Abundance of production can quietly become scarcity of appreciation.

We can now produce first and decide later, which feels liberating until the pile becomes the problem.

The answer is to reintroduce friction consciously where it protects our judgment.

Imagine receiving 50 birthday cards. Until recently, each card carried a small record of effort: someone chose it, found a pen, thought about you, wrote something, located your address, and sent it. The message mattered, but so did the friction around it. Now imagine receiving 50 beautifully composed birthday messages generated in 30 seconds. The prose may be warmer, the jokes sharper, the grammar flawless. Still, the emotional arithmetic has changed. When a polished message can be produced almost without cost, its polish tells us less about how much thought, time, or care went into it.

That small example captures a much larger problem of the generative age. Text, images, music, presentations, video, analysis, and advertising can increasingly be produced by almost anyone at extraordinary speed. This is an expansion of capability worth celebrating. However, it also creates a new kind of inflation. When supply rises dramatically while human attention remains fixed, each additional unit of output has to fight harder to be noticed, remembered, and valued. Abundance of production can quietly become scarcity of appreciation.

Once upon a time, when friction did useful work

For decades, innovation has treated friction as an engineering defect. We wanted faster checkout, instant photographs, one-click ordering, auto-complete, and seamless interfaces. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) extends that logic into the realm of thought and expression: instant ideas, instant prose, instant pictures. Much of this friction deserved to disappear. Yet some forms of difficulty had a hidden function. They forced........

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