The Path of Most Resistance

On struggle, friction and what makes us human

The brain loves a well-trodden path…

Picture a field. Each day we cross it, and each day we take the same route, because we are creatures of habit. Over time the grass wears away and the route becomes a groove of bare earth. Easy to find. Easy to follow. No thinking required.

Choosing a new route is harder. The grass resists. We have to look where we are going, decide, push through. And the next day, the old path is right there, inviting us back again.

This is how habits form. The brain likes the path of least resistance, and it will take it whenever it can. Now imagine being offered a smooth ride across every field we will ever need to cross. No grass to push through. No route to choose. No path to wear at all.

The thinking, making species

Two things, perhaps above all others, make us human. We think and we make.

We named ourselves Homo sapiens, the wise or thinking human. Yet in 1907 the French philosopher Henri Bergson suggested we might be better described as Homo faber, the human who makes. For Bergson, our intelligence shows itself first in our capacity to fashion tools, and then tools that make other tools.

Thinking and making have rarely been easy. They are effortful, uncertain, full of false starts. They have friction. And it is that very friction that has shaped us as much as we have shaped the things we made.

Half a century later, Hannah Arendt looked ahead to the age of automation in The Human Condition. She saw machines lifting from us the very labour by which we had come to define ourselves and warned of “a society of laborers without labor”. She was writing about factories. Today the machine has followed us into the study.

The messy middle

AI is extraordinary. I use it sometimes. I suspect many of you do too.

However, when I reach for AI, I notice something in myself: a quiet relief at being spared the struggle, the blank page. The time, the not-knowing. The annoyingly clumsy first attempt. My relief is understandable. But I wonder what it costs.

As a species, we  have become very focussed on, nay, obsessed with, outcomes. The finished report, the polished post. The answer, the speed.

But an output is only the visible tip of something larger. What matters as much is what happens to us in the making of it: the thinking, the confusion, the tension, the mistakes, the moments of wanting to give up. This messy middle is where our minds stretch and grow. A muscle only strengthens through the small tears of effort. The mind is no different.

AI takes us straight to the destination and quietly removes the journey. We are optimising it for efficiency: faster answers, smoother outputs, fewer steps. Yet the conditions that grow human creativity and development are almost the opposite: time, uncertainty, detours, getting it wrong. Skip the messy middle and we skip the very struggle in which our creativity, our uniqueness , and, dare I say it, our irreplaceability are formed.

There is a growing tension here, that we have not we have fully woken up to.

This concern is not new. Nearly 2,500 years ago, Plato told the story of the Egyptian king Thamus, who was offered the gift of writing. He was not impressed. Writing, he warned, would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls”, giving people the appearance of wisdom without the substance of it.

We might argue that Thamus was wrong about writing. But replace the word writing with AI, and his warning lands rather close to home…

Who am I, if I don’t need to think?

The psychologist Erik Erikson described identity as “a subjective sense of an invigorating sameness and continuity”. Who we are rests on a felt thread running through our lives. A continuity between who we were, who we are and who we are becoming.

For the whole of our history, thinking and making have been woven into that thread.

So what happens to our identity when we, the thinking species, can do almost everything without thinking?

At this level, AI poses an existential threat to our identity. Not the dramatic kind we see in films, with machines rising up against us. Something quieter. A gradual hollowing out. A forgetting of who we are, because we no longer need to practise being it.

Erikson believed that without a sense of identity, we struggle to feel truly alive.

And identity rarely travels alone. Who we are is bound up with what we stand for, our sense of purpose. When one thread begins to fray, the other often loosens too…

Lost and found

Purpose, though, is a little like conscience. We don’t necessarily possess it once and for all. We lose it and find it, lose it and find it again, often many times in a single life. In fact, some might say that we don’t find our purpose, and would argue instead that we make our purpose.

Purpose moves through beginnings and endings, and through the long, uncertain stretches where we feel lost in between. William Bridges, who wrote so wisely about transitions, called that in-between place the neutral zone. It is disorienting. It is uncomfortable. And it is where something new quietly takes root.

Think of a seed in winter soil. Nothing appears to be happening. Yet beneath the surface, the shell is softening, splitting, making way.

Struggle is not a detour from purpose. Very often, it is the path to it.

The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius put it simply: “What stands in the way becomes the way.” Nearly two thousand years later, Ryan Holiday took that line for the title of The Obstacle Is the Way, bringing Stoicism to a whole new generation. It seems we still need reminding.

If we let a machine carry us over every obstacle, we may never make our own way at all.

What will we invent next?

When we stopped working physically, when machines took over the ploughing and the lifting, we invented gyms. We now pay to lift heavy things and walk on treadmills that take us nowhere, because our bodies need the struggle our lives no longer give them. I find that both funny and rather profound (especially as I do it myself!).

Now that our need to think is diminishing, what will we invent next? Gyms for the mind? Deliberate friction? Spaces where we choose the long way round, simply because the long way round is where we grow? Or will we drift, comfortable and well served, slowly becoming slugs on the sofa of convenience, more than we are already?

For humans, struggle is not a flaw to be engineered away. It is vital.

The field is still there. The grass still grows. And we still get to choose which path we walk…

Where in your life have you quietly handed over the struggle?

What might you be missing in the messy middle?

And where might you choose, intentionally to take the path of most resistance?

This piece is inspired by a panel discussion I had the privilege of attending with Herminia Ibarra, Lynda Gratton, Gianpiero Petriglieri and Tomas Chamorro-Preemuzic.

Further reading

• Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907; trans. Arthur Mitchell, 1911). Project Gutenberg
• Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958). Overview. See also Rosalie Waelen, “Rethinking Automation and the Future of Work with Hannah Arendt”, Journal of Business Ethics (2025).
• Plato, Phaedrus (trans. Benjamin Jowett). Project Gutenberg
• Erik H. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (W. W. Norton, 1968). W. W. Norton
• William Bridges with Susan Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes (1980; 40th anniversary edition, 2019). Amazon
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (trans. Gregory Hays, Modern Library, 2002). Wikipedia
• Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way (Portfolio/Penguin, 2014). Amazon