Frictionless and Forgettable: How Tech Undermines Friendship and Creativity
Welcome back to PsyberSpace I'm your host, Leslie Poston. Today's episode was inspired by a real life conversation I was having with friend and colleague Jason Miller on another social network. He runs a b to b marketing and music podcast called b to b sides that you should check out if that's something you're interested in. Without further ado, today's topic.
Leslie Poston:Remember when you had to remember someone's birthday? Maybe you wrote it on your wall calendar or jotted it in your day planner. You might have called your friend on the phone or sent a card by mail. The effort, as small as it was, actually helped keep that friendship a lot. It created a thread of memory and emotional investment.
Leslie Poston:Then along came Facebook. Suddenly, this app was telling us when to say happy birthday, how to say happy birthday, what emojis to use, or whether to use a generic post and telling us who to do it for. And in the process, we all gradually stopped doing the work of friendship. That's not just nostalgia talking. That's the result of platforms stripping away something called emotional labor and replacing it with frictionless interaction that feels like connection and mimics connection but isn't necessarily real connection.
Leslie Poston:And now generative AI is doing the same thing to our creativity. It gives us shortcuts that feel powerful, but they come at a cost. They remove the messy, meaningful cognitive friction where real insight tends to be born. If you've listened to my episode, your brain on easy mode, you already know our brains are wired to choose comfort over challenge, which makes these frictionless tools feel good even when they're quietly dismantling the depth of our thinking. This episode builds a bit on that concept.
Leslie Poston:Today, we're talking about how technology's obsession with ease may be unraveling everything from friendships to our imagination. Let's get into it. Now I'm not here to tell you social media is evil or AI will destroy us all. I've done multiple episodes defending mindful scrolling and showcasing research on the benefits of digital connection. But there's something specific happening with friction here that is worth examining in this episode.
Leslie Poston:Emotional labor is the effort required to manage emotions in social relationships. It's not just about being nice. It's about doing the work of connection. Before social media, that labor was embedded in how we navigated friendship. It was frictional.
Leslie Poston:We actually had to try. There was no notification prompting you to message your friend. You had to care enough to do it yourself. You had to remember birthdays, plan get togethers, navigate conflicts face to face. The effort mattered because it was an investment of time, attention, and emotional energy.
Leslie Poston:And here's the thing. That investment created the value of the friendship. When we work harder for something, we tend to value it more. This is a well documented psychological principle called effort justification. The more we put into a friendship, the more meaningful it becomes.
Leslie Poston:But social platforms changed that equation. They automated the reminders, simplified the responses, and started turning friendship maintenance into a flattened series of low effort clicks. What felt like convenience was actually erosion, the slow wearing away of the emotional scaffolding that held real life relationships together. To be clear, digital connections can absolutely become meaningful real life relationships, but only when we bring old school emotional effort to online interactions and eventually move them beyond the confines of a social media platform. The medium isn't the problem.
Leslie Poston:It's the low effort, algorithm mediated way that we're trained to use it. Facebook didn't just remove friction from friendship. It replaced meaningful interaction with something more insidious: intermittent reinforcement. This is a concept from behavioral psychology where rewards come unpredictably, creating some of the strongest patterns of repeated behavior that we know. Think about slot machines.
Leslie Poston:You don't win every time you pull the lever, but you might win. And that possibility keeps people playing. Social media works much the same way. You post something, and maybe you'll get a like, maybe you won't, maybe some comments, maybe silence. The unpredictability makes it a little addictive.
Leslie Poston:But here's the problem: intermittent reinforcement is designed to keep you engaging with the platform, not the actual people. You become addicted to the possibility of social validation, not to making genuine connections. The dopamine hit comes from the notification, not from deepening a relationship. The neuroscience behind this is pretty interesting. Intermittent reinforcement hijacks our brain's dopamine system, which normally helps us learn from unexpected rewards.
Leslie Poston:But social media turns this learning mechanism into an addiction mechanism. Every unpredictable like or comment triggers a prediction error in our dopamine neurons, the same system that's supposed to help us adapt and grow. This creates continuous partial attention. You're always somewhat engaged with your phone, always checking for that next hit of social feedback. Meanwhile, the person sitting across from you at dinner gets your leftover attention.
Leslie Poston:The friction of a real conversation, the pauses, the misunderstandings, the need to really listen, starts to feel clunky and stressful compared to the smooth dopamine delivery system in your pocket. But that friction is exactly what builds intimacy and understanding between people. What if the problem isn't, Oh, humans are lazy, but that we're being systematically trained to avoid the very experiences that make us human? There is a fascinating concept in psychology that we've talked about in other episodes called cognitive dissonance, the mental discomfort that we feel when our actions don't align with our beliefs. One way we resolve this discomfort is through effort justification.
Leslie Poston:We convince ourselves that things we've worked hard for must be valuable. This principle explains why friendships that survive challenges often feel stronger, why difficult conversations can deepen bonds, and why relationships that require effort can feel more meaningful than relationships that don't. Facebook and other social platforms disrupted this psychology. They made social interaction so easy that it lost its psychological weight. Saying happy birthday when a notification reminds you isn't just more convenient.
Leslie Poston:It's somehow less meaningful than remembering on your own. The platform turned genuine effort into low effort signals. Like a heart emoji, an auto generated birthday message, these gestures feel like connection, but they lack the investment that makes the connection real. By removing the friction, we remove the value. And data backs this up.
Leslie Poston:Studies on social media use consistently show that passive engagement can be associated with decreased well-being, while active engagement commenting, messaging, and creating can have more positive effects. The difference is the effort. Passive consumption requires no investment, so it tends to create no emotional return. The same dynamic that's affecting our friendships is transforming how we create, and the stakes might be even higher. Creativity isn't just about having good ideas.
Leslie Poston:It's about developing them through process. That process requires desirable difficulties, challenges that are harder in the moment but lead to better long term learning and insight. When you struggle to find the right word, when you get stuck on a problem and have to think around it to find a solution, when you write that terrible first draft and revise it five times, that struggle isn't wasted energy. It's where originality happens. Research on learning shows us that when things come too easily, they don't stick.
Leslie Poston:Easy learning feels good in the moment, but it creates shallow understanding. Difficult learning feels frustrating but builds expertise and insight. There's also a neuroplasticity angle here. Our brains operate on a use it or lose it principle. When we consistently outsource cognitive tasks to AI, we're not just avoiding effort, we're potentially weakening the neural pathways that support independent thinking.
Leslie Poston:The brain regions responsible for creativity, critical analysis, and problem solving need regular challenge to maintain their strength. Generative AI offers what looks like creativity, essays, images, code, and music. But it skips the cognitive friction where real creative development happens. When AI writes your first draft, you miss the thinking that happens in the struggle to articulate your ideas. When it generates your brainstorm, you miss the mental flexibility that comes from pushing through creative blocks.
Leslie Poston:This isn't just about output quality, it's about cognitive development. Every time we outsource cognitive work to AI, we lose an opportunity to strengthen our own thinking muscles. There's a concept in psychology called flow, the mental state where challenge meets skill level, creating deep engagement and optimal performance. Flow happens when a task is hard enough to require your full attention, but not so hard that it overwhelms you. Flow is where creativity thrives.
Leslie Poston:It's where athletes perform their best, where artists create their most meaningful work, where programmers solve their most complex problems. And flow requires friction the right amount of difficulty to keep you fully engaged. LLM and Generative AI tools often promise to get you into flow faster by removing obstacles. But in practice, they might be preventing flow altogether. If the challenge is too low, if AI is doing the hard thinking for you, you never enter that state of deep engagement.
Leslie Poston:This connects to something called the default mode network, a brain network that activates when we're not focused on specific tasks. As I've discussed in previous episodes, this boredom network is crucial for creativity, insight, and memory consolidation. But when AI provides instant stimulation and answers, we rarely enter the mental downtime where our best ideas emerge. And here's a wild thought. What if boredom is actually a feature, not a bug?
Leslie Poston:We're constantly consuming instead of creating the space for an original thought. Think about the difference between using a calculator for complex math versus working through it by hand. The calculator gives you the right answer faster, but working through it manually engages different cognitive processes. You understand the problem differently, you notice patterns, and you develop mathematical intuition. The same thing happens with creative work.
Leslie Poston:When AI generates ideas for you, you're not developing your own creative intuition. When it writes for you, you're not building your own voice. When it solves problems for you, you're not strengthening your own problem solving ability. Here's something counterintuitive: When something is slightly harder to process, we often understand it better. This is called cognitive disfluency, and it's been demonstrated in numerous studies.
Leslie Poston:Researchers have found that when test materials are printed in hard to read fonts, students perform better on comprehension tests. When math problems are presented in a way that requires more effort to understand, students are actually more likely to catch their own errors. The extra difficulty forces deeper processing. Generative AI optimizes for the opposite: cognitive fluency. It makes everything smooth, easy to understand, and polished.
Leslie Poston:But that smoothness might be preventing the kind of deep thinking that leads to insight and originality. This relates to cognitive load theory from neuroscience. There's productive cognitive load that builds expertise, and there's unproductive load that just creates confusion. AI often removes productive load the mental effort that strengthens our thinking while sometimes adding unproductive load through choice overload. When AI offers endless creative options, we might spend more energy choosing than creating.
Leslie Poston:When your first draft looks finished, do you bother revising? When the AI generated image looks perfect, do you push yourself to imagine something different? When the answer comes instantly, do you question whether it's the right question? Friction isn't just an inconvenience to be optimized away. It's often a signal that real thinking is happening.
Leslie Poston:Regular listeners will be familiar with the psychological phenomenon called learned helplessness. If you're new, that's where repeated exposure to uncontrollable situations leads people to stop trying, even when they actually do have control. It was first studied in experiments with dogs who stopped trying to escape electric shocks, even when escape became possible. I worry that AI dependency might be creating a similar effect with human creativity and problem solving. When AI consistently outperforms us at writing, image generation, and idea development, people might internalize the message that they're not good at those things and that they should just let the AI handle it.
Leslie Poston:This can be particularly dangerous because creativity and critical thinking are skills that require practice and failure. They're not fixed talents. They're capabilities that strengthen with use and atrophy without it. Every time we default to AI, instead of struggling through a creative challenge ourselves, we're potentially weakening our own creative confidence. Memory research shows us another concerning pattern.
Leslie Poston:When we offload memory tasks to technology, we don't just lose recall. We lose the consolidation process where memories become insights. The act of remembering isn't just storage and retrieval. It's active reconstruction that creates new connections and understanding. AI that remembers for us might be preventing this deeper learning process.
Leslie Poston:The risk isn't just that we become dependent on AI. It's that we lose faith in our own cognitive abilities, and we develop learned helplessness about thinking itself. And unlike the dogs and the psychology experiments, we're choosing this helplessness. We're opting into it because it feels easier in the moment. But easy and helpful, they aren't the same thing.
Leslie Poston:One of the most underappreciated casualties of frictionless technology might be our tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. Both deep relationships and creative work require the ability to sit with not knowing, to be comfortable with questions that don't have immediate answers. Real conversations are messy and unpredictable. You don't know where they'll go, what you'll learn about the other person, or how your own thinking might change. That uncertainty is part of what makes human connection meaningful, and it's exactly what social media algorithms try to eliminate.
Leslie Poston:Similarly, creative work begins with uncertainty. You start with a vague idea, a feeling, a question without an answer. The creative process is about exploring that uncertainty, following threads that might lead nowhere, and being willing to not know until knowing emerges. Generative AI tools tend to collapse uncertainty quickly. Ask a question, get an answer.
Leslie Poston:Describe what you want, get a result. This efficiency comes at a cost. It trains us to expect quick resolution instead of learning to work productively with ambiguity. There's also a social comparison element here. When we see AI generated content that looks perfect, we unconsciously compare our rough human efforts to polished algorithmic outputs.
Leslie Poston:This is like comparing your behind the scenes struggle to someone else's highlight reel, except now the highlight reel is generated by machines trained on millions of examples. This sets an impossible standard for human creativity. But ambiguity tolerance is critical for both relationships and creativity. It's what allows you to have conversations where you might change your mind, to explore ideas that might not work, and to be curious instead of certain. When technology consistently resolves uncertainty for us, we might be losing our capacity to navigate the uncertain spaces where growth happens.
Leslie Poston:Let's address something that comes up whenever we critique frictionless technology, and that's the Trojan horse of accessibility. It is absolutely true that generative AI tools help many people. Text to speech, auto captioning, predictive typing, grammar assistance, and more. These features can be transformative for people with disabilities, people learning new languages, or people with limited time or resources. But here's where we need to be careful.
Leslie Poston:Accessibility is often used as a rhetorical shield to deflect criticism of broader design choices. Tech companies wrap things in the language of inclusion to accelerate adoption, And then further down the road, they avoid deeper questions about what their tools are optimizing for. There is a big difference between removing unjust barriers and removing growth producing challenge. Accessibility should mean access to meaningful engagement, not just access to effortless consumption. When a company uses accessibility language to justify AI features that reduce cognitive effort for everyone, they're often not serving disabled users.
Leslie Poston:They're serving their own business models. True accessibility would give people tools to engage more deeply with creative and social challenges, not to bypass them entirely. We're also seeing hedonic adaptation in our relationship with convenience. Just like we adapt to other pleasures and need increasing amounts to feel satisfied, we adapt to frictionless technology and become less tolerant of any difficulty. What felt convenient yesterday becomes baseline today.
Leslie Poston:Anything requiring effort begins to feel frustrating. This adaptation cycle keeps pushing us toward more automation, more convenience, and more friction removal. We can support accessibility while still questioning whether frictionless design serves human flourishing. These two ideas are not in conflict. So where does this leave us?
Leslie Poston:We can't uninvent social media, and the cash cow hype train of artificial intelligence has certainly left the station. And maybe we shouldn't want to. These tools do have some real benefits, but we can be more intentional about how we design and use them. We should ask, does this tool remove barriers or remove meaning? Does it support human capacity or does it replace it?
Leslie Poston:Does it enhance our ability to connect and create, or does it make us more passive consumers of automated connection and creation? The goal is not to make everything difficult. It's just to preserve the type of difficulty that helps us grow. We want to make and deploy technology that scaffolds human development, not technology that shortcuts it. Attention research is also relevant here.
Leslie Poston:When we switch between AI assistance and our own thinking, we experience attention residue cognitive resources that remain stuck on the previous task. This makes both our AI assisted work and our independent work less effective. We're not fully present for either mode of thinking. This might mean choosing AI tools that help you think better, rather than tools that think for you. It might mean using our social platforms to facilitate real world connections, rather than replacing them.
Leslie Poston:It might mean embracing uncertainty and effort as features, not bugs, in both relationships and creative work. The pattern we've explored today, the erosion of meaningful friction, shows up everywhere in modern life, from passive politics to passive consumption to passive creation. It's all connected, and it all points to the same question: What kind of humans do we want to become? We live in a world where ease is everything. Tap to like, autofill this message, generate the image, post the thoughts you didn't really think.
Leslie Poston:But here's the truth: what makes something meaningful is often the struggle it took to get there. Emotional labor isn't wasted energy it's intimacy. Cognitive friction isn't a bug it's how we grow. The dopamine hit from a like will fade. The satisfaction from a conversation you invested in will last.
Leslie Poston:The AI generated essay might impress people, but the ideas you struggled to articulate will change how you think. So this week, start to notice where ease is replacing effort in your life. Notice when technology offers to remove friction and ask yourself, is this friction serving me, and is the struggle part of the point? Choose your frictions wisely. Some barriers need to come down, but some difficulties are worth preserving because they're not obstacles to human flourishing.
Leslie Poston:They're the path to it. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off and reminding you to stay curious. Don't forget to like and subscribe so you get an episode every week, and send it to a friend if you think that they'll enjoy it.
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