We Optimized the Wrong Thing: People Need the Inconvenience

AI is taking the friction out of our lives, and it’s doing it faster than anything that came before.

It drafts the email we were dreading. It summarizes the report we were supposed to read. It picks the restaurant, plans the route, suggests the reply, and finishes the sentence before we’ve decided how it ends. Decision by decision, it is removing the choices we used to make on our own, from what to watch tonight to how to phrase an apology.

Most of that is a gift. Some of it may be a theft we haven’t noticed yet.

The consumer internet already ran this experiment on our errands, our shopping, our music, and our love lives. AI is now running it on our thinking.¹ The first round has a few things to tell us about the second.

I own several hundred vinyl records.² It’s a ridiculous way to listen to music.

Each takes up space. Each needs to be stored upright, cleaned, handled by the edges like evidence, and played on equipment that wants its own maintenance schedule. Twenty minutes in, the music stops and I have to get up and turn the thing over. Meanwhile, the phone in my pocket holds roughly the entire history of recorded sound, available in about the time it takes to misspell a band’s name.

There is no rational argument for vinyl if the objective is to hear a song.

But I don’t put on a record to hear a song. I put it on to choose. To hold the sleeve, read the liner notes, look at artwork made for a twelve-inch square instead of a thumbnail, and commit to one artist for forty minutes instead of skipping after forty seconds. Rob Gordon³ in High Fidelity reorganizes his entire collection autobiographically to survive a breakup. Ridiculous, yes. It’s also the most honest depiction on film of what an object can hold that a stream cannot.

Spotify gives me access to music. Vinyl gives me an occasion to listen to it.⁴

I use both. They solve the same problem and satisfy completely different needs, and almost nothing about the way we build products, services, and AI tools today is designed to understand the difference.

We have spent thirty years making life easier. We may have confused that with making it better.

The Great Frictionless Experiment

The modern consumer economy runs on a proposition so simple it barely registers as one: make things easier, and people will want them more.

The track record is hard to argue with. Amazon made shopping easier. Uber made getting across town easier. Netflix, Spotify, and Google Maps did the same for entertainment, music, and knowing where the hell you are. Tinder made meeting people easier, or at least made finding people to meet more efficient, which is not quite the same thing.

Each removed some combination of time, effort, uncertainty, or complexity from an existing human behavior. And each quietly reset our expectations of what an acceptable experience looks like. Waiting became a problem to solve. Searching became a problem to solve. Choosing became a problem to solve. Eventually even boredom became a problem to solve, and we solved it so thoroughly that most of us can no longer stand in an elevator for nine seconds without checking something.

The language of business followed. Reduce friction. Eliminate pain points. Streamline the journey. Minimize cognitive load. Optimize conversion. I have written versions of those sentences into strategy decks myself, and I meant every one of them.⁵

Somewhere along the way, convenience stopped being a design goal and became something closer to a moral imperative. If an experience asks for effort, someone must have designed it badly.

Buried inside that belief is a bigger one: that the effort required to achieve something is separate from the value of achieving it.

Sometimes it is. Often it isn’t.

Learning an instrument requires repetition, frustration, and failure. A relationship worth having requires vulnerability and the occasional deeply uncomfortable conversation. Getting stronger requires resistance, literally. An original idea requires uncertainty and a willingness to be wrong in public. In each case the difficulty isn’t standing between you and the outcome. It’s part of the machinery that produces it.

Remove the resistance and you don’t get the same result faster. Sometimes you get a different result entirely.⁶

Convenience Is Not a Smaller Version of Fulfillment

The most consequential mistake of the convenience era may be treating convenience and fulfillment as two settings on the same dial.

They’re different instruments entirely. Convenience asks how quickly I can get what I want. Fulfillment asks what getting it meant. We have organized our lives, our businesses, and now our technology almost entirely around the first question, and we’ve become extraordinarily good at answering it. Food arrives. Cars appear. Questions are answered. Increasingly, whole pieces of work are finished before we’ve had much chance to engage with them at all.

But an outcome is not an experience. And an experience doesn’t become fulfilling just because it produced the outcome you ordered.

Imagine an earpiece that translates every conversation perfectly and instantly. Functionally, the problem of talking to someone in another language is solved. What it can’t give you is the first conversation you understand without help, the small surge of competence when you order dinner in a city that isn’t yours, or the way learning how a people speak changes how you see them. The device delivers the outcome. The effort develops the person.⁷

Cooking works the same way. Ordering dinner and making it both solve hunger. Only one involves choosing ingredients, building a skill, making decisions, screwing up the sauce, and producing something with your own hands. Cooking is not a slower way of eating. It’s a different activity that happens to end at the same table.

We tend to measure success by the distance between desire and delivery, and assume that shortening it always improves things.

Sometimes the distance is where the good part lives.⁸

More friction worth having⁹

• In Search of Maybe: what a bookstore knows that an algorithm never will.

• Expected to Arrive Experienced: what happens to talent when AI skips the struggle that builds it.

• Accept, Allow, Yes, Send: I built a website by pressing buttons. Who did the work?

Every essay lives in the archive at someassemblyrequired.sg/archive.

Romance Is Inefficient by Design

Almost everything we recognize as romantic involves effort nobody required.

A handwritten letter when a text would do. Dinner made from scratch when delivery is faster and, honestly, sometimes better. Crossing the city for one hour with someone. Walking through half a dozen shops for a gift that feels exactly right when a gift card would technically cover it.

None of these is the efficient way to accomplish the underlying task. The inefficiency is the gesture. A handwritten letter says something a text cannot, even with identical words: someone took the time. The effort is part of the message, and frequently it is the message.

Romance points at something larger. Meaningful relationships resist optimization.¹⁰ They need patience, uncertainty, compromise, and a willingness to invest without knowing what comes back. Vulnerability requires risk. Commitment requires sacrifice. Intimacy requires attention, and attention requires giving something up: time, convenience, sometimes certainty.

Not all difficulty earns its place, obviously. Manipulation, cruelty, and needless conflict don’t become meaningful because they’re hard. But the costs that make relationships demanding are often the same ones that make them matter.

We know this instinctively in our personal lives. Then we walk into work and design as though effort has no value at all, as though every extra step is waste.

Part of the reason is that convenience is so easy to measure. Time saved, steps removed, conversion lifted. Nobody has a dashboard for going out of your way.¹¹ There’s no KPI for anticipation. And so, in organization after organization, the things that can’t be counted keep losing the argument to the things that can.

Something to Push Against

Watch what people do with their time and money once it’s genuinely theirs to spend.

They run marathons. Climb mountains. Restore old cars. Take up the cello at fifty-five. Attempt recipes with fourteen steps and a two-day rest. They spend years mastering skills with almost no practical application to daily life, and they routinely describe these as the most rewarding things they do.

Nobody runs a marathon because it’s an efficient way to cover 42 kilometers. Nobody climbs a mountain because they have business at the top.

Picture a marathon where everyone is driven to the finish in an air-conditioned bus. Everyone arrives. Everyone gets the medal. Nobody has run a marathon, and the person who steps off the bus is exactly the person who got on.

That’s what difficulty does that convenience can’t. It changes the participant. It builds capability, produces confidence, and supplies evidence, hard evidence, that you can do something you once couldn’t.

Daniel LaRusso¹² spends a good chunk of The Karate Kid waxing cars and painting fences, convinced he’s being used as free labor. He’s learning karate. The tedium isn’t a delay before the lesson. It is the lesson, delivered in a form he can’t skip.

Muscles strengthen under resistance. Skills develop through repetition. Judgment improves by making decisions and living with them. Different processes, one shared requirement: you have to be there. Someone else can lift the weight; your muscles won’t grow. Someone else can make the hard call; you won’t develop the judgment that comes from making it.

We cannot outsource the experience of becoming capable.

Which is why the elimination of effort deserves far more scrutiny than it gets. Sometimes effort is the price of admission. Sometimes effort is the show.

Paying to Get It Back

There is something wonderfully absurd about the convenience economy. We spend billions removing friction from everyday life, then spend billions more buying it back.¹³

We take the elevator to the office, then pay a gym to let us climb stairs that go nowhere. We automate the laundry and spend Saturday nursing a sourdough starter. We navigate with a system designed to make getting lost impossible, then book adventure travel that promises uncertainty, discomfort, and a decent chance of getting lost.

Contradictory on its face. Perfectly logical underneath. We don’t want all of the difficulty back. We want difficulty with a purpose, and we’ll pay handsomely for it.

Fitness is the obvious case. Generations of engineering designed physical labor out of daily life, and the gym, the trainer, the Pilates reformer, and the obstacle race exist to put it back in a form we choose. Adventure tourism sells exposure to the exact discomforts modern life spent a century eliminating. Pottery classes, woodworking weekends, and bread courses are desirable because they demand time, patience, and skill, and the lopsided bowl you carry home matters less than the afternoon that made it. Experiential luxury increasingly sells access to rituals and places rather than objects, precisely because a ritual can’t be shipped.

The common thread isn’t nostalgia. It’s participation. These businesses monetize the one thing the convenience economy spent decades trying to remove: the requirement to do something yourself.

The paradox compounds. The more efficiently we strip effort out of ordinary life, the more valuable certain kinds of effort become.¹⁴

It isn’t a clean swap. A spin class is not a shift on a loading dock. One is imposed by economic necessity; the other is chosen, paid for, and abandoned the moment it stops being fun.

That difference is the whole story. We aren’t buying difficulty. We’re buying the right to choose it.

The Privilege of Choosing Your Inconvenience¹⁵

Romanticizing inconvenience is easy when you have the time, money, and freedom to pick yours.

A parent working two jobs and covering childcare doesn’t need more friction. Someone commuting two hours each way because they can’t afford to live near work isn’t savoring the slow road. For a lot of people, convenience isn’t a luxury. It’s how the week survives contact with reality.

And the technologies that remove unnecessary effort create real freedom. Online banking saves a trip someone couldn’t afford to make. Delivery is a lifeline for people with limited mobility. Automation takes over work that was exhausting or dangerous. AI puts tools and expertise within reach of people who never had the resources to touch them.

These are genuine improvements to human life. Any argument for inconvenience that turns into an argument against accessibility has lost the plot.

The line runs between difficulty imposed and difficulty chosen. One erodes your sense of agency. The other builds it.

Which suggests the real luxury emerging in a frictionless world isn’t inconvenience at all. It’s discretion.¹⁶ The freedom to decide which inconveniences are worth your time, rather than having your effort consumed by circumstances you didn’t pick. To strip out the frustrations that keep you from living well, and keep the challenges that make living worth it.

That’s a different brief for technology. Less the elimination of every form of effort, more control over where our effort goes.

Convenience should buy us the freedom to pursue fulfillment. It was never supposed to replace it.

Bad Friction and the Other Kind

Not all friction is created equal.

Nobody wants forty-five minutes on hold with the bank, serenaded by the same twelve bars of Vivaldi. Nobody finds romance in filling out the same form three times, or in a checkout flow apparently designed by someone who hates money. That friction is bad design, full stop. It wastes time, breeds anxiety, and stops people doing what they came to do. Kill it.

The other kind asks us to participate rather than consume. It builds anticipation, demands attention, invites discovery, or makes an outcome feel earned. It gives an experience texture. Call it meaningful friction.

The distinction is about to matter enormously, because technology is superb at eliminating effort and largely blind to why some effort matters.

A routing algorithm will find the fastest way to the coast without knowing that the long way was the reason you went for a drive. A recommendation engine will serve exactly what you’ll probably enjoy and never grasp the pleasure of stumbling onto something you didn’t know you wanted. Pixar’s¹⁷ WALL-E imagined the logical endpoint¹⁸: humans gliding around a starship in hover-chairs, every need anticipated, every screen inches from the face. The film plays it as satire. The product roadmap plays it straight.

The system sees inefficiency. The human sees possibility.¹⁹

None of this is a case for preserving inconvenience everywhere. It’s a case for knowing which kind you’re looking at. Some friction stops people from doing what they want. Some helps them become who they want to be. Confusing the two may be the single most expensive design mistake of the convenience economy.

The Machine That Writes the Love Letter

Artificial intelligence drags all of this into the light.

For the first time, we’re building technology that removes friction not just from transactions and physical tasks, but from the cognitive and creative work that has always required a human to sweat over it. Writing. Designing. Researching. Analyzing. Composing. Work that took days now takes minutes.

I use AI constantly. I build workflows around it for a living. I believe it amplifies human capability in ways we’re only starting to understand, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise.

But the question everyone keeps asking, how much work can it eliminate, is the least interesting one on the table. The better question is what happens to the person when the effort disappears.

Take writing. Having an idea and working through an idea are not the same act. Writing forces you to confront what you actually think. You find the contradiction you’d been stepping around. You make a connection you didn’t know was there. You abandon a position that sounded brilliant in the shower and collapses the moment it hits the page.²⁰ The struggle isn’t the cost of producing the article. It’s how the thinking gets done.

An AI can draft a love letter in four seconds. It can’t struggle to find the words, and the struggle was most of what the letter meant.

So the honest answer depends on what you’re trying to do. Summarizing a meeting? Remove every ounce of friction, with my blessing. Developing an original point of view? Keep some of the resistance, because the difficulty is doing useful work.

As machines get better at doing things for us, we’ll have to get far more deliberate about which things we keep doing ourselves. Often not because we’ll do them better. In many cases we won’t. Because doing them is part of how we become who we are.

Technology that extends our capabilities and technology that lets us skip the experiences through which capabilities develop can look identical from the outside. One makes us more capable. The other makes us more dependent, and the line between them is rarely visible while you’re standing on it. AI can just as easily introduce productive struggle: a sparring partner that pushes back, asks the awkward question, refuses to hand over the answer until you’ve worked for it.²¹ That version exists. It just isn’t the default, because the default is optimized for the same metric as everything else.

Should we use AI to make things easier? Of course. The real question is whether easier always makes the human experience better.

I increasingly suspect it doesn’t.

What to Put Back

For businesses, the implications run well past customer experience.

For decades, competitive advantage meant faster, easier, cheaper, more convenient. That still matters. But what happens when every retailer delivers same-day, every service is instant, every platform anticipates your preferences, and every brand has an AI assistant standing by to do the thing for you?

Convenience stops being a differentiator and becomes table stakes.²² And once the functional experience is effortless everywhere, brands have to compete on something else: the meaning of having the thing, not just the ease of getting it.

That reaches into almost every category. Product design has to consider what a product lets people learn, express, or experience, not merely accomplish, and something that asks for thoughtful interaction can build a deeper relationship than something that runs on autopilot. Retail may be worth less as efficient distribution and more as discovery, expertise, curation, and participation, all the things a checkout page physically cannot reproduce. Hospitality may distinguish itself by getting guests to engage with a place rather than consume its amenities. Nobody tells the story of the seamless check-in. They tell the story of the conversation they didn’t expect.

Education faces the hardest version. If an AI can produce the right answer instantly, then producing right answers can’t be what education is for. What’s left is judgment, curiosity, resilience, and the ability to stay inside a hard problem without flinching.

Then there’s my own industry. Marketing has spent years shaving every message down to its most digestible form: three seconds to land, minimal cognitive load, nothing asked of the audience whatsoever. There were good reasons for that. But not every meaningful connection forms in three seconds. Some ideas reward contemplation. Some stories need patience. Some work is memorable precisely because the audience had to lean in and finish it themselves. In a world drowning in effortless content, asking something of your audience may become the differentiator.²³ Not obscurity for its own sake. Something worth the time.

The strategic shift runs from designing around the removal of effort to designing around the creation of meaning. Remove friction where it stops people from participating. Preserve it where participation creates the value. Introduce it, carefully, where the experience gets richer because people have something real to do.

The next great innovation may not be about taking something out of the experience.

It may be about knowing what to put back.

Friction Worth Having

As technology makes more things effortless, effort itself starts to look like a luxury. Handmade objects command premiums over mass-produced ones. Mechanical watches still sell, despite drifting a few seconds a day next to a phone that never does. People pay for chef’s tables, guided expeditions, and workshops that demand hours of their time.

But the deepest version isn’t expensive at all. A family cooking dinner together. Someone teaching themselves guitar, badly. A meandering two-hour-long walk that serves as a proxy for a meeting.²⁴ An afternoon lost in a bookstore. What these require isn’t money. It’s attention, which is now the scarcest thing most of us own.

We’ve spent years treating time as something to save. Time is also the raw material experiences are made of. Sometimes the point of the hour is to spend it.²⁵

What kind of people do we become when fewer and fewer things ask anything of us?

I hope technology eventually takes away most of the tedious, repetitive, soul-flattening tasks that eat our days. But a world without unnecessary struggle is not a world without meaningful challenge, and we should be careful not to build the first and mistake it for the second. People need to exercise judgment, make commitments, and live with consequences. We need to meet things we don’t immediately understand, to be uncertain, to be surprised, to get it wrong and discover we’re capable of more than we thought.

Nobody needs to earn an afternoon off. Not every moment should be a character test. But if every obstacle is removed, every decision anticipated, every desire met before we’ve had time to feel it, something goes missing. Maybe not our happiness. Possibly the conditions that make growth and discovery possible at all.

The danger isn’t that life becomes too easy. It’s that we start mistaking ease for the purpose of life.

I’m not giving up convenience. I don’t want bank queues back, or a paper map unfolded across the steering wheel, or an afternoon on the phone trying to book a flight. I like that technology handles the things I don’t want to do.

But I also want to stumble onto things by accident. To work through ideas that resist me. To make things with my hands. To spend an unreasonable amount of time choosing a record, cooking a meal, or wandering a city I’ve never seen. I want the possibility of getting it wrong and the satisfaction of figuring it out.

The great achievement of the convenience economy was removing the obstacles between people and the things they want. Its great blind spot was assuming every obstacle was one of them.

We don’t want frictionless lives. We want friction worth having.²⁶

I’m Christopher Smith, founder of RockPaperScissors in Singapore. My job is the one this article interrogates: I take friction out of how creative work gets made.²⁷ I design and build the workflows and AI systems that let brands, agencies, and in-house teams make better work, faster. The craft is knowing which friction is just waiting and which is where the judgment lives, then removing the first and protecting the second.

Thirty years making the work. Now I rebuild how it gets made. rockpaperscissors.sg