Why friction is necessary for growth

No try biking up that hill without friction you can expend infinite effort but without friction you'll not get anywhere. The tire will spin and spin but with no friction you'd have no forward force applied. That is if you muscles could work without friction that might work but the spining of the chain and all the other details don't work without friction.

But I think at a more personal level truly learning and having that learning last happened because friction not because it was effortless. I honestly don't remember much about things that were effortless. Things that don't take effort can't show you what your doing wrong because it was effortless, there was no resistence to feel where you might be going wrong. I agree there is a optimal point of friction but minimization might not be that optimal point.

I’m gonna be that guy. Reminds me of AI coding: sure, it gets you to the goal faster, but you lose the opportunity to learn, improve or find a smarter way of solving your problem.

I’m told some use AI to do boilerplate work, but I bet those that buy wholesale into the AI hype use it for everything, especially things they don’t know much about and would actually benefit from learning themselves.

I am self-taught and naturally curious: having a machine to rob me of the chance to learn and discover, to beat my head against a wall, which I also have to babysit because it is dumb as a rock, is simply a net negative for me.

Your idea of necessary friction is universal. Friction is not a bug in biology; it’s the feature that keeps systems alive and adaptive. Bones mineralize under load and thin without it; muscles hypertrophy with strain and atrophy in a cast; immune networks calibrate by meeting antigens, not by hiding from them. At the cellular level, survival isn’t guaranteed - deprived of trophic signals or mechanical challenge, many cells default to apoptosis, a programmed self-destruct that enforces “use it or lose it.” In other words, life is written to respond to calibrated challenge: too little challenge invites decay, the right dose drives renewal and growth.

Human learning follows the same logic. Struggle, what educators call “desirable difficulty”, is the stimulus for neuro synaptic remodeling, deeper encoding, and ultimately the capture of knowledge . On the other hand, effortless consumption rarely rewires anything - you just run an existing circuit . The trick lies in the magnitude, you want eustress, not overwhelm. It’s like the Goldilocks portion of resistance that keeps feedback and growth flowing and motivation intact. When we remove all frictions, our minds, just like our muscles will decondition. That’s where we need to incorporate purposeful frictions like you said, in order to strengthen. We are literally coded by our DNA for calibrated struggle. Without it, biological systems will drift toward atrophy and with it, they will evolve.