Wisdom doesn’t arrive on demand. It arrives in the space we stopped leaving for it. A century ago, Hesse wrote about a man who had everything and felt nothing—and the way out.

Key Points

• Hesse’s Siddhartha draws a distinction our age has collapsed: Knowledge transmits, wisdom cannot.
• AI makes knowledge free. The un-transmittable—judgment, presence, discernment—is now the rarest capacity. 
• Siddhartha’s detour through wealth mirrors our optimization culture; his recovery is practice, not platitude.

This week, over dinner, a friend and I started talking about Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha –a book we had both read several times over the years, at different ages, for different reasons. Somewhere between courses, the conversation shifted. While the subject remained the same, we were no longer discussing a novel. We were discussing the world today. And by the time the plates had cleared, we agreed that a book written over one hundred years ago described our present moment more clearly than most things written this year—and that it had something very important to tell us about living in that moment. 

In the novel, the eponymous hero Siddhartha is a handsome young man who leaves home in search of enlightenment. Together with his friend Govinda, he attempts a variety of spiritual techniques and paths. And eventually, as one tends to do in 6^th century BCE India, they meet the Buddha. The Buddha is clearly enlightened, and the Buddhist philosophy is radiantly wise. Govinda is enraptured and becomes the Buddha’s disciple. 

Siddhartha, however, walks away. 

Why?

Not out of arrogance or even misunderstanding. Siddhartha knows the Buddha is enlightened, he knows that he has just met a supreme teacher of the very thing—the only thing—that he longs for, the thing that he has destroyed his previously comfortable life for. 

So, again: why? 

Because Siddhartha understood something we are in serious danger of forgetting: The most important things cannot be handed to you. They can only be lived into. 

The Buddha’s enlightenment was real—but it was the Buddha’s. Siddhartha would have to achieve his own enlightenment by himself, because enlightenment is not the sort of thing that can be transmitted by teaching. It must always be individually and independently realized. 

Decades later, when Siddhartha and Govinda meet again by a river as old men, it is Govinda who is still restless, still searching, still asking strangers whether they might have the secret. He spent a lifetime in possession of perfect answers, and they never became his. The seeker who outsourced his path never finished walking it.

The Kamaswami Years

Siddhartha’s own path runs through a long detour. Midway through the novel, he abandons the spiritual search and becomes a merchant for a trader named Kamaswami. He becomes rich, gets good at the game; and as he plays it, he develops what he calls the habits of the “childlike people”—acquiring, comparing, anxiously checking whether he is winning.

This spiritual fall is not the result of one big decision; rather, it is the compounding power of a thousand smaller movements. Eventually, Siddhartha turns into a man he neither recognizes nor respects, and he goes down to the river ready to drown himself.

Siddhartha is saved. But before we turn to his redemption, it is instructive to understand his failure. Siddhartha does not lack intelligence or knowledge. He does not lack determination or discipline. He lacks one thing only: wisdom. He is able to pursue his goals successfully, but he lacks the wisdom to understand which goals are worth pursuing.

The Anti-Teacher

Siddhartha is taken in by a ferryman named Vasudeva, and it is through Vasudeva that Siddhartha finally achieves enlightenment. It is tempting to call Vasudeva the teacher Siddhartha finally accepts.

He isn’t. Hesse is explicit: Vasudeva insists he is not a teacher or a sage, only a ferryman. He transmits no doctrine and corrects no error. His one talent is that he listens—not as technique, but without waiting to speak, without sorting, the way the river receives everything and rejects nothing. Vasudeva offers no content at all, only conditions: attention, silence, a witness, a river. And even then, what finally breaks Siddhartha open isn’t anything that Vasudeva says; it is his own son abandoning him exactly as he once abandoned his father. 

So actually, it is not Vasudeva who delivers enlightenment to Siddhartha. It is life. It is the river. Siddhartha’s instinct was right all those years ago. Enlightenment can only be lived into.

The Mechanical Buddha

Hesse’s novel turns on a single distinction: Knowledge can be transmitted; wisdom cannot. For a century, that read as mysticism. It now reads as a technical specification—because we have built machines that occupy one side of that divide completely.

A large language model is the apotheosis of transmittable knowledge: every doctrine, every framework, delivered instantly and fluently. We have built a mechanical Buddha—a flawless transmitter with nothing realized behind the words. It can articulate the eightfold path. But it has never sat by a river.

This is not a criticism of the technology but a clarification of what it makes scarce. When transmission becomes free, the bottleneck moves to everything transmission cannot carry: presence, judgment tested against experience, the discernment to know which of 10 correct answers is yours. 

The real danger in our brave new world is not that we will have the wrong answers. It is that we will have the right ones—endlessly, brilliantly, dazzlingly, compellingly right—and that having them will make us do what Govinda did: bow the head and take the robe.

What This Asks of Each of Us

I am not suggesting we abandon our tools. I build with these systems daily. The question is what kind of human is operating them—whether you are running a company, raising a child, or working a night shift to fund a dream. What I am suggesting is that we learn to live with them, not through them. Here are three disciplines for doing so, taken straight from the novel:

Refuse secondhand certainty. Use AI to gather knowledge. But when the output arrives, ask the question Siddhartha asked the Buddha: This may be true, but is it mine? Have I tested it against lived experience, or am I outsourcing my judgment along with my research?

Audit the Kamaswami drift. Every few months, ask: Which of my current habits would the younger, clearer version of me not recognize? Erosion is silent. The audit cannot be.

Sit by the river. Literally, if you can. Build unmediated time into the week—no input, no output, no optimization target. Wisdom does not arrive on demand. It arrives in the space we stopped leaving for it.

The Threshold

Hesse wrote Siddhartha in the aftermath of a world war, a personal breakdown, and a civilization’s crisis of meaning. He understood that when external systems grow powerful, the inner life doesn’t become optional. It becomes urgent.

The machines will keep getting better at dispensing knowledge; that part is settled. What remains unsettled is us: whether we become Govindas, devoted followers of the perfect transmitter, or ferrymen who have learned that the answer is never handed to you across the water.

Or, worst of all, perhaps, merchants who forgot why they crossed the river in the first place.

[Feature Photo Source: SaengTawan/Shutterstock]

Original article @ Psychology Today.

The post You Can Have Every Answer and Still Feel Lost appeared first on FaisalHoque.

You’re the one everyone leans on. So why does it feel so lonely at the top of everyone’s list? A look at the cost of being needed—and the courage it takes to be seen.

Key points

• Everyone needs you. No one knows you. Being depended on can quietly replace being seen.
• The person everyone leans on is the person nobody checks on.
• The way out isn’t being needed less. It’s being seen: Show your uncertainty, not just your competence.

A few months ago, a member of my team messaged me on WhatsApp. It wasn’t about a project or a deadline. It was much simpler than that.

“How are you doing?” he asked. “Because it’s a lot right now—work, family, the whole roller coaster of life’s journey.”

That was it. Just that. There’s a lot going on. How are you? 

I did what I always do: I turned the conversation back outward. I reassured him. I told him I was good. I told him that keeping my eye on the prize kept me motivated, and that making my team successful made me happy.

Every word in my answer was and remains true. But it’s also just the type of response that leaders learn to give. Because leaders need to have the answers. And when they don’t, they need to be able to bear the weight of the uncertainty—alone. Their team needs to feel: He’s got this. We’re going to be alright.

It’s just part of the role to perform competence and calm and cheerfulness, especially when you don’t feel it. And most leaders I know don’t complain about this. They just do it. But they pay a price for doing it, one that is easy to ignore because at first glance it doesn’t look like there’s a price at all.

The price is loneliness.

The Invisibility of the Everyday Caregiver

We know by now that loneliness is very harmful. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory declared loneliness a public health epidemic, with health risks comparable to those “caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.” But those warnings describe the loneliness of the disconnected—empty rooms, unanswered calls. And at first glance, that seems to be the exact opposite of the life of a busy leader. Leaders are rarely disconnected. Their calendars are full, and they’re the first person called when something happens. So why do I say the price of leadership is loneliness?

Because there is another kind of loneliness: the loneliness of being the person everyone depends on.

And this isn’t a burden faced only by leaders. It is the condition of anyone who takes care of others. The parent who holds a family together, the nurse at the end of a double shift, the partner who never breaks down, the friend everyone calls first. Every day, people in all walks of life become the person others lean on. And every day, they carry what no one thinks to ask them about. The corner office has no monopoly on being needed. Anywhere there is someone on whom others count, there is someone at risk of being unseen.

The late social neuroscientist John Cacioppo, who spent decades studying loneliness, showed that loneliness is not simply a matter of being physically alone. It is better understood as perceived social isolation: the subjective sense that our connections are insufficient or insecure or unreciprocated. This perception can distort how we read the world and how we behave toward others. It can even change how our bodies function. Loneliness, on this account, is not a function of how many people surround us. Rather, it is about how we feel about the relationships we are in and how we bring our presence to them—or not.to use the systems effectively while refusing to let them use you.

For the indispensable, this is the danger. Leaders may be surrounded by people who need and admire them, who consult and depend on them—and yet they can still feel unseen. Indeed, the former may help cause the latter, because the more people rely on a leader, the less room there seems to be for uncertainty, unfinishedness, or simple tiredness.

I’ve spent decades working with leaders of various kinds. And what I’ve observed again and again is that the people others depend on most are often the least likely to be asked how they are doing—and the least likely to answer honestly if they are. Instead of expressing vulnerability, they perform certainty. And this is not because they’re emotionally insensitive. They feel the vulnerability acutely. Just, when everyone else is vulnerable, too, the leader steps up to hold it, which can mean putting their own feelings to the side.

Maybe I can put it like this: The more skillfully we carry others, the less anyone suspects we might need carrying ourselves.

Becoming Visible

The Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh taught that “the most precious gift” we can offer someone we love is our “true presence.” I’ve thought about this often since that WhatsApp message. My colleague offered me his true presence—he made contact without an agenda, without needing anything from me. It was a small act of generosity that cut through the noise of everything else. And it made me wonder how often leaders receive that gift—and how often they’re too deep in the role to even notice it’s being offered.

Now, it’s important to say that being present and being reliable aren’t flaws. The problem arises when those virtues become rigid prisons in which we trap ourselves, when being needed becomes the only way we allow ourselves to be connected. That’s when leading turns into loneliness.

The path out of this loneliness is not to become less needed. It is to become more visible. And that requires practices most that indispensable people find deeply uncomfortable:

1. Let someone see you struggle. Not a curated confession. Just the honest admission, once, to someone you trust: “I don’t know what I’m doing right now.” Notice what happens when the world doesn’t end.
2. Ask for help when you don’t technically need it. The point isn’t efficiency. It’s to practice receiving, the muscle that atrophies first in people who are always giving.
3. Notice when you’re performing certainty. Pause and ask: Am I being strong right now, or am I hiding? There is a difference, and only you can feel it.
4. Protect one relationship in which you are not the helper. Find at least one bond in which your role is not to solve, fix, or hold things together. Just be.

The Courage to Be Known

Being needed is a gift. But it is not the same as being known. And being needed without being known is what causes the peculiar loneliness of leadership—and of every life spent taking care of others. That loneliness does not heal by becoming more useful. It heals by becoming more visible. And visibility, unlike indispensability, requires not strength but courage.

If I could reply to that WhatsApp message again, I’d say the same thing—that I’m motivated, that I care for my team, that the work matters.

But I might add: “And it is lonely sometimes. Thank you for asking.”

[Feature Photo Source: pronoia/Adobe Stock]

Original article @ Psychology Today.

The post The Loneliness of Being Needed appeared first on FaisalHoque.

The question isn’t whether to use AI; every serious person in every serious field will. The question is how to use it in a way that keeps the human element alive.

Key Points

• AI is embedded in how we work—and that’s a good thing.
• But AI’s fluency can lull us into deferring to it rather than directing it.
• Using AI well means staying in the driver’s seat, and that takes deliberate practice.

I came to America from Bangladesh at the age of 17, with very little money in my pocket and even less of an idea of what I was walking into. What I did have —and what I’ve leaned on for every decision I’ve made ever since—was a capacity I had developed early in life: the ability to work out what I actually thought, and then to act on it even when no one else agreed with me.

There’s a word for that capacity. Judgment. And it’s the thing I’m most worried about losing right now.

The reason I am worried about it is because I use AI every day. I use it to build applications, develop frameworks, design visual assets, and research what’s happening at the edges of the fields I need to understand. I use it to stress-test arguments before I bring them to my team or to a client. I use it to think through how a message will land before I send it. In raw output, I’m more productive today than a team of 10 would have been five years ago. And it isn’t just speed; the work is objectively better. 

Right now, I’m still one of the early adopters. But pretty soon, this will be the reality in every job. Very few people will have a choice about whether or not they use AI, just as few people get to choose whether they use computers or email or the internet today.

So this isn’t an article about whether to use AI. It’s about how to hold onto your judgment while you do.

The Core Skill Behind Using AI Well

AI is extraordinarily powerful, but it’s powerful in what we might call a generic way. While a generative AI model will be trained on all the insights of all the sciences, all the works of the great artists and the brightest business thinkers, it generally does not and cannot know what matters in your particular situation. It does not know what trade-offs you’d accept, what your experience tells you about how something will actually land, or what the right call is given everything you know that the machine doesn’t. That knowledge is yours, and using it is what turns AI’s general capability into something that works for you.

Without your judgment, AI gives you fluent but generic output. With it, you get something that couldn’t have come from anyone else. And the combination of AI’s general power and your judgment is far greater than either alone—but only if you’re actively in the conversation, thinking alongside the tool rather than deferring to it.

This means that using AI well is not fundamentally about writing better prompts or knowing which model to use. Rather, it’s about staying actively engaged with what comes back. It’s that simple.

The principle might be simple; the practice is not quite so straightforward. The sheer ease with which AI models respond to requests and create outputs leads to a phenomenon known as cognitive offloading. Offloading our mental load is precisely the attraction and the promise of AI: By delegating some tasks we are freed to think more deeply and effectively about other things. The risk, though, is that we offload the wrong things—that we outsource our higher judgment about what matters, the ultimate meaning of a piece of work or the creative design. If this happens, we stop using AI to support our own thinking and instead begin deferring to the machine.

How to Use AI Well

These aren’t rules for avoiding using AI. They’re practices for getting the most out of it—by making sure you’re always the one in the driving seat.

• Develop the idea before you write the prompt. You can’t delegate effectively to an AI model if you aren’t fully in control of the task. If you start with a topic you’re interested in and ask the machine what to think about it, you begin by deferring to it. Instead, come to it with a developed position you’re willing to defend. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask the AI to challenge your view or help you strengthen it. But the strategic intent must be yours before you type the first word. That’s what makes you the architect of the output rather than turning you into an agent of the AI.
• Define the destination before you delegate the execution. Don’t hand an AI model a blank canvas. Give it a defined problem that includes a sketch of your destination and then use it to help fill in the details. That way, the architecture—the requirements, the dimensions, the logic—remain yours. If you can’t explain what you’re asking for before you ask, you’re not ready to use the tool. The result will be an output that looks finished but that isn’t really yours.
• Use AI to find the research. Interpret it yourself. AI is extraordinarilly good at surfacing studies, mapping out a field, and pointing you toward evidence that can confirm or challenge a view. Use it for all of that. But don’t accept its summary of what the results it digs up mean. The interpretation—where the evidence leads, what it confirms, where it falls short—has to be your own.
• Notice when you’re reaching for AI to avoid the uncomfortable. Sometimes we prompt AI because we want help with the processing burden of a task. Other times, we reach for it because it offers an easy way around something uncomfortable. The discipline is to identify and lean in to the type of difficult that creates friction and to follow where it leads. This is as true when you are crafting a business strategy, working on an article, or building a product.

The Human Edge

The practices above are not rules for limiting how or whether you use AI. They are the tools I use to ensure I stay in the driver’s seat while I use it, rather than becoming a passenger being moved about by a very capable machine.

The central skill of the AI age, then, is the willingness to do the driving yourself. To be the architect or orchestrator of the process rather than a storm-tossed ship on a sea of machine reasoning. It means knowing where you’re going before you start out and never letting go of your vision.

The most powerful technology ever built will not save anyone who has stopped thinking for themselves. The discipline required for the AI age has two parts: learning to use the systems effectively while refusing to let them use you.

[Feature Photo Source: JKLoma/Adobe Stock]

Original article @ Psychology Today.

The post We All Use AI. Here’s How to Use It Well appeared first on FaisalHoque.

We’ve engineered boredom out of existence. But boredom fuels creativity, self-reflection, and growth. It’s time to reclaim the void.

KEY POINTS

• AI and technology have made boredom nearly impossible – and that’s a serious problem.
• Research shows boredom activates the brain’s default mode network, sparking creativity and innovation.
• Without boredom, children never learn to generate meaning; adults never pause to examine their lives.
• Reclaiming boredom requires deliberate effort: Schedule nothing, walk without input, sit with silence.

I was in the check-out queue of my local supermarket. It was long and moving slowly. I’d forgotten my phone in the car, so I just stood there, waiting as the minutes dragged out. I stared at the cashier. I stared at the aisles. I stared at the ceiling. Hmm. What could I stare at now, I wondered?

I felt … weird. Not angry, not excited, not sad, not happy. What was this strange feeling?

Suddenly, I got it.

I was bored. It had taken me a moment to recognize the feeling because it had been so long since I had last felt it.

The machine is always there, isn’t it? The moment the mind begins to wander, we reach. Back in prehistory, there was thing called a radio, and then came television. People filled their evenings with shows. Then came Google and YouTube, followed by the hellscape of social media. Always something to do, always something to keep us occupied.

AI takes this a step further. Social media can ignore you—your post gets no likes, the group chat moves on without you—but algorithms never will. They always have time for you. And it’s not just time, either. They always care about you, attend to you, shape themselves around you and remember what you care about. Algorithmic engagement never runs dry.

It is practically impossible to be bored nowadays because there is something of interest just inches or seconds away. Perhaps this is progress of a sort, but it is also destroying something essential.

Boredom Fuels Innovation

We treat boredom as if it were a disease: something to cure, escape, or optimize away. But research tells a very different story.

Psychologists Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK found that boredom can be surprisingly good for creativity. In their studies, people who first endured a dull task —such as copying or reading phone numbers from a directory—generated more creative responses afterward than those who skipped the boredom. The point isn’t that boredom kills the mind. It may be what nudges the mind to wander, with that wandering then leading to good ideas.

Neuroscience helps explain why this happens. When nothing external fully claims our attention, the brain’s default mode network (DMN) comes online. This is the system involved in memory, imagination, self-reflection, future thinking, and mind-wandering. It’s not a magic creativity button—insight also needs other networks that test and refine ideas—but the DMN helps explain why good ideas so often arrive in the shower, on a walk, or during a dull task. When we’re bored, the mind has fewer external hooks to grab onto. So it turns inward, wandering through memories, possibilities, and associations, which is how innovation happens.

What We Lose When We Lose Nothing

It’s about more than innovation. Without boredom, children don’t develop the internal resources to generate their own meaning. A child who is never bored—whose every idle moment is filled by a screen or an app or a voice that responds—may never learn to tolerate the discomfort that precedes imagination. The imaginary worlds, the strange games, the bizarre stories children invent: These are born in the empty hours. Take away the emptiness and you take away the ability to create magic from nothing.

The cost is no less significant for adults When every moment is filled with engagement, we never encounter ourselves in silence. We stay stimulated—and never pause long enough to ask whether any of it matters.

Without boredom, we lose one of the most important conditions for deep self-reflection. We lose that unstructured empty time when the questions that we have been avoiding bubble up and confront us: What do I actually want? What am I avoiding? Is this the life I intended to build?

Some of the most important steps in my own journey came from moments of nothing, stretches of boredom in which the absence of stimulation forced my mind to wander into territory I wouldn’t have chosen consciously. Boredom was the uninvited guest that brought the gift I didn’t know I needed.

Boredom won’t return on its own. Machines are too available, too responsive—simply too good at filling the gap. In our time, reclaiming boredom must be a deliberate act.

Here are five ways to start:

1. Schedule nothing. Block 20 minutes with no input: no phone, no book, no meditation app. Not mindfulness. Just emptiness. Let your mind do whatever it does.
2. Delay the prompt. When you want to ask the machine, wait. Give your own mind 10 minutes with the question first. You may be surprised by what surfaces.
3. Walk without input. No podcast, no music, no notifications. Let boredom accompany you. Notice what your mind reaches for when nothing is offered.
4. Do something dull on purpose. Wash the dishes without a podcast. Fold laundry in silence. These aren’t just chores; they’re invitations for the default mode network to do its work.
5. Protect your children’s boredom. When they say “I’m bored,” resist the urge to fix it. That boredom is not a problem. It’s the beginning of something they need to build themselves.

Tune Out. And Let the Silence Return

I paid for my groceries and walked back to my car. Immediately, I looked at my phone. Thirty-seven notifications while I had been gone and new pings coming in even as I looked. I went to my email and was about to start typing. Then I stopped and turned my phone off.

Technology offers us infinite engagement. But too much engagement is noise.

The truth is, we have a deep need for silence. The empty space is not a void to be filled. It’s fertile ground. It’s where creativity germinates, where self-knowledge forms, where the questions that matter most have room to surface.

Let me be clear. I am not saying: use the silence to be mindful or meditate. I am not suggesting a clever way of optimizing the emptiness.

I am saying: be bored.

Let the empty space be empty.

Let the silence be silent.

[Feature Photo Source: luismolinero/Adobe Stock]

Original article @ Psychology Today.

The post Be More Bored appeared first on FaisalHoque.

Most of us are living in the waiting room of our own lives—convinced that peace is one promotion, one milestone away. It isn’t. Stop waiting for perfect. Start living.

KEY POINTS

• We suffer from the belief that life should be perfect.
• Wabi-sabi teaches that flaws are not obstacles to beauty—they’re the source of it.
• Accepting imperfection does not mean you stop caring about quality.

In December 2006, my late friend and mentor Ito San took me to rural Japan for the first time. Our journey began in Yokohama and wound its way to the foot of the Japanese Alps, to an old ryokan called Yarimi-kan in the Shin Hotaka hot spring area of Gifu prefecture, nestled between Mt. Yarigatake, Mt. Hotaka, and Mt. Kasagatake.

“Come,” said Ito San. “It is time for kaiseki.”

I had heard of kaiseki before—a traditional multi-course meal based on the seasons. I had even had some kaiseki meals in the U.S. But this was my first true experience of kaiseki, and it baffled me.

The ceramics the meal was served on were imperfect—here a glaze that pooled unevenly, there a rim that wasn’t quite round. The ingredients were barely manipulated by the team of cooks, presented in way that was close to their natural state rather than being polished into something impressive. And the entire experience unfolded slowly, quietly, without any attempt to dazzle.

By every standard I understood, this meal should have felt unfinished and unimpressive. Instead, it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. I could not explain why.

The Trap We Live In

For most of us, most of the time, life is always just about to happen. When I get my dream job, when I have a million dollars in the bank, when I find the love of my life, then everything will be good and life can begin.

But that moment rarely comes. Or more precisely, it comes, but we find that it does not bring the peace or the joy that we dreamt of. Even after the promotion, after the windfall, after the wedding, life continues to move, to demand, to surprise, and, yes, to break. Life never graduates to a settled state, because that is the nature of life; indeed, it is perhaps the best definition we could have of being alive. Only dead things remain as they were, things that are alive and vital are in a constant process of becoming.

And we don’t just want things to be good; we want to know that they’ll stay good. We want the ground to stop shifting beneath us. But it never does, because being alive means not standing still.

And in the meantime, we suffer—and not just from the fact that life is always imperfect and unsettled but, even more, from our belief that it shouldn’t be.

The Word I Was Missing

The philosophy that kaiseki is built on has a name: wabi-sabi. It is a worldview rooted in three principles: nothing is perfect, nothing is permanent, nothing is complete. And rather than seeing this as a cause for complaint, wabi-sabi sees this as a reason for joy. It is a philosophy that celebrates the beauty in impermanence and imperfection.

The kaiseki meal that Ito San gave me expressed this beautifully. The imperfect plates, the seasonal ingredients that would be gone in days—the meal was a celebration of what is, rather than a longing for what we think should be. And over the years, I began to understand that this is what had moved me so much about that meal: It was a living demonstration that imperfection and impermanence are not obstacles to beauty but rather its source.

Modern psychology increasingly supports what wabi-sabi teaches. Research on self-compassion by Kristin Neff has shown that people who respond to their own imperfection with warmth rather than harsh judgment report lower anxiety, less depression, and greater well-being. Wabi-sabi is, in a sense, self-compassion made into a worldview. It says, You are imperfect, your life is unsettled – and neither of those things needs fixing.

What Ito San Taught Me

As someone who has spent decades building companies, I used to treat imperfection as the enemy, something to be eliminated before I could move forward. Every flaw in a product or a strategy felt like something that needed fixing before it was ready for the world. And as in work, so in life; every stage of life felt like a rough draft of the version that was coming next.

That meal with Ito San at the foot of the Japanese Alps didn’t make me stop caring about quality. But—eventually— it changed what I was waiting for. I stopped requiring everything to be right before I could act, and I stopped requiring perfection before I could feel at peace.

And now, almost 20 years later, I see clearly that the most meaningful work I’ve done—as an entrepreneur, as a writer, as a father—has come not from having everything figured out but from moving forward within conditions that were imperfect and incomplete.

3 Practices for Embracing Imperfection

1. Notice beauty in something unfinished. Once a day, pause to notice something imperfect that moves you—a conversation that didn’t resolve neatly, a project still taking shape, a season that’s already turning. Notice it the way you’d notice a cracked bowl in a kaiseki meal: not as a problem but as something with character.
2. Let something be good enough. Choose one task this week and release it before it’s perfect. Send the draft. Ship the idea. Notice that the world doesn’t end—and that something unpolished can still be valuable.
3. Name what you’re waiting for. Write down the condition you’ve set for your own peace: “I’ll feel settled when _____.” Then ask yourself whether you’re postponing a life that’s already here.

Get Busy Living

Ito San passed away some years after our journey together. The mountains still stand, the river still flows. I have returned to that first kaiseki meal many times in memory and, eventually, in my own kitchen, preparing a seven-course meal to honor what he taught me.

He never explained wabi-sabi to me in words. He didn’t need to. He served it on uneven plates, in a wooden inn that creaked with age, beside a river that was never the same from moment to moment. The lesson was the experience itself. There is beauty in a life that is unsettled and imperfect.

As Andy Dufresne almost said in The Shawshank Redemption: Get busy living, or get busy waiting.

[Feature Photo Source: Nito/Adobe Stock]

Original article @ Psychology Today.

The post Only Dead Things Stay the Same appeared first on FaisalHoque.

Six big things are disappearing from your life—and what to do about them.

KEY POINTS

• AI is eroding human capacities – effort, attention, judgment, agency – often in ways we mistake for progress. 
• The losses are subtle, and that’s what makes them dangerous. 
• Small, deliberate acts can reverse the drift before it becomes permanent.

AI is making life easier, faster, and more convenient. And much of that is genuine progress. But quietly, almost imperceptibly, some important things are disappearing from our lives – things we didn’t realize we depended on until they started to fade away. Over the past year, I’ve been exploring these losses in this column, and a pattern has emerged. The things we’re losing aren’t dramatic. They’re subtle. They’re the kind of things you don’t miss until one day you reach for them and find they’re gone.

Here are six of the things we’re losing, and six steps you can take to get them back.

1. The Illusion of Ease

We tend to think of ease as an unqualified good. But this framing hides something important: some forms of difficulty aren’t obstacles to the life we want. They’re part of how that life gets built.

When I was growing up in Bangladesh, getting hold of a Simon and Garfunkel cassette required real effort. That effort made the music matter to me in a way it wouldn’t have if I’d simply asked Siri to play it. The investment created the attachment. This principle applies far beyond music. Effort is how we turn information into knowledge, how we turn events into the experiences that shape us.

AI is removing friction from our lives at an extraordinary rate, and much of that removal is welcome. But we should ask of any type of friction whether there is something we need to preserve there. When friction is purely procedural, eliminate it gladly. But when it’s the kind that teaches you to notice, to remember, to care, then removing it doesn’t save you effort. It costs you growth.

Before reaching for the easiest path, pause. Ask whether the struggle you’re about to bypass is the kind that builds something in you. If it is, it’s not a cost. It’s the whole point.

2. The Collapse of Attention

As the world speeds up, something precious is collapsing: our ability to be fully present. We race through days packed with competing demands, multitasking our way through meetings and meals, telling ourselves we’re being productive. But the research is clear: multitasking makes us worse at everything we’re trying to do.

The deeper loss, though, isn’t cognitive – it’s human. When we hurry through life, we stop being present to ourselves and to the people we care about. We live reactively rather than intentionally, letting the world dictate its pace instead of choosing our own.

This week, try single-tasking: choose one thing and give it your complete attention. Mute the notifications. Protect a window of time that belongs to you and not to your inbox. The world will keep accelerating. But you get to choose the speed at which you move through it.

3. The Loss of Self

We tell ourselves stories to live, as Joan Didion wrote. We make sense of our experiences by shaping them into narratives. In doing so, we don’t just describe our lives. We create them. The struggle to find the right word for what we feel is part of how we come to understand what we feel.

Increasingly, we’re handing that work to AI. We ask it to draft our emails, polish our reflections, and sharpen our descriptions of things that matter to us. The AI-written version may read better by any conventional standard. But it’s not the record of a particular person making sense of a particular life. Storytelling is more than communication – it’s self-creation. When AI shapes our stories, we don’t just lose words. We lose the process through which we become ourselves.

Not everything you write is identity work. A status update to your team is a task, so use whatever tools help. But when you’re writing about your relationships, your struggles, or to someone you love, that’s a story. Write the messy draft first. Your narrative is too precious to hand over to a machine.

4. The Comfort Trap

We knew social media was damaging our children. We knew algorithms were feeding us rage because rage keeps us scrolling. We knew, and yet we did almost nothing. By the time we finally acted, the damage ran deep, and the fixes came too late.

This is what happens when we confuse tolerance with acceptance. Tolerance feels like patience. But too often it’s just avoidance, wearing a respectable mask. True acceptance means looking at reality unflinchingly and engaging with it, even when what you see is something you’d rather not deal with.

We are repeating this pattern with AI. We see the risks and scroll past the headlines, assuming someone smarter is handling it. But acceptance need not give way to resignation. Viewed properly, accepting how things really are gives us more agency, not less. Ask yourself: What am I hoping will just go away? Once you’ve named it, it becomes much harder to keep pretending you don’t see it.

5. The Crisis of Judgment

AI can draft your emails, analyze your data, and schedule your meetings. It promises liberation from the management burden of daily life – and that promise is real. But as AI takes over more of the doing, it increases the burden of deciding. After all, someone still has to choose what’s worth doing in the first place.

Peter Drucker drew a useful distinction here: efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things. AI makes us dramatically more efficient. But effectiveness – knowing what matters, what to prioritize, where your uniquely human insight is needed – remains stubbornly in our hands. And when you can do ten times as much, the cost of doing the wrong things multiplies accordingly.

The danger is that we stop trusting ourselves to make these calls. We defer to the tool, or we simply let the pace of output substitute for the harder work of reflection. Start building the muscle instead: at the end of each day, ask yourself what you chose to do, what you delegated, and why. The goal isn’t to reject AI’s help. It’s to make sure you’re leading yourself, not just keeping up.

6. Reclaiming Agency

Perhaps the deepest loss of all is the erosion of our capacity to act. When everything is uncertain – when AI is reshaping work, when the ground keeps shifting – it’s natural to freeze. The sheer volume of change can make us feel powerless, and powerlessness breeds passivity.

But agency doesn’t require certainty. It requires grounding. And one of the most powerful ways to rebuild that ground is to return to the things that have sustained us before – the songs, the books, the practices, the people who gave us strength in the past. Return isn’t regression. It’s bringing who you’ve become to what you thought you knew, and discovering that it can still give you what you need.

Recently, I listened to “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel. It was one of my favorite songs growing up, and I’ve heard it thousands of times. But listening in my fifties, I heard something new – a tenderness for the young man I once was, and in that tenderness, a source of strength. The song hadn’t changed. I had. And it gave me exactly what I needed for the present moment.

When the world feels paralyzing, don’t only look forward. Look back. Return to one song, one book, one practice that marked a turning point. The resources you need to face what’s ahead may already be part of your story.

Your Next Chapter

These six losses share a common thread: none of them announce themselves. They arrive silently, disguised as progress. And that is precisely what makes them dangerous. By the time you notice what’s gone, the habits that once sustained you have already started to fade.

But the reverse is also true. Each of these losses can be reversed through small, deliberate acts: writing in your own voice, slowing down for one hour, asking yourself what you’re tolerating that deserves a real response. You don’t have to take all six steps at once. Pick one. Start there.

AI will keep advancing. The world will keep accelerating. But the most important question of this era isn’t what machines can do for us. It is “What are we willing to keep doing for ourselves?”

[Source: EDA/Adobe Stock]

Original article @ Psychology Today.

The post Your Next Chapter in the Age of AI appeared first on FaisalHoque.

We engineer friction out of everything. But some of that friction is what turns information into skill and experience into meaning.

KEY POINTS

• Effort turns information into skill and experience into meaning.
• The distinction that matters is between effort that merely delays you and effort that develops you.
• In a world where things are too easy, we have to be intentional about keeping difficulty alive.

I loved Simon and Garfunkel as a teenager (still do). But feeding that love was no easy matter. Growing up in Bangladesh, it took serious acts of devotion to find ways of listening to their songs. You had to find someone who owned a cassette tape or make friends with the owner of the right shop, or wait for a friend to bring one back from abroad. And when you finally got your hands on something, you listened to it over and over, because that tape was all you had.

It’s much easier to find music nowadays. The friction has been reduced to virtually nothing. I don’t even have to go to the trouble of typing anything into Spotify; I can just speak into my phone and Siri does the rest. And this is true of much more than music. Really, it’s about every domain where effort used to be the price of experience, where friction was the cost of learning. That price, that cost, has virtually disappeared.

Think about how easy it is today to find new recipes or learn new cooking techniques; on a completely different scale, think of how easy it is to “meet” and judge potential romantic partners. You don’t even have to get out of bed. You just have to look at your phone and swipe this way and that.

Some of this is definitely progress. But let’s be careful, too. Sometimes, it’s important to pay a price for getting things.

Why Paying the Price Matters

We tend to think of effort as a cost, the unpleasant thing we endure to get what we want. This is true, but it’s leaving something important out of the picture. In addition to being a cost, effort is sometimes doing very important things for us.

First, effort makes data functional: It turns information into personal knowledge. Without effort, it’s impossible to grow skill. That’s why watching 20 YouTube videos about mathematics won’t help you learn math by itself. And it’s why Duolingo is really a video game rather than a serious effort to teach languages.

Effort also makes things meaningful. I had to work so hard to find a Simon and Garfunkel cassette that, when I got one, the effort made the songs matter to me in a way they wouldn’t have if I’d just pulled them up on Spotify. The investment created the attachment. That’s not nostalgia—it’s how we come to care about things.

Effort, in other words, is how we turn events into experience and memories. It’s how we turn information into knowledge that we can use. Without it, things pass through us; but when we put the work in, we gain skills and meaning and understanding. 

A June 2025 study from Harvard and MIT confirms this picture. Participants who used AI to write essays retained less knowledge, demonstrated less originality, and engaged less deeply with the material than those who worked through the difficulty themselves.

Now, while all of this is true and important, it’s equally true and important to say that we should not romanticize effort for its own sake. Plenty of effort is just drudgery—busywork and unnecessary friction, obstacles that teach you nothing. Not every struggle is sacred. And so, rather than completely rejecting effort or always glorifying it, we need to start understanding when effort matters and when it doesn’t.

Knowing Which Struggles to Keep

The distinction is not between effort and ease but between effort that merely obstructs and effort that forms us. Some difficulties are administrative. They are the incidental burdens wrapped around an activity: typing instead of speaking, formatting a document, scheduling a meeting, hunting through menus, moving files from one place to another. These tasks may consume time and attention, but they do not normally deepen understanding, sharpen judgment, or strengthen attachment. If a tool removes them, little of value is lost.

Other difficulties are different. They are not attached to the activity from the outside; they are part of what the activity is. Writing in your own words is how you discover what you think. Working through a mathematical problem is how you learn to see structure. Cooking without exact certainty, tasting and adjusting as you go, is how you develop instinct. Here, the effort is not a barrier between you and the result. It is the process through which the result becomes yours. Remove the struggle, and you may still get an outcome, but you lose the growth, the skill, and, often, the meaning.

So the question is not: How can I make this easier? It is: What kind of difficulty is this? Does it merely delay me, or does it develop me? If the friction is only procedural, eliminate it gladly. But if the friction is what teaches you to notice, remember, or care, then it is not a cost. It is the point.

Practices to Preserve the Right Kind of Friction

Here are three practices that can help you keep the right kind of friction in your life:

1. Pause before reaching for the easiest answer. When something feels difficult, it is natural to want relief as quickly as possible. But not every difficulty should be removed on sight. Sometimes a brief pause can help you tell the difference between unnecessary hassle and meaningful effort. Before asking AI to draft the paragraph, try writing a few sentences yourself.
2. Ask yourself: Is this saving me effort or saving me from growth? This is a useful question because it gets to the heart of the issue. Some tools free us from repetitive, low-value tasks, and that is a genuine benefit. But other forms of convenience protect us from exactly the kinds of struggle that build judgment, patience, competence, and self-trust. When a shortcut removes only tedium, it is probably worth taking. When it removes the part that would have stretched you, it may be costing more than it gives.
3. Add small forms of active engagement back into daily life. The right kind of friction does not have to be dramatic. Often it comes in small, ordinary acts: taking notes instead of passively highlighting, cooking without relying completely on a recipe, rereading a challenging paragraph instead of jumping straight to a summary, walking without constant stimulation. These moments ask a bit more of us, but they also return more. They deepen attention, strengthen memory, and make experience feel more fully our own.

The goal of these practices is not to make life harder for its own sake. Rather, it is to preserve the forms of effort that help us become more present, capable, and alive.

The Work Matters

Convenience is one of modern life’s great gifts, and we should use it gratefully. But we should also be careful not to let it remove the very struggles that teach us, shape us, and help us care. The challenge, then, is not to reject ease, but to become more thoughtful about where we welcome it. And in a world increasingly designed to make everything effortless, part of wisdom may be learning which difficulties are still worth choosing.

[Source: Exnoi/Adobe Stock]

Original article @ Psychology Today.

The post What We Lose When Nothing Is Hard appeared first on FaisalHoque.

Your stories don’t just communicate who you are. They create who you are. Don’t let a machine write them.

KEY POINTS

• Writing isn’t just communication; it’s self-discovery and self-creation.
• When AI shapes our stories, we don’t just lose words. We lose ourselves.
• Narrative sovereignty in AI means refusing to let a machine narrate the most human parts of your life.

This morning, I stumbled on an email I’d fired off to a friend on one of those days when everything was on fire. It was raw and clumsy, full of half-formed thoughts and feelings too intense to clearly articulate. As I was reading it, a thought hit me: if I’d written that email today, I might well have asked an AI to clean it up.

And any of the current generation of large language models would have done an excellent job. It would have found crisp formulations for my confused feelings and subtle images for my aching thoughts. By the normal standards of communication, it would have been an objectively better email. But something important would have been missing.

Me.

The Power of Stories

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” writes Joan Didion in her classic book The White Album. I think that’s right. We tell stories about our experiences in order to make sense of them, to give them meaning and sometimes even beauty. Stories aren’t just an add-on to our lives—in some real sense, they are our lives.

Here’s an example that might help explain what I’m getting at. Think of someone in great pain, joints and limbs aching, gasping for breath, forcing herself to move, to try to run—so much pain that she even loses control of her bodily functions. And still she pushes and strains, one step after another. Rough, right?

Well, now try to imagine something even more difficult, something Camus said about Sisyphus: We must imagine her happy. How on earth is that possible?

This is how. She’s not torturing herself. She’s running a marathon to raise money for the favorite cause of her beloved mother, who passed away last year. Every step, every shooting pain, every gasp for breath—his is love, this is her telling her mother, “Mom, thank you. I miss you. I love you.”

That’s just a story. That’s all it is. She’s taking the events of her life, the perceptions and sensations, the physical movements, the memory of her mother, the pavements under her feet, the wind against her face and the faceless crowds cheering—she’s taking all of that, and she’s making a story out of it, giving meaning to physical and mental experience.

That’s all it is, and that’s all any of our lives are. A collection of stories, some big, some small, all connected and interwoven, entangled with each other and with the stories that other people tell about their own lives.

And we don’t just create our lives with our stories—we also create ourselves. In his account of identity, the psychologist Dan McAdams argues that a person comes to understand who they are by weaving the remembered past and the imagined future into a continually evolving story that gives life some unity and purpose.

The Problem with Letting AI Tell Our Stories

Increasingly, we are turning to AI to help us tell our stories. We use it to draft our emails, to “improve” our reflections on something that matters to us, to “sharpen” our descriptions of meaningful events and feelings and thoughts. And while I do this myself, I want to suggest that we need to be very careful about this; in particular, I want to highlight two dangers of doing it.

First, we lose the process. As McAdams’s research suggests, we don’t just report on our lives after the fact; we become ourselves through the act of shaping our stories. The struggle to find the right word is an essential part of the work of becoming ourselves. So, when AI takes over the writing, it doesn’t just save us time, it removes us from the very activity through which we come to understand who we are.

Second, in a sense, we lose the story itself. The story AI writes isn’t fully ours. It’s a statistically plausible version of what someone like us might say, assembled from the patterns of millions of other people’s words. It often reads beautifully and it might even move the person who receives it. But it’s not the record of a particular human being making sense of a particular life.

Narrative Sovereignty

There’s a term that thinkers writing about Indigenous media use that I keep thinking about here: narrative sovereignty, which is the power of a people to tell their stories for themselves. I don’t mean to collapse that larger political and cultural meaning into the question I’m asking here. But I do think the concept illuminates something in the context of AI, too.

Each of us has a stake in telling the story of our own life in our own voice, however imperfect that voice may be. A sovereign nation does not hand over its laws to a neighboring power, however efficient or well-intentioned that power may be. In much the same way, a sovereign self should be wary of handing over its defining stories to a machine, no matter how fluent or polished the machine’s version might sound.

Some acts of expression are also acts of self-creation, and those need to remain in our hands. And that’s what narrative sovereignty is about when it comes to AI: refusing to let the most human parts of your life be narrated for you.

Practices to Protect Your Narrative Sovereignty

Protecting your narrative sovereignty doesn’t require abandoning AI. It requires knowing when to set it aside. Here are some practices I’ve found helpful.

1. Write the messy draft first. Before you prompt an AI, write it yourself. All of it. The confusion, the clumsy words—that mess is where the meaning is made. Some of it may be smoothed out at a later stage, but letting that process unfold in stages means that we can find our meaning in it rather than driving to the finishing line of the marathon.
2. Keep a personal space. Maintain a journal, a notes app, a voice memo habit—some place where your unfiltered voice lives. No AI. This is your narrative home ground.
3. Ask: Is this a task or a story? Not everything you write is identity work. A Monday morning status update to your team: Few of us are finding our identity here, so use whatever tools are available to make the writing process as easy as possible. But when the writing is about your relationships, or it’s writing to someone you care about—that’s a story. And you need to be sovereign in the telling of your stories.

Your Story, Your Voice

Remember the marathon runner: every step agony, every breath a gasp, her body failing her in ways she can’t control. No one watching would call it elegant. But she gets to decide what those miles mean, because the story is hers.

So is yours. Don’t let anyone else tell it for you.

[Source: veneratio/Adobe Stock]

Original article @ Psychology Today.

The post Don’t Let AI Write the Story of Your Life appeared first on FaisalHoque.

Panic is contagious. So is clarity. Every scroll, every headline, every catastrophic group chat is an exposure event. Here’s where to start.

KEY POINTS

• The current chaos is real. But panic won’t help you navigate it.
• Doom-scrolling feels like staying informed. It’s actually panic wearing a productive mask.
• The 2 a.m. mind lies to you. Resilience means learning to reach the 8 a.m. mind on demand.
• Resilience isn’t about ignoring the fire. It’s about responding wisely to it.

The Greek god Pan was a wild deity – half goat, half man, a creature of the wilderness who played pipes and chased nymphs. He is the god of nature, of groves and glens, of cherries bursting crimson and branches heavy with flowers. He is the god of spring and fertility, of the world bursting into splendor.

But like all gods, he also has a darker side.

When Pan appeared to travelers crossing remote places, or to soldiers in battle, his presence could trigger an overwhelming, irrational terror. People would lose all sense of direction and scatter headlessly. The Greeks called this divinely generated madness panikon — literally, “pertaining to Pan”. And that’s where our word panic comes from.

It’s a useful origin story, because it captures something psychology also suggests: panic is more than ordinary fear. It’s a sudden state of alarm that can flood the body and make clear thinking much harder. And if that state sounds familiar right now, well, join the club.

Why Panic Doesn’t Serve You

The triggers are everywhere today. Wars are destroying communities and destabilizing economies. Artificial intelligence is advancing fast enough to make entire professions feel precarious. And the leadership that’s supposed to provide a steady hand often feels like the opposite.

When we are under acute stress, or suffering from high anxiety, thinking tends to narrow; flexible problem-solving becomes harder, and people are more likely to fall back on fast, habitual, threat-driven responses (the psychological logic behind what we loosely call “fight or flight”). The irony is that this is precisely the opposite of what we actually need in stressful situations. When the economy is uncertain, that’s when you need to think strategically about your career; when the political landscape is volatile, that’s when you need discernment about what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Panic makes doing this harder – and furthermore, it’s contagious. A landmark study by Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock showed that emotional states spread through social networks even without direct interaction. When Facebook algorithmically reduced positive or negative posts in users’ feeds, those users’ own posts shifted in the same emotional direction.

Moreover, panic can feel like productivity. For example, when we doom-scroll, it can feel like staying informed, or when we catastrophize about what AI will do to our job, we may think we’re doing strategic planning. So, the problem isn’t just that panic shuts down clear thought and wise action. It’s also that panic can fool us into thinking that we are thinking clearly and acting wisely, when actually we’re doing the opposite.

The Recovery of Judgment

The antidote to panic is the recovery of judgment – the ability to put things in perspective and to tell the difference between what actually matters and what’s a passing storm.

Almost everyone knows what this recovery feels like, because almost everyone has experienced its simplest version. You’re lying awake at 2 a.m., convinced that something – your job, your finances, a decision you made – is catastrophically wrong. Everything feels urgent and terrible. Then morning comes. The facts haven’t changed. But somehow you can see them differently. The thing that felt like a crisis at 2 a.m. looks like a problem at 8 a.m. – still real, but manageable. You can distinguish between what needs action and what your exhausted brain was inflating.

The challenge, in a world where Pan’s voice is loud and constant, is learning to access the 8 a.m. mind while the world feels like it is eternally in the midst of its darkest night. Here are three practices that help us meet that challenge.

1. Cultivate a Mindfulness Practice. Panic often creates urgency – the feeling that you must act now, that slowing down is irresponsible. Mindfulnesshelps you to recognize that feeling for what it is: a physiological alarm, not a reliable guide to action. When you feel the panic rising – the urge to doom-scroll, to fire off a reactive email, to catastrophize at 2 a.m. – the goal isn’t to suppress it. It’s to see it. Ask yourself: Is this response moving me forward, or just making me feel like I’m moving? That gap between stimulus and response is where judgment lives.
2. Curate Your Information Diet. The 24-hour news cycle and social mediaare engineered to make everything feel like a crisis – because crisis drives clicks. Panic is contagious, so set deliberate windows for news consumption rather than grazing all day. Unfollow sources that thrive on outrage. The goal isn’t ignorance – it’s recognizing the human vulnerability to panic, and protecting ourselves from it.
3. Talk to People You Trust. When we’re panicking, we can suffer under the illusion that we’re thinking clearly when we’re actually spiraling. In isolation – or in algorithmically curated echo chambers – there’s no external check on whether our “strategic planning” is real or just panic-driven catastrophizing. Actual conversation with trusted people is the antidote: people who will say “I think you’re overreacting” or “No, that’s real, and here’s what I’d consider.” And the time to build those relationships is before you need them – not in the middle of the crisis. When Pan shows up, you want to already know who to call.

Pan Doesn’t Have to Win

The Greeks understood something important about panic: It was a force that came from outside you. Pan appeared, and you lost your mind. But the story also implies something hopeful – the madness was situational, not permanent. Once Pan left, people came back to themselves.

The current moment is a Pan moment. The god has shown up in the wilderness, and the noise is deafening. But you don’t have to scatter. You can stand still long enough to find your bearings, and then move – not in terror, but with intention.

[Photo: Best/Adobe Stock]

Original article @ Psychology Today.

The post The World Is on Fire. Now What? appeared first on FaisalHoque.

The Relationship that Never Hurts You Is Hurting You

AI may offer the safest relationship you’ll ever have, but it might also quietly erode the very humanity real relationships are meant to build.

KEY POINTS

• AI companions offer comfort by eliminating emotional friction; that’s dangerous.
• Psychological growth depends on rupture and repair, not frictionless harmony.
• The relationships that shape us most are the ones that challenge us.

The use of AI companions is rising. Companies like Character.AI and Replika explicitly offer AI companionship for humans, and demand for their services is growing. At the same time, people are increasingly using general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude as friends and even romantic partners.

This isn’t surprising. AI companions offer something that no human relationship can: intimacy without risk. ChatGPT never takes out a bad day on you. Claude doesn’t remember mistakes you made 10 years ago. AI companions listen without interrupting. They always understand you and they never get angry with you.

This ease, this lack of friction, is attractive, because real relationships are hard. We all know this from experience, whether that experience is in our romantic lives or in the professional domain. People misunderstand each other other all the time. We irritate each other, anger each other, and occasionally fight with each other. All of this is inevitable in a human relationship, and none of it is fun.

So when a technology arrives that appears to offer the benefits of a relationship without any of the difficult parts, of course people are drawn to it.

The “Good Enough Mother” and the Danger of the “Perfect” Relationship

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough mother” proposed something radical: a parent or guardian who always meets their child’s every need perfectly doesn’t produce a thriving child; they produce a dependent one. Winnicott’s argument was that it is the small, manageable failures—the moment the infant has to wait and tolerate frustration—that build the child’s internal resources. The capacity to cope, to self-soothe, to tolerate uncertainty: None of these will develop in a perfectly frictionless environment. They develop healthily in an environment that is imperfect but good enough.

This insight transfers directly to our adult relationships. When we surround ourselves with relationships that demand nothing of us, we eliminate one of the most important conditions for personal growth. And it’s not just that we stop growing. We also risk losing, or at least significantly weakening, capacities we have already developed, such as tolerance for ambiguity, the ability to regulate our own emotions, and the resilience that only comes from navigating difficulty without someone smoothing the path for us.

AI companionship looks very different when held up against this light. By design, AI offers the “perfect” relationship—no arguments on a Tuesday night, no misunderstandings, no discomfort. It is love with all the friction taken out.

But that delivers too much of a good thing. Even harmony can be damaging when experienced to excess. AI relationships are too good, and what we need are relationships that are good enough.

What we need are human relationships.

Innovation Needs Friction

This is about more than our personal relationships. In The Third Man, Orson Welles delivered one of cinema’s sharpest observations about conflict and creativity: “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

It’s an exaggeration, of course, and unfair to Switzerland. But the underlying point holds: Comfort doesn’t produce breakthroughs. Tension does.

Yes, you can prompt AI to push back. You can ask it to challenge your assumptions, poke holes in your argument, play the contrarian. But that’s friction on demand—friction you control, friction you can switch off the moment it becomes uncomfortable.

Real creative friction is different. It arrives uninvited, from a mind that genuinely sees things another way. For example, twice a week I meet with my research team. Rather than telling each other how brilliant our ideas are, we look for flaws, poke holes, and suggest revisions. This is sometimes deeply uncomfortable, especially when a cherished idea gets knocked about and has its weaknesses exposed. But what emerges is invariably better as a result.

What makes those sessions work is that I can’t control them. When a colleague locks onto a weakness in my argument, she doesn’t stop because I’m getting frustrated. I can’t click a button to make the conversation more agreeable. I have to stay in it because that’s what we’re there for. And that’s exactly what forces me to rethink and adapt rather than just feel comfortably challenged for a moment before moving on and sticking with my original views regardless.

Protecting the Friction

Here are four practices that can help you preserve the friction that leads to growth:

1. Notice the retreat. Pay attention to the moments when you reach for AI instead of a person—not for information, but for comfort, validation, or the avoidance of a difficult conversation.
2. Stay in the discomfort. The next time a conversation with someone you care about gets uncomfortable, resist the urge to withdraw or to resolve it prematurely. Sit with it instead.
3. Invite the pushback. Ask a colleague, a friend, or a partner: “What am I not seeing?” And when they tell you, don’t defend your view. Listen.
4. Keep one relationship analog. Choose one relationship in your life and commit to keeping it fully human. No AI mediation, no drafted messages, no optimized responses. Just two imperfect people doing the hard work of understanding each other.

The Gift Only Humans Can Give

Love, said the philosopher Iris Murdoch, is the extremely difficult realization that someone other than us is real. That reality—the stubborn, inconvenient fact that other people have needs different from our own, perspectives we don’t share, reactions we can’t predict—is what makes human relationships hard. It is also what makes them irreplaceable.

Because growth is not something we can achieve alone. It’s something people do for each other and with each other, often without meaning to, often through friction. AI companions will keep getting better at simulating warmth, understanding, and connection. But simulation is not the thing itself. The grit that produces the pearl requires a genuine irritant—something that resists you, surprises you, and refuses to be optimized away.

That is a gift only humans can give each other. And it would be a tragedy if we replaced it with comfort.

[Photo: Ekaterina Pokrovsky/Adobe Stock]

Original article @ Psychology Today.

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