You might have noticed, I’m guessing you didn’t, that I didn’t post last week. Life got in the way - international travel with a baby, some exciting projects on the work front, and sadly dealing with a totaled car (RIP beloved 4Runner). I felt both uninspired and overwhelmed to try to put words on paper that felt worth sharing. But in reality those were excuses for the real reason NOT to write, which is it’s HARD. It’s hard and it’s also uncomfortable. Imposter syndrome is always right around the corner and last week it felt like we were standing face to face.
It wasn’t until I was out of the normal day-to-day that I felt like I had inspiration, or really space, to write. We’ve spent the last week as a family in Soller, a small town on the island of Mallorca. Since we’ve been here, we’ve fully embraced the slower days and time outside. I’ve been fortunate to sneak in a few early morning rides in arguably one of the most iconic places in the world to pedal. That time, outside and in a new environment, snapped me out of the funk and made me so grateful that we made this trip happen. And one thing I’m realizing is that the experiences that shape us most are usually the ones with some amount of friction.
We knew when our son was born that we wanted to do a trip while he was little and before the hustle of new parenthood took over our daily lives. Layer in career transitions for both of us and we had plenty of reasons to second guess if this was a good idea. Traveling with a six-month old, especially when it’s your first, is daunting. What if he cries the entire international flight, what if he doesn’t adjust to the new time zone, what if it ends up being miserable… It’s easy to spiral.
Our experience thus far has exceeded our expectations! Have there been stressful moments? Absolutely. But this has been an unforgettable opportunity to spend time together. He might not remember it, but we certainly will. And that’s the point. Meaningful friction creates memories.
We live in a world increasingly designed to remove friction. Take writing for example. When I was struggling to finish a post last week, there were several moments where I reached for AI. I wanted the easy out. It was tempting to drop my half finished ideas into an LLM and ask it to “make this better”. Or “is this right?”. I didn’t start this to outsource the ideas, I started it to struggle through becoming a clearer thinker. Outsourcing that struggle would prevent me from actually learning - that’s not the point.
While thinking about this connection between friction and meaning, I kept coming back to a book I recently read: The Explorer’s Gene by Alex Hutchinson. Hutchinson argues that humans are pulled toward uncertainty — that exploration itself is part of how we construct meaning. Exploration is inherently a choice, and one that people have made forever. We explore because we believe there might be something meaningful on the other side of uncertainty. It’s engrained in who we are.
I didn’t set out to make this about AI, but somehow I feel like it always finds its way back into the picture. I question how AI and access to everything will change our willingness to explore or lean into hard things over time. Right now it feels like we’re trending the wrong way. It reminds me a bit of social media where we understand the tradeoffs, but convenience and stimulation usually win anyway. More like social media - recognizing the potential downfalls, but using it anyway for the dopamine. I’m not worried about outsourcing tasks. I’m worried about outsourcing the parts of ourselves that are formed through struggle.
I firmly believe that friction is a feature, not a bug. Friction creates memories. Friction makes you think. The friction is what makes us human. We learn through the struggle. We adapt through the real feedback.
Maybe the goal isn’t to eliminate friction from life, but to get better at recognizing which kinds are worth keeping.
-Alec
