Abundance is amazing.A frictionless life is the trap.

Technology has always promised abundance: take something scarce and make it easier to reach.

More food, medicine, information, and choice. More access to tools, care, knowledge, and opportunity.

Some abundance is miraculous. An AI tutor gives a kid more opportunity, and faster diagnostics give a patient a better chance. Internet access gives someone in a remote place more agency. Someone who can’t draw but can now show an idea has more power to create.

That’s progress doing what progress is supposed to do.

But abundance usually arrives by removing friction.

A lot of friction is just bad. It wastes time and protects lazy systems, turning simple needs into endurance tests.

I’ve spent a lot of my career removing that kind of friction.

Fewer clicks. Shorter forms. Faster onboarding. Less waiting. Cleaner paths between wanting something and getting it.

I still believe in that work.

If someone’s trying to learn, get care, start a business, apply for a job, understand a bill, or talk to a doctor, that friction usually just gets in the way.

So no, this isn’t a book about making life harder.

That would be stupid.

But AI made it harder to ignore the other kind of friction: the kind that had been doing a job.

I’ve been using large language models since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022. At first, like a lot of people, I treated it as a strange new tool. It became part of my work and then part of how the people around me worked.

I’ve used AI for marketing, customer support, product work, research, writing, planning, analysis, and the endless little tasks that make up a modern workday. I’ve helped teams adopt it, and watched what happens: rough drafts appear in seconds, blank pages disappear, support replies get cleaner, product ideas get shaped, research gets summarized, and people who were stuck suddenly get moving.

A lot of that is useful.

Some of it is wonderful.

But after a while, I started noticing a pattern I couldn’t quite shake.

People used AI to get unstuck, then to skip the part where they would have had to think. Then they were taking the output and feeding it into the next thing, and the next thing after that, until whole chains of work were being built out of machine-shaped starting points.

The tool wasn’t just helping with the work.

It was changing where the thinking began.

That sounds dramatic, and maybe it is. But once you see it, it’s hard to unsee. The first draft becomes the input. After that, the summary becomes the understanding, while recommendations and answers become the judgment and the plan.

And the person in the middle starts to do less of the thing that used to make them better.

Less wrestling with the blank page.

Less sitting with confusion.

Less checking whether an answer actually makes sense.

Less building the argument in their own head.

Less developing taste by making a choice and living with it.

I’m not saying this happens every time. I’m not saying AI makes people stupid. That’s too crude, and it misses what makes this hard.

The problem is that AI is often useful.

That’s why the trade off is easy to miss.

It removes friction that blocks people: lack of confidence, time, access, language, technical skill, or a starting point. That can come at the cost of the friction where judgment, skill, memory, taste, and ownership used to form.

That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.

I have two sons who are software engineers. They use AI too, at work and in the rest of their lives. In their world, using it is already ordinary. I don’t look at that and think, “They should stop.” That would be ridiculous. This is the water now.

But I do find myself wondering what it’s doing to them, and to all of us.

I was around for the first big consumer internet wave. I got on the web in 1994 with Netscape Navigator, back when the whole thing still felt like a weird door had opened in the wall. The internet changed everything. It changed work, media, shopping, friendship, knowledge, culture, attention. It was enormous.

This feels bigger. Or maybe more intimate is the better word.

The web gave us access to more of the world. AI gives us something that can participate in our thinking, our writing, our decisions, our learning, our relationships, our creativity, and our sense of competence.

That feels different because answers are becoming abundant alongside information. We’re getting language and output shaped like judgment, expertise, care, and work.

And when those things become abundant, we have to ask a harder question than whether the tool is useful.

Of course it’s useful.

The question is what we stop doing when the tool does it for us.

That question led me beyond AI.

Once I started seeing the pattern there, I started seeing it everywhere. Movies and music became abundant while commitment and attachment thinned out. Connection brought comparison with it. Convenience also removed some of the moments where the effort itself made the experience mean something.

The mistake is treating abundance as one thing.

It isn’t.

Sometimes abundance removes friction that was blocking life. Sometimes it removes friction that was building life. Sometimes it removes friction that was protecting life. And sometimes it does all three at once, which is where things get inconvenient.

That’s what this book is about. Rather than deciding whether abundance is good or bad, the better question is: what did this new abundance remove?

Was the old friction blocking agency, dignity, health, learning, or access?

Then remove it.

Was it building attention, skill, memory, judgment, commitment, reciprocity, or meaning?

Then be careful.

Was it doing both?

That’s where the real work begins.

This book won’t ask you to go backward toward worse tools or more bureaucracy. I have no interest in artificial hardship, and I don’t think inconvenience is wisdom with worse branding.

Most of the old systems were worse.

But worse systems sometimes had useful constraints tangled up inside them. Those constraints made us wait and choose. They also made us ask another person. We had to practice and live with a decision long enough for it to become part of us.

Then abundance arrived and removed the whole knot.

The bad part went.

But sometimes the useful part went with it.

By the end of this book, I want you to have a better way to look at any new abundance in your life: an app or AI tool, a new convenience or shortcut, even a promise that the hard part can finally disappear.

I want you to be able to ask:

What was this friction doing?

Was it blocking me?

Was it building me?

Was it protecting me?

And if it was doing something valuable, how do I preserve that value without pretending the old system was better than it was?

And that’s the hard part for all of us.

Technology is getting good at giving us more: choice, convenience, content, answers, connection, speed, and intelligence on demand.

The question is whether all that more makes us more capable, or only less inconvenienced.

I want us to notice what the hard parts were doing before we make them disappear.