Knowledge risks becoming merely transactional, a commodity to be accessed, rather than relational or internalized. Information on tap instead of an ongoing dialogue with ourselves and the world. We should use automation to take away mundane obstacles and drudgery. I do. But we must recognize the distinction between that and what I call productive friction. This is the kind of difficulty that’s worth preserving, the kind of struggle that pushes you forward as you push against it.
The most underexplored form of productive friction is the kind directed inward — not the resistance of a tool or a system, but the difficulty of articulating what you actually think. Friction with yourself is what turns passive consumption into genuine understanding.Friction isn’t inefficiency to be eliminated. It’s the resistance necessary to build genuine judgment and refine taste.
Friction, in other words. It works in subtle, but discernible, ways. Friction forces articulation. In those RISD critiques, “I just liked it better” meant blank stares and humiliation. I learned to identify and name what I was seeing: the way warm gray advances while cool gray recedes, how a curve that accelerates too quickly feels anxious and disjoint.
Friction requiring articulation only works when someone already has a body of knowledge to draw from — the struggle is in surfacing what’s dormant, not in acquiring what’s absent. Search fails here because you don’t know what to ask. An artist who knows their body of work but must explain it is doing a fundamentally different kind of labor than someone querying from scratch. This is also the narrative that capital requires: legible articulation of taste as proof of value.This phenomenon isn’t exclusive to design. A chef adjusts seasoning instinctively because they’ve oversalted dishes thousands of times. Carpenters anticipate how walnut splits because they’ve felt it crack beneath their chisels. Mechanics hear subtle engine faults after years of troubleshooting rattles.
Tagging things, like curating playlists, builds a latent understanding of taste. The tension is that platforms treat this accumulated taste-knowledge as a moat to propel consumption, when it could instead serve as a springboard for self-knowledge — the curation process teaching the curator what they actually care about. editorialAutomation streamlines tasks but inhibits mastery. Junior developers who only lean on AI may struggle to debug from first principles; writers who exclusively prompt can’t structure an original argument. They become adept at generating outputs, but become disconnected from foundational insights.
The same principle applies to relationships: discovering another person requires knowing where to start, not just where to jump in. Annotation alone is insufficient — what matters is learning which pathways to explore to carve out an interesting flow. The friction of mastery is not just knowing what you are interested in, but developing the instinct for where to find it.
