“Make life harder” is a strange rallying cry. Yet in January, journalist Kathryn Jezer-Morton at the Cut went viral for touting friction-maxxing. “Stop using ChatGPT completely,” she wrote. “No, it does not have good ideas for meal planning. Buy a cookbook. Text your friends for advice. Go to Trader Joe’s. Come on .”

Jezer-Morton may be onto something, social science research suggests. Letting chatbots write emails or provide emotional support simplifies being a thinking, social being , researchers wrote in February in Communications Psychology . But doing hard things or maintaining life’s frictions, while often frustrating in the moment, is vital for experiencing pleasure and cultivating purpose.

“We get a lot of meaning out of work and what we do day to day,” says Emily Zohar, an experimental social psychologist at the University of Toronto.…