What if making life harder actually made it more worth living?

We’re used to convenience. You can DoorDash every meal, call up any movie to your TV screen, and use AI to write your emails. Advances in technology have mostly been focused on making our lives «easier.» But this tech sometimes sells us solutions to problems that we didn’t know we had. It leads us away from the regular human duties of chores, correspondence, and even leaving the house. If these tech companies had their way, we’d be in our houses 24/7, all of our needs met, hooked up to an infinite drip of dopamine that they are in control of. Instead of schlepping to your local library to flip through an encyclopedia to get an answer to a question like «how much does an elephant weigh,» you can conjure up a truckload of information without even getting out of bed. Instead of making plans with a friend to talk through a breakup, we can fire up ChatGPT for some instant advice. Instead of visiting our local butcher to ask what cuts are good right now, we Instacart whatever cut the store’s algorithm shows us first. We’ve all assumed this is a good thing. We aim for «frictionlessness.» But is there a tipping point at which convenience actually hinders us?