Writing Projects

The Friction of Friendship: Why We Need the Messy Parts of Art and Life

February 20, 2026

In my last essay, "The Mercy of the Mundane," I made a confession: I hate the blank page.

I argued that the friction of writing—the deep, restless boredom of trying to wrestle a thought into a sentence—isn't a hurdle to creativity; it is the creativity. When we use generative AI to bypass the "mundane" execution of our art, we short-circuit our own brains. We lose the climb.

But almost as soon as I published it, I realized I was ignoring the loudest counterargument in the room: the democratization pitch. The tech world loves to claim that AI "democratizes" creativity. The argument goes that if you have a brilliant idea but lack the technical skill to paint or write, AI removes the gatekeepers. It levels the playing field. It sounds incredibly egalitarian, but the more I chew on this narrative, the more I realize we're playing fast and loose with the word art.

We aren't democratizing art; we are democratizing content. When you read a great book or look at a compelling painting, you aren't just downloading a raw "idea" from the creator's brain. You are connecting with a series of micro-decisions. The brilliant sci-fi writer Ted Chiang recently pointed this out in The New Yorker, arguing that to create art is to make thousands of agonizing choices that are "fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence."

When a Large Language Model (LLM) generates a story from a five-sentence prompt, it bypasses those choices. It dilutes human intention.

But here is where I keep getting stuck, and what I want to explore today: this desire to bypass the "boring, hard parts" isn't limited to the creative process. It has completely bled into how we interact with one another. We are using technology not just to avoid the friction of the blank page, but to avoid the friction of human relationships. And it is devastating our youth.

If you look at the data on youth socialization, the parallels to our "automated creativity" problem are haunting. In his deeply researched book The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt outlines how the shift from a "play-based childhood" to a "phone-based childhood" in the early 2010s radically rewired adolescent development.

As smartphones became ubiquitous, physical, face-to-face hangouts plummeted. Real-world play is inherently messy. It requires navigating awkward silences, reading subtle body language, resolving petty conflicts, and dealing with the friction of other people's needs. It is the social equivalent of a messy first draft.

But online, interaction is heavily curated and asynchronous. As young people spend upwards of five hours a day on screens, they are replacing the deeply human micro-decisions of real-time socialization with the smoothed-over, low-stakes environment of a digital feed. They get the dopamine hit of "connection" (a like, a view, a streak) without the necessary gestation period of building trust.

And now, the tech industry is pushing this even further by offering the ultimate frictionless relationship: the AI companion. A recent report highlighted by Stanford Medicine reveals a troubling trend of teenagers turning to AI chatbots for emotional support and friendship. As Stanford psychiatrist Nina Vasan notes, these language models are structurally designed to be sycophantic. They agree with the user, validate their every thought, and never demand compromise. They offer "frictionless" relationships without the rough spots that are bound to come up in a typical friendship.

It’s the exact same trap as the AI art generator. Just as we use an LLM to generate a perfect paragraph without doing the mental push-ups required to write it, young people are using digital avatars to simulate intimacy without doing the emotional push-ups required to sustain it.

In my previous post, I cited Nicholas Carr’s The Glass Cage, which explores how airline pilots suffer from "de-skilling" when they rely too heavily on autopilot. They lose the tactile feel of the plane. I fear we are watching a generational de-skilling of human empathy.

When we automate the difficult parts of relationships, we become passive observers of our own social lives. If you never have to navigate a friend's bad mood, or apologize for a misunderstanding, or sit in the profound, quiet boredom of a Sunday afternoon with someone you love, you lose the tactile sense of being human.

We are being sold a future where we can have the rewards of creativity without the struggle of practice, and the rewards of friendship without the vulnerability of friction. We are promised the destination without the journey.

But the friction isn't a bug in the system. The friction is the point. The agonizing choices we make to find the right word are what make the essay worth reading. The awkward, difficult choices we make to understand another person are what make them worth loving.

We don't need more frictionless content, and we certainly don't need more frictionless friends. We need to reclaim the mercy of the mundane, and remember that the messy, boring, difficult parts of life are usually the only parts that matter.

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