The friction fetish

How we mistook difficulty for depth

You're in the gym, halfway through a workout that feels increasingly pointless. Your form is suffering, your energy is depleted, but something in you insists on pushing through the discomfort. Not because it's helping — the research is clear that this level of strain increases injury risk without improving results — but because stopping feels like giving up. Like admitting you took the easy way out.

This moment reveals something uncomfortable about how we relate to difficulty. There's a cultural obsession with effortful processes that often has less to do with their effectiveness and more to do with our fear of missing something essential by choosing the easier path.

What's less obvious is how this fear, combined with well-documented psychological biases, makes us terrible judges of when difficulty actually serves us versus when it just makes us feel virtuous.

Still from Whiplash (2014)

The psychology of earned value

The research on effort justification is unambiguous: we systematically overvalue outcomes we've worked hard to achieve, regardless of objective quality. In Leon Festinger's foundational studies, participants who endured embarrassing screening tests — reading sexual words aloud to a group — rated subsequent discussion groups about animal sexual behavior as significantly more interesting than those who entered with minimal embarrassment. They were evaluating identical, deliberately boring discussions. The effort alone created subjective value.

This isn't wisdom about the importance of earning your way. It's measurable cognitive bias.

The IKEA effect demonstrates how pervasive this pattern is. In controlled experiments, consumers willingly pay 63% more for furniture they've assembled themselves compared to identical pre-assembled pieces. They'll rate their often poorly-constructed creations as more valuable than expert-made equivalents. The effort creates psychological ownership that bears little relationship to actual quality.

Research on consumer decision-making shows this extends beyond physical assembly. Shoppers who invest more cognitive effort in product evaluation are willing to pay premium prices, driven by what psychologists call "self-justification needs." We overvalue anything we've worked for, even when that work serves no practical purpose beyond making us feel we've "earned" the outcome.

Here's where psychology meets culture: we've built entire mythologies around the idea that things obtained easily are somehow less legitimate, less meaningful, less ours. The bias isn't just individual — it's become a collective performance of how value gets created.

When pain becomes performance

Consider fitness culture, where "no pain, no gain" has become gospel despite mounting evidence of its limitations.

A 2022 systematic review of competitive athletes reveals the psychology behind this pattern: athletes with perfectionist concerns and tendencies to ignore bodily warning signals show significantly higher rates of overuse injuries. The research identified "pain normalization" as a key cultural factor — the systematic reinforcement of the idea that discomfort equals progress.

Yet cardiovascular research consistently demonstrates that sustainable, moderate exercise provides comparable benefits to extreme training. Studies following tens of thousands of participants found that those who walked regularly had similar heart disease risks to those exercising vigorously. The effectiveness isn't in question — the psychology is.

We cling to the pain narrative because intensity provides immediate feedback that we're "doing something real," while the benefits of sustainable training only become apparent over months or years. We mistake the immediate sensation of effort for evidence of effectiveness.

The fear isn't just about results — it's about authenticity. If getting fit doesn't require suffering, does it really count? If we can't point to our effort as evidence of our commitment, how do we know we've truly changed?

The productivity performance

Corporate culture reveals another dimension of this pattern: the systematic conflation of visible effort with meaningful output.

A 2014 Stanford study by economist John Pencavel provides striking evidence of this disconnect. Analyzing productivity data, Pencavel found that employee output falls sharply after 50 hours per week and drops so dramatically after 55 hours that additional time becomes pointless — people working 70 hours accomplish no more than those working 55 hours. A 2017 study of call center workers confirmed this pattern in real-time: as daily hours increased, performance systematically decreased.

Meanwhile, a 2023 study of Chinese workers found that "996 culture" (9am to 9pm, 6 days per week) significantly increases burnout and psychological distress while decreasing meaningful productivity. The research showed that cultural emphasis on visible effort — long hours at the office — systematically undermines the actual goal of productive work.

Yet the cultural narrative persists: if work doesn't feel difficult, are we really working? If we can accomplish tasks efficiently, does that mean we're not pushing ourselves hard enough?

The real fear runs deeper than performance metrics. It's about identity. In a culture that equates effort with character, choosing efficiency feels like confessing to moral laziness — less committed, less serious, less deserving of what we achieve.

The knowledge anxiety

Perhaps nowhere is this fear more pronounced than in how we consume information and develop understanding.

Watch the cultural performance around efficient learning. We experience genuine shame about using Blinkist to read book summaries — as if accessing ideas efficiently somehow makes the ideas less legitimate. Audiobooks trigger anxiety about whether the experience "counts" as real reading. Students choose courses based on reputation for difficulty rather than learning effectiveness, performing intellectual seriousness through unnecessary struggle.

The underlying terror reveals itself: if we don't experience the full journey of discovery, do we really understand? If we haven't wrestled with ideas through confusion and difficulty, can we claim genuine knowledge? If we use tools that make comprehension easier, are we cheating our way to enlightenment?

This fear has some basis in reality. Research on learning does show that certain types of difficulty — what psychologists call "desirable difficulties" — enhance retention and understanding. Struggling to retrieve information strengthens memory. Grappling with complex concepts builds cognitive flexibility. Some friction genuinely serves learning.

But our psychological biases make us terrible at distinguishing between difficulty that enhances understanding and difficulty that merely makes us feel like we're learning. We conflate the experience of effort with the achievement of insight.

When our judgment fails

The uncomfortable truth is that we can't trust our intuitive sense of when effort serves us versus when it serves our self-image.

Sunk cost research shows we continue investing in failing projects, relationships, and decisions simply because we've already invested effort — even when abandoning these investments would clearly serve us better. The effort creates psychological ownership that overrides rational evaluation.

Our bias toward effort runs so deep that we experience guilt when efficient solutions work too well. We question whether we "deserve" outcomes that didn't require struggle, as if suffering were a prerequisite for legitimacy.

Observe cultural movements toward deliberate inefficiency performed as virtue. Analog productivity systems gain popularity despite digital alternatives that work better. "Slow living" movements celebrate laborious processes as inherently more meaningful. There's organized resistance to AI tools and automation, not because they don't work, but because they work too well — and that efficiency feels morally suspect.

The pattern extends beyond individual choices. Entire cultural institutions organize around the premise that difficulty equals depth. Educational systems mistake rigor for learning. Workplace cultures confuse busyness with productivity. Social norms treat visible struggle as proof of character.

What we're witnessing isn't wisdom about the value of effort. It's systematic bias operating at cultural scale, with people unable to distinguish between meaningful difficulty and performed difficulty because the psychological equipment for making that distinction is fundamentally compromised.

The observer's bias

This guilt about taking efficient paths isn't moral intuition — it's cognitive bias shaped by cultural narrative. When people feel like they're "cheating" by using tools that make difficult tasks easier, they're experiencing the friction fetish in real time.

This compulsion to choose difficult approaches not because they work better but because they feel more legitimate isn't character-building — it's the psychological tax of living with biased equipment in a world that increasingly offers frictionless alternatives.

But here's what I've had to reckon with: my instinctive embrace of efficiency might be its own form of moral performance. Perhaps my optimization-oriented psychology makes this pattern visible precisely because I'm not emotionally invested in effort-based meaning-making. Maybe I can see the friction fetish clearly because I have my own systematic blind spot — an over-attachment to streamlining that makes me dismiss the genuine transformation that sometimes emerges through struggle.

The most uncomfortable recognition might be this: none of us can trust our feelings about when struggle serves us. Our brains systematically overvalue effortful processes, and our culture systematically reinforces this bias. But some brains also systematically undervalue the alchemy that can emerge through difficulty. Our psychological equipment for distinguishing valuable friction from performed friction is fundamentally compromised — in both directions.

This doesn't mean all difficulty is performative or all efficiency is virtuous. Some challenges genuinely develop capacity. Some friction creates genuine value. Some journeys can't be compressed without losing what makes them worthwhile. But if our judgment about which difficulties fall into these categories is systematically biased, then we're making consequential choices about our lives with broken instruments —navigating questions of meaning, growth, and authenticity using psychological processes that systematically overvalue effort regardless of whether that effort actually serves these deeper goals.

This recognition doesn't solve anything. The guilt about choosing efficient paths persists. The questioning of whether outcomes achieved easily are somehow less legitimate continues. But recognizing these feelings for what they are — not moral wisdom, but the unavoidable experience of being human with systematically biased psychological equipment — changes something fundamental about how we understand the cultural movements forming around us.

Because if individuals feel this tension, entire cultures are grappling with the same compromised judgment at scale.

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References:

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Collewet, M., & Sauermann, J. (2017). Working hours and productivity. Labour Economics, 47, 96-106.

Norton, M. I., Mochon, D., & Ariely, D. (2012). The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(3), 453-460.

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Wang, Y., Zhang, H., & Li, X. (2023). Modeling the significance of work culture on burnout, satisfaction, and psychological distress among the Gen-Z workforce in an emerging country. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10, 828.