, one that shows up in psychology, in nature, in every discipline that has ever studied how people actually improve, sitting in direct conflict with almost everything modern design has spent the last two decades optimising for.

The instinct behind most products today is to remove friction wherever it's found. Fewer steps, fewer decisions, fewer moments where a person has to pause and think. On the surface this looks like generosity, an industry working hard to make life easier. Underneath it, something stranger is happening. The same friction being engineered out of a product is often the exact thing a person needed in order to actually get better at whatever the product claims to help with.

What the research actually says about difficulty

UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork gave this phenomenon a name in 1994: desirable difficulty. His research found that learning conditions which make performance harder in the moment, spacing practice out instead of cramming it, mixing related skills together instead of mastering one at a time, testing yourself instead of simply re-reading, produce dramatically stronger long-term retention than the smoother, easier alternative. Learning that feels effortless in the moment is frequently the learning that vanishes first. The version that feels harder while it's happening is usually the version that survives.

The same pattern shows up wherever a real craft is actually being built. Skipping the fundamentals because a shortcut feels faster in the moment tends to surface its cost much later, in a gap that only becomes visible once something more advanced is asked of you and the foundation underneath it was never properly laid. Putting your head down through the unglamorous years, taking on the obstacles a discipline throws at anyone serious about it, is what eventually reshapes a person into someone sturdier, more resourceful, more capable of solving a problem nobody handed them the answer to. That reshaping doesn't happen on the easy path. It only happens on the one with resistance built into it.

The evidence already showing up in how people think

The clearest, most current version of this trade-off is playing out in real time with artificial intelligence. A 2025 study by Michael Gerlich, surveying 666 participants across age groups, found a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool use and critical thinking ability, with cognitive offloading acting as the mechanism connecting the two. Younger participants, who showed the heaviest reliance on AI tools, scored measurably lower on critical thinking assessments than older participants who used the tools less. Researchers studying this pattern have started calling the result cognitive debt, the idea that leaning on an external system to do the thinking doesn't just save time in the moment, it can permanently erode the very capacities, memory, reasoning, sustained focus, that would have otherwise been built through use. A similar effect was documented over a decade earlier by Sparrow and colleagues in 2011, who found that heavy reliance on search engines actually impairs a person's independent memory, since people start remembering where to find information rather than the information itself.

None of this is an argument against these tools existing. It's evidence for something narrower and more uncomfortable, that removing a specific, difficult mental task doesn't leave a person's capability untouched. It leaves the exact muscle that task would have exercised sitting unused, and unused capacity atrophies the same way any capacity does.

What nature already knew about this

Plants demonstrate the same principle without any of the ambiguity. A stem grows upward against gravity, toward light, and that upward push against a constant resisting force is what a botanist would call gravitropism and phototropism working together, growth defined entirely by what it's straining against. Separately, plants exposed to consistent mechanical stress, wind, touch, the repeated flex of being pushed and pulled, develop shorter, thicker, measurably stronger stems through a process called thigmomorphogenesis. Plants raised indoors, sheltered from wind entirely, grow tall and thin instead, and reliably struggle or fail once moved into an outdoor environment that finally asks something of them. The absence of friction doesn't produce a stronger plant left alone to flourish. It produces a fragile one, unequipped for exactly the conditions it was always going to eventually face.

Humans avoiding the necessary friction of a discipline, a craft, or a hard conversation are running the same experiment on themselves, sheltered growth that looks fine in the greenhouse and collapses the moment it's asked to stand in actual wind.

Choosing friction on purpose

None of this is an argument for difficulty as a virtue in itself. Plenty of friction is simply bad design, a chorus structured so nobody can find the hook, a garment cut in a way that fights the body wearing it, a staircase built somewhere nobody would ever naturally want to walk. The distinction that matters is whether a piece of resistance is doing something for the person on the other side of it, or simply extracting more time and calling it necessary. Good design, in the way that actually helps someone, isn't the version that removes every obstacle in front of them. It's the version considered enough to know which obstacles are load-bearing, and leaves exactly those in place on purpose, a deliberately, almost meritocratically sorted set of frictions that let a person, and a collective built from many people doing the same, actually grow into something capable rather than merely comfortable.

It's worth carrying that thought into whatever's actually on the table, a product, a system, a piece of fashion, a building, a house, a relationship, a routine, the actual way a life gets lived day to day, or the version of yourself you're still building. The struggle is what makes any of it. Removing it, in the end, is what breaks it instead. There's something almost ironic about how consistently that gets forgotten.

Let us choose our friction, in how we learn, how we build, how we design the systems and cities and tools everyone else will eventually live inside, before the collapse ends up choosing it for us instead.

Selective Friction

The evidence already showing up in how people think

The clearest, most current version of this trade-off is playing out in real time with artificial intelligence. A 2025 study by Michael Gerlich, surveying 666 participants across age groups, found a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool use and critical thinking ability, with cognitive offloading acting as the mechanism connecting the two. Younger participants, who showed the heaviest reliance on AI tools, scored measurably lower on critical thinking assessments than older participants who used the tools less. Researchers studying this pattern have started calling the result cognitive debt, the idea that leaning on an external system to do the thinking doesn't just save time in the moment, it can permanently erode the very capacities, memory, reasoning, sustained focus, that would have otherwise been built through use. A similar effect was documented over a decade earlier by Sparrow and colleagues in 2011, who found that heavy reliance on search engines actually impairs a person's independent memory, since people start remembering where to find information rather than the information itself.

None of this is an argument against these tools existing. It's evidence for something narrower and more uncomfortable, that removing a specific, difficult mental task doesn't leave a person's capability untouched. It leaves the exact muscle that task would have exercised sitting unused, and unused capacity atrophies the same way any capacity does.

Selective Friction

What nature already knew about this

Plants demonstrate the same principle without any of the ambiguity. A stem grows upward against gravity, toward light, and that upward push against a constant resisting force is what a botanist would call gravitropism and phototropism working together, growth defined entirely by what it's straining against. Separately, plants exposed to consistent mechanical stress, wind, touch, the repeated flex of being pushed and pulled, develop shorter, thicker, measurably stronger stems through a process called thigmomorphogenesis. Plants raised indoors, sheltered from wind entirely, grow tall and thin instead, and reliably struggle or fail once moved into an outdoor environment that finally asks something of them. The absence of friction doesn't produce a stronger plant left alone to flourish. It produces a fragile one, unequipped for exactly the conditions it was always going to eventually face.

Humans avoiding the necessary friction of a discipline, a craft, or a hard conversation are running the same experiment on themselves, sheltered growth that looks fine in the greenhouse and collapses the moment it's asked to stand in actual wind.

Selective Friction

Choosing friction on purpose

None of this is an argument for difficulty as a virtue in itself. Plenty of friction is simply bad design, a chorus structured so nobody can find the hook, a garment cut in a way that fights the body wearing it, a staircase built somewhere nobody would ever naturally want to walk. The distinction that matters is whether a piece of resistance is doing something for the person on the other side of it, or simply extracting more time and calling it necessary. Good design, in the way that actually helps someone, isn't the version that removes every obstacle in front of them. It's the version considered enough to know which obstacles are load-bearing, and leaves exactly those in place on purpose, a deliberately, almost meritocratically sorted set of frictions that let a person, and a collective built from many people doing the same, actually grow into something capable rather than merely comfortable.

It's worth carrying that thought into whatever's actually on the table, a product, a system, a piece of fashion, a building, a house, a relationship, a routine, the actual way a life gets lived day to day, or the version of yourself you're still building. The struggle is what makes any of it. Removing it, in the end, is what breaks it instead. There's something almost ironic about how consistently that gets forgotten.

Let us choose our friction, in how we learn, how we build, how we design the systems and cities and tools everyone else will eventually live inside, before the collapse ends up choosing it for us instead.

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© 2026 Vitality Vanguard.

© 2026 Vitality Vanguard.

© 2026 Vitality Vanguard.