What We Lost When Life Got Easier

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It’s funny how sometimes we see patterns in our own lives that are worth exploring deeper.

Within a span of just a few days, I had two completely unrelated conversations. One was with the head of a primary and secondary school, and another during a leadership workshop in Memphis where I was leading a workshop on generational dynamics. even one reader wrote to me referencing the same notion in resposne to a post of mine. Strangely enough, all three of these conversations landed on the same topic, or rather appliances: 

The washing machine.
The dishwasher.
The garbage disposal.

Not exactly the kind of inventions you expect to spark deep conversations about society. But the idea that kept surfacing around those appliances was fascinating. This is a great extention of last week’s eassy on the Velocity Gap—the idea that we’ve accelerated faster in technological advancements than we have in understanding the moral implications of those advancements.

The big question is this: Does making life easier actually make life better?

As we move forward in society, even now with artificial intelligence, we are constantly trying to eliminate friction.

We invent things to make our lives better, easier, faster, and more productive. Ultimately, we do this to provide what we believe will be a better human experience.

That impulse has driven innovation for generations.

Take something as ordinary as household appliances.

When the washing machine, dishwasher, and garbage disposal became common in American homes during the mid-20th century, they were revolutionary. Tasks that once required hours of physical labor could suddenly be put into motion in minutes. This “freed” up time for someone to go and do something else while a machine did the work. 

Specifically, these appliances were “supposed to” allow mothers, at least in the cultural assumptions of that era, to spend more time making a positive impact in their homes and with their children. They were child-rearing (as the term parenting had not yet caught on widely).

But history rarely unfolds the way we might expect.

Economists have a phrase for moments like this: the productivity paradox.

The productivity paradox describes the phenomenon where technologies designed to increase efficiency do not always result in the productivity gains we expect (Solow, 1987; Brynjolfsson, 1993).

In other words, the tools that promise to save us time don’t necessarily give us more of it.

And one of the things humanity has always been trying to do is buy time.

We’ve tried to add years to our lives through modern medicine. We’ve tried to get time back through modern inventions. We’ve tried to expedite time through faster travel, faster communication, and faster access to information.

In many ways, we’ve achieved those goals. But progress often comes with unintended consequences.

With these advancements, expectations rise. Norms shift. What once felt like a luxury becomes the new baseline.

This is where the idea of the Velocity Gap becomes important.

The unintended consequences don’t reveal themselves as quickly as technology is advancing today, and often in the pursuit of progress, we neglect to understand the impact on the human experience.

The distance between those two realities continues to widen.

The smartphone is one of the clearest examples. Smartphones were designed to remove friction from communication. We could communicate instantly. No more missed calls, no more waiting by the phone in the kitchen, no more being stranded without being able to get a hold of a loved one.

But when communication friction disappeared, something else disappeared with it: boundaries.

In fact, if you were to pick one word that serves as the anthem of Generation Z, it would probably be boundaries…or authenticity. 

The irony is that those boundaries became necessary precisely because the technology designed to connect us removed the natural ones that used to exist.

Your phone is always in your pocket.

You can’t leave the receiver off the hook anymore and escape calls. The dial-up modem can no longer run interference, exchanging the phone ringing for “You’ve Got Mail.” 

You can’t step away from communication. Every notification, like, vibration, or message reminds you that someone somewhere is interacting with you, or thinking about you.

Work follows you home. Conversations follow you everywhere.

And suddenly the line between work and life disappears.

As I discussed in last week’s essay, social media accelerated this dynamic even further. Platforms that promised connection also intensified the speed and volume of interaction, amplifying the distance between technological capability and our ability to process its effects. Though the promise of connectivity was supposed to make everyone feel more included in society and community, the reality was that isolation accelerated, polarity increased, and the most connected people felt so alone.

Friday night, I was stuck on a one-hour flight for nearly nine hours due to the issues at the Atlanta airport. While I was able to get a decent amount of work done, it was a Friday night, and “The Social Network” movie was on the plane, so I indulged. While I rarely watch movies, I was just reminded, even if through a Hollywood lens, of the original intentions of social media and how quickly it expanded and grew out of control.

The more I’ve reflected on these conversations, the more I’ve noticed a pattern.

Every time we remove friction from our lives, we tend to increase our dependency on a non-human experience.

We replace manual labor with machines. We replace conversations with messages. We replace memory with search engines.

And now, with artificial intelligence, we are beginning to replace parts of thinking itself.

Each step promises convenience, productivity, freedom, a brighter future. But every step also subtly (or not so subtly) shifts the human experience.

These changes ripple through generations.

Many Baby Boomers were raised by parents who survived war, economic hardship, and scarcity. So Boomer’s guiding principle became simple: give your children a better life than you had yourself.

They worked hard to provide stability and opportunity. But that pursuit of provision came with trade-offs.

Many of their children, Generation X, became what we now call the latchkey generation, returning home from school to empty houses while parents were still working.

At the same time, the broader social environment was shifting dramatically.

The birth control pill was approved in the United States in 1960, allowing sexual activity to become increasingly separated from reproduction (FDA, 1960). The broader Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s reshaped social norms around relationships, family structure, and gender roles. Educational attainment also increased rapidly during this era, with college enrollment expanding significantly after World War II and continuing through the latter half of the 20th Century (Goldin & Katz, 2008).

By the late 1950s, roughly three out of four American households owned a washing machine (U.S. Census Bureau, 1960). Dishwashers followed more slowly but became widely adopted in suburban homes during the 1970s and 1980s (Cowan, 1983). Garbage disposals also spread rapidly through postwar suburban housing, reaching a majority of newly built homes by the late 1960s (Strasser, 1982).

The expectation was clear. These inventions would free up time.

In other words, many of the same decades that introduced widespread household appliances also introduced profound shifts in family life, reproduction, and opportunity.

Technology, medicine, and social change were all moving forward simultaneously.

When Gen X later became parents, they often tried to remove friction from their children’s lives.

Part of this impulse was shaped by fear amplified through media cycles from warnings about AIDS in the 1980s to rising coverage of school shootings, terrorism, and tragedies like the Oklahoma City bombing and the attacks of September 11.

Parents leaned more heavily into emotional support. They encouraged conversations about feelings. In some cases, they attempted to become their children’s friends instead of simply their parents.

The intention, again, was to create a better human experience.

But every attempt to remove friction changes the environment in which the next generation grows up.

Now we are entering a new chapter.

Artificial intelligence is poised to remove friction on a scale humanity has never experienced. We are already deep into AI slop and seeing the early indicators of Brain Rot.

The promise is productivity.

But the friction we are removing is the core friction essential to the human experience…experience. 

Experience is what fosters character and forms wisdom. 

And when we remove friction for the human experience, humans aren’t experiencing life, the aches and pains of love, the joy and celebrations of success. We become the drones. The machines. Devoid of the ability to respond from the deep emotional reservoir that makes us human.

What happens when the obstacles that once shaped our thinking begin to disappear? What happens when effort itself becomes optional?

None of this means technology is bad.

Progress has improved human life in extraordinary ways. Medicine, communication, transportation, and countless other innovations have alleviated suffering and expanded opportunity.

But progress always involves trade-offs. Sometimes the obstacles we remove are the very things that once formed us. Friction taught us patience. The world imposed limitations that demanded human creativity to solve. Waiting cultivated space for time and reflection. Pain and hurt allowed us to feel and to fight and to heal. 

Maybe the goal of progress should be to eliminate every obstacle. Maybe the goal is deciding which friction is worth keeping.