Against autocomplete for life

Why friction is becoming the only moat that matters

24th Street Intersection (1977) by Wayne Thiebaud

We’re worried about the wrong kind of cheating.

Mainstream discourse has reduced the AI conversation to institutional plagiarism and hyper-optimization, in a frenzied rush to not get “left behind.”

But a more insidious threat compounds daily. We have been outsourcing our decision-making to AI and algorithms. This doesn’t just influence what we buy, who we date, or how we spend our time. It increasingly shapes these choices through direct instruction and recommendation.

The Claude Boys started as an online meme mocking AI dependence, yet quickly transformed into a self-professed cohort of hundreds of teenagers who are outsourcing their entire daily lives and personal decisions to large language models. The satire became prophecy— a nod to a bleak future in which we surrender to technological determinism.

Brendan McCord

, founder of the Cosmos Institute, calls this “autocomplete for life.” And the implications extend far beyond subculture and affect all of us. In its obsession with frictionless design, consumer tech has produced convenient seductive alternatives that often steer us toward the path of least resistance.

And who can blame us? We’re wired for efficiency, but we must be cognizant of what we’re giving up. When we offload that small, formative friction of deliberation, we atrophy the muscle of self-direction. As philosopher L. M. Sacasas has stated, a frictionless life is also a life without traction. Without resistance, we are left drifting, perpetually suggested-to, but never authentically choosing.

The divide between those who cede to passive consumption and those who lead intentional lives is widening. As someone who thinks deeply about how we build environments to cultivate high agency, friction has become the most useful lens for understanding what’s at stake. Originality, taste, discernment.

These capacities don’t just make you interesting. They compound into edge, gradually then irrevocably like water sculpting stone. And most people are outsourcing them away without realizing it.

In a frictionless age, friction itself is power. The few who design it back into their lives will be irreplaceable. The ultimate stake, however, is not competence, but being. To accept the convenient, frictionless path is to trade the arduous, often messy, work of flourishing for the sedative ease of mere existence.

Why we need friction to flourish

Before we get to the strategic opportunity friction offers, it’s worth considering its value in principle. Every era produces its own moral infrastructure, and ours is being built around leverage. Choosing friction is, in part, a refusal to accept those defaults unexamined.

Benjamin Franklin understood this principle better than most. He designed his life around practices that forced confrontation with his own gaps and limitations:

• 13 virtues project: Each week Franklin focused on one virtue and tracked his daily progress in a notebook. He cycled through all thirteen for years. The process humbled him. By his own admission he failed often, but the daily tracking forced him to see the gap between his values and his behavior.

• The Spectator method: Franklin taught himself to write by studying The Spectator, a British magazine known for sharp prose. After reading an essay he would attempt to reconstruct it from memory several days later. He compared his version to the original to see where his rhythm, structure, and tone fell short. It was through this taxing process he discovered the mechanics of thought itself.

• Junto: Franklin formed the Junto, a society for mutual improvement. He gathered curious young tradesmen and professionals who wanted to sharpen their thinking on the agreement they abide by specific rules. This included using Socratic questioning, and above all pursuing truth rather than victory. Through the Junto, Franklin designed intellectual friction into his life.

• Public experimentation: Franklin married theory with practice. His experiments carried real physical risk (the kite experiment being the most famous). This made error visible. When experiments failed publicly, they tested his humility and exposed him to criticism.

Through these constraints, Franklin built practical judgment across multiple domains. Beyond achievement, his life showed clear signs of flourishing. He sustained deep friendships and mentorships while inventing, negotiating peace, and writing well into his eighties.

What I’m describing here is not a friction of arbitrary difficulty like shovelling yourself out of a snowstorm when a snowblower is readily available. By friction, I mean a productive resistance that builds capability. Franklin wasn’t born an academic savant nor was he given any handouts from his working class family. It was through sustained effort and repeated confrontation with reality that Franklin built the person he became.

As philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann argues, we must discern between “trouble we reject in principle but accept in practice” and “trouble we accept both in practice and in principle.” The former is difficulty we seek to eliminate through solutions and cures—cancer or car accidents—even if we accept in practice that we must endure them. But the other kind refers to a resistance that constitutes meaning—cooking a meal, hiking a mountain. These are difficult tasks we choose to do and agree that in principle and in practice the resistance is good. Which troubles we accept in principle depends on what we’re trying to build and what we value. Cooking from scratch might be productive friction for someone developing culinary skill or impressing a partner, but pointless hardship for someone whose meaning comes from other domains.

So is friction necessary for human flourishing? Yes, but only the right kind. The capacity to discern which resistance builds you and which merely burdens you is itself a form of judgment. And that judgment, like every other capability worth having, can only be developed through practice. You can’t outsource it to an algorithm or optimize your way around it.

The collapse of earned effort

I can’t stop thinking about this post from

Lulu Cheng Meservey

:

I worry that AI will make most people intellectually sedentary. When we no longer had to do as much manual labor thanks to new technology, we became more sedentary and baseline fitness declined. At the same time, a minority of people got fitter than ever because they exercised with intention, for status or self-care.

AI could create a world where most people become intellectually slovenly, while the privileged or determined few give themselves mental superpowers.

This was in response to an MIT brain scan study of ChatGPT users that revealed cognitive disparities between users and non-users. A week previously, Mary Harrington’s opinion piece was published in The New York Times, titled “Thinking is Becoming a Luxury Good” in which she argues cognitive fitness is stratifying along class lines just as physical health has.

As the uncertainty about what a post-AI future will look like grows, the consensus on what skills and traits that will shake out to be useful becomes foggier. Those with the most intel and capital are forming their own hypotheses—a movement that’s creating a widening divide between those who outsource their thinking and attention to screens and those who are doubling down on intellectual “exercise.” In other words, those who see orientation toward difficulty as something worth preserving and those who cede to its decline. The elite have been opting out in a variety of ways long before consumer AI made its debut, sending their children to Waldorf and classical schools, and hiring phone-free nannies.

Designing intellectual friction into your life—grappling with the Great Books and messiness of original sources rather than generating a summary, for instance—will determine what side of the divide you’re on. Not only is intellectual exercise becoming a scarce, high-value moat to preserve, but the compounding effects of critical thinking and focus will allow you to develop a non-fungible judgment, a practical wisdom needed to see original problems that AI is blind to. This is a clear edge in the age of cognitive atrophy.

But this divide isn’t just economic. A subset of ambitious Gen Z see the opportunity at stake here and are actually emboldened by the agency AI offers them to work on more purposeful endeavors.

Caroline Ciaramitaro

interviewed a cohort of college-age students, many of them True Fellows with early access to AI, who shared an optimistic vantage point on the future of work:

They believe we’re entering an economy where technical skills are commoditized, but they’re hedging that self-expression and problem identification will persist as the scarcest resources.

Productive resistance doesn’t just allow you to become intellectually “fitter,” it allows you to become more intentional about where you choose to spend your time. Solving big problems in the world, devoting your time to passion projects, becoming an expert in your craft—all of these things take considerable mental fortitude and real effort. To be blunt, you can’t half-ass it. As AI commoditizes instant content and quick takes, these are the kinds of endeavours that will have strong market value. Friction then becomes a contrarian signal of effort.

On its own, AI is a form of mimesis. The tendency to want what others want, what René Girard called mimetic desire, is algorithmically amplified. In turn, the default consumer becomes homogenous. But bring a strong interior world and deep priors, and AI becomes an avenue to amplify self-authorship. Friction is what builds and protects that interior world. It’s the only way to stay interesting in a world of slop and sycophantic sameness.

Choose your trouble

As Borgmann alludes to, not all “trouble” or friction is worth accepting both in principle and in practice. But discerning which friction to preserve and where to focus your effort depends on what you value.

The clearer your orientation, the stronger your justification for self-imposed friction. And through this process of effort and intention, confrontation with reality will continue to refine what matters.

Here are a few concrete examples, including some of my own self-imposed:

• Becoming a parent → arguably imposes some of the most enduring friction and with it, some of the highest upside for personal transformation. Forces orientation toward the future and stakes your identity on something larger than yourself.

• Committing to a complex long-term project → things like writing a book, building a company, and multi-year research builds tolerance for uncertainty and delayed gratification.

• Engaging with ideas you disagree with in long-form → as the great Paul Graham has said “If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it.” Long form writing sharpens thinking and prevents cognitive atrophy, an antidote to AI sycophancy.

• Participating in live debates / Socratic discussions → form your own Junto club or join salons like Interintellect. Seek out dissenting perspectives and engage in difficult conversations where the answer isn’t obvious. Creates real-time discomfort necessary to challenge/sharpen your own perspectives.

• Reading physical books, joining book clubs → forces you to focus on select texts and creates accountability for deep engagement. Builds taste and expands worldviews beyond what the algorithm serves to you. Difficult texts e.g. the Great Books build foundational knowledge. The Catherine Project and The Great Library of Alexandria are two excellent (free) initiatives to get started.

• Hosting dinners at your home → requires planning and commitment. In turn, accelerates deeper relationships. Can be optimal for connecting people across different groups and inviting people you’re still getting to know.

• Training for something specific → signing up for a competition or performance imposes external accountability and requires you to put in work. Exposes true skill level under pressure and raises the stakes for deep learning.

When your preferences solely come from recommendations and your thoughts from prompts, you erode the capacity for self-direction. In the Decision AI era, friction is what preserves the interior complexity that makes a life feel like yours.

—

I’ve been thinking a lot about my own friction and how to lead a more intentional life, from the content I consume to the things I choose to work on, while still embracing technology.

I’d love to hear from others doing the same. How are you designing productive resistance into your life?

And if this post resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone in your network who might also be thinking about these ideas.

As always, thanks for reading.

-Sam