We reach for AI because it eliminates struggle. But struggle isn't just effort. It's the process through which we build competence. How do we consciously decide which struggles we can afford to skip, and which ones we can't afford to lose?
When I was learning to write — really learning, not just putting words on a page — I spent years filling notebooks that nobody would ever read. Drafts that went nowhere. Arguments that collapsed under their own weight. Sentences I rewrote ten times, then deleted. That struggle wasn't waste. It was the curriculum.
The seductive shortcut
AI writing tools are genuinely useful. They help with structure, with phrasing, with getting unstuck. I use them myself. But there's a version of using them that worries me — not the tool itself, but what we tell ourselves about it.
The story goes: effort is inefficiency. Struggle is a bug to be patched. If a tool can produce a first draft in seconds, why spend hours writing one yourself?
The assumption hiding in that question is that the output is the point. But for many things — writing, problem-solving, designing — the process is where the learning lives.
Cognitive scientists call it "desirable difficulty." The friction of retrieval practice, spaced repetition, interleaving: these feel harder than passive review, but they produce stronger learning. The struggle isn't incidental to the outcome. It is the outcome.
Choosing your struggles
None of this means we should reject tools that make life easier. That would be absurd. We use calculators and don't worry about losing our ability to do long division. We use GPS and don't memorize street maps.
But those are capabilities we've decided, collectively and individually, that we don't need to develop deeply. The question worth asking, each time, is: is this one of those? Or is this a struggle I actually need to go through?
The answer isn't always obvious. And I suspect it varies by person, by goal, by context. But asking the question at all seems important, before we outsource, before we skip, before we decide the effort isn't worth it.
Because sometimes it is. And once you've let the muscle atrophy, it's hard to get back.