I traveled to Sydney this week.

It has become easy not to, and with all the busy and chaos, any such effort can seem unnecessary. After all, with all the complexity, why make our lives more difficult?

Do an online course, a meeting via Teams or just skip the friction that comes from unnecessary effort. What my couple of days away reminded me is how much I like travelling.

There is something wonderful about the clarity of mind that comes from time away from home, the office, workmates getting on with work without me and family not really missing me at all. Travel time to be bored, to allow the mind to wander.

Different places to run or walk. I got up at 6:30am yesterday to run to the Opera House and back, in light rain. Switching the brain on to navigate a new route from point A to B, where the mind doesn’t quite know its north from south, east from west. Even dealing with the friction of potentially getting lost, or heading in the wrong direction.

The new world is largely about removing friction. Technology to make the hard and boring easier or effortless. Anything hard can easily be deleted from the flow:

while (pain === true) {
  measure();
  iterate();
  delete();
}

AI can write that code or a story quicker, even if we have no memory of what we (+AI) actually wrote. Who needs to be building new brain synapses anyway? It’s ‘better’ to just give AI the heavy thinking.

There are so many examples in society and business of wanting to remove all friction, seek clarity and calm. Businesses seek to systemise everything to make the customer experience smoother, but more often to take staff autonomy out of the equation.

As a case in point, while all very logical I’m sure, on my Qantas flight back today, when scanning to board, I was given a great big X by the computer as my section hadn’t been called quite yet. I needed to wait 10 more seconds to board, and go to the back of the queue.

The walk of shame from disobedience.

I won’t go on a boring rant, but I can think of several other examples over the past week where the system programming was set up to avoid rule breakers and remove staff autonomy. Are we risking humans unable to problem solve as they get out of practice?

AI is good at writing, but also good at being quite average, rather than remarkable. Every story defaults to the average. AI music or art is usually, on the surface, solid, good, fine. Why bother putting in more effort? But it is rarely remarkable. It’s easy to spot AI mediocrity.

But minimal, viable and OK — good enough, even if not remarkable. To me, this is the biggest cultural shift of our times: reducing human autonomy and the potential implications for brain development that come with it.

Digital systemisation removes friction, but at what cost?

1. Students are defaulting to AI to produce their assignments, yet have no memory of writing them. Many educators are dropping take home exams, to stop dumb graduates.

2. Consultants are writing reports, with sizable budgets, with no mindful recommendations. The media has been bursting of late with the BIG-4 failing to exploit AI ethically, and big job loses.

3. Society is potentially losing its ability to be bored as its attention is deep within phones. Distraction has become the new epidemic, wasting time, turning brains numb.

Rituals beyond technology are likely to become more important, as is our ability to have a sense of belonging beyond doom-scrolling social media. Digital controls our behaviour (and increasingly won’t allow any divergence from the average acceptable path). Hope is in decline, as trust in leaders in business and government is slipping, deservedly so.

It seems to me that everything will be OK in five to ten years, but only with the realisation that we have become a bit lazy in allowing technology to remove all our thinking, and the friction that seemed a pain, but was actually the most rewarding, and best bit of being alive.

 I had lunch with a good friend yesterday.

We tend to let our minds go wandering, he gets me thinking. The theme was signals when things aren’t working, in a job or other pursuit. My reflection is that if every day is fine or even good, and there is little friction or even pressure, is this a good or bad sign?

It seems obvious that this is by and large a good (or fine) reality.

Yet, perhaps a fulfilling day, week, life isn’t always about everything being fine and good. A more fulfilling existence will come from painful moments, and the pushing through and learning (and creating new synapses) that come from this.

Learning to not avoid the PAIN. To push through it, iterate and grow.

How we assess our days as good or bad may be part of the challenge. Accepting that friction and tension is not necessarily the signifier of bad in an otherwise good day.

There's a bit of pain in creating anything good. Leading a team, sustaining and growing a business, raising a family, training for a marathon, getting out of bed on Saturday morning to keep a 5km ParkRun streak, nurturing musical talent, learning a new language, cooking a fancy dinner, or hitting a fitness or professional goal. Our ability to train to build resiliance, to push through pain is fundamental to being humans who acheive anything. Good things generally come from pain, friction and failure.

Technology can take all the pain and friction away, and ensure we live a fine or good existence. The easy life is likely not the better life. Removing all friction likely gets boring.

What we will need moving forward are those with well-trained, mindful, problem-solving brains able to solve ever-present and escalating problems. Not waiting to find calm in the chaos, but having the agility and resilience to remain calm whether sunny or storming.

Sectors are failing globally, simply because they kept waiting for clarity and calm to return.

Struggling to survive, when the early signals were ringing years or decades ago.

A better solution is embracing chaos, and creating better within this inevitable reality.

Everything is NOT fine.

But this is OKAY, as culture lives and evolves in the friction. As tensions grow, culture shifts.