Does life, of late, feel just too easy? Are you keen to make it harder than it already is? If that sounds like a genuinely demented question in the week that the world came close to threatened Armageddon, then fair enough. I bridled too when I read last week about friction-maxxing, the supposed trend for doing things in slightly more effortful, time-consuming or analogue ways – cooking from scratch instead of ordering a delivery, finding your way using road signs instead of just plugging in the satnav, or reading a book rather than half-listening to the audio version of it – as a form of creative resistance to the inexorable march of big tech through our lives. Times are tough enough for a lot of people without being made to feel lazy for taking shortcuts.

Besides, the list published this week by the Washington Post of ways to friction-maxx – which included such superhuman feats as seeing your friends in person rather than just WhatsApping them, and actively trying to remember something rather than just falling back on Google – sounds suspiciously like the rebranding under an irritating new name of what used to be considered merely living. Your grandparents would have scoffed at the idea that any of these things were remotely difficult, or that making an effort to do them could somehow make you a better, more resilient person.

On closer inspection, however, it turns out that’s the point. What Kathryn Jezer-Morton, the writer who originally coined the term friction-maxxing back in January was arguing is that none of these things are genuinely hard for most people – and if anything, they can be a source of deep meaning and joy. Yet somehow, she writes, we have allowed ourselves to fall for the idea that “reading is boring; talking is awkward; moving is tiring; leaving the house is daunting”, and that outsourcing all that supposed emotional labour to an app could be as liberating for 21st-century minds as the outsourcing of physical chores to the washing machine or the vacuum cleaner was supposed to be for 1950s housewives.

If you happen to be a socially awkward tech bro, anxious to offload as much of your personal life as humanly possible to someone else in order to focus on working at your startup round the clock, then perhaps the headlong pursuit of convenience at all costs makes sense. But what if you don’t want a life so effortlessly efficient, so devoid of contact with recognisably human surfaces, that it slides past mostly unnoticed while you’re hunched over a screen? Worse still, what if removing all these supposed tiny drags on our time, energy and patience risks leaving us not only unhappier, but dumber into the bargain?

For what differentiates this generation of AI tools from earlier labour-saving devices is that they largely replace mental rather than physical labour. Years of throwing the laundry into a washing machine and pressing a button instead of wringing it through a mangle may perhaps have made humans marginally less physically strong, but it hasn’t deskilled us of anything that really mattered. The jury is still out, however, on the long-term intellectual impact of using AI tools at work – with a recent study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft concluding that it could make workers more efficient but also less competent at “independent problem-solving” once they got used to relying on the programme to do their thinking for them – or students using ChatGPT to knock off an essay.

One (admittedly small) study of the latter led by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggested that writers relying on large language models (LLMs) to assemble their material showed less activity in brain networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity. As Nataliya Kosmyna, the researcher behind it, put it: “Your brain needs friction to learn.” It’s the effort of sifting and absorbing facts and ideas yourself that seems to make them sink in, which may explain why students using ChatGPT seemingly struggled to remember quotes from the essays they had only just handed in.

If she’s right, then it isn’t just the reader’s experience that is diminished when books are lazily cobbled together using AI, but the writer’s: they’re cheating themselves out of a critical stage in the creative process, which is working out what you think by scribbling it down and then suddenly, dismayingly, seeing all the holes in it. Perhaps it’s merely force of habit. But the reason I still transcribe interviews the old-school way, by replaying the recording and typing out what I hear rather than by getting an AI transcription tool to do it for me, isn’t just fear of the machine making a mistake. It’s that listening a second time helps me make connections or hear things I missed in the room.

What might look from the outside like menial work that could easily be farmed out to a machine is, in other words, surprisingly often integral to the thinking process. And if that’s true at work, now is the time to ask how far it’s true in our personal lives, before the AI tools creeping into them become as hard to dislodge as smartphones already are.

In a world where everything becomes easier and faster, regulating emotion may be an increasing challenge. Making an everyday task even slightly harder forces people to slow down and think about what they are actually doing rather than acting on impulse, which is why you are probably more likely to say something you later regret when firing off a quick, furious text in the heat of moment than when laboriously handwriting a letter. But perhaps the main skill at risk in a more friction-free world is that of patience with other people, in all their infinite capacity to be annoying.

Living with someone you love is friction, quite a lot of the time. Having small children is the living definition of friction, if you have hopes of ever getting anything done. Democracy, too, is ultimately friction, since it means accepting that other people also have a say. Friction is the name we give to rubbing up against the outside world and sometimes encountering resistance, and if nothing else it’s time to reclaim the idea that there is actually nothing wrong with that; that this is simply what it means to love and be loved, to be engaged with society, to think and feel. And yes, sometimes friction burns. But it’s also how you know you are alive – and in days like these, we should be maxxing out on that for all we’re worth.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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