The Frictionless Life
Tom Greene
For most of the 20th century each generation scored higher on IQ tests than the previous generation. Not by a little, either. In many countries, scores increased roughly three to five IQ points per decade. This phenomenon became known as the Flynn Effect. It doesn’t mean that your kids are smarter than you, although they probably are. (All parents are considered idiots at some point.) It means that, over time, successive generations performed better on certain kinds of complex problem solving and abstract reasoning measured by IQ tests.
Then a strange thing happened. In a 2023 study, the Flynn Effect seemed to be going in reverse. The largest declines were among 18-to-22-year-olds, and declines were steeper among people without a four-year college degree. The pattern appeared across age, gender and educational groups. So, what changed? Plenty of things, actually. We used to embrace doing hard things. Today we still admire other people doing hard things. We just don’t necessarily want to do the hard things ourselves. We still like things that are hard to get, but we’ve become extraordinarily good at finding short cuts…and avoiding friction. Modern life removed the friction between wanting something and getting it. Take weight loss, for example. Pharmaceutical companies spent years developing and testing GLP-1 weight loss drugs. The result is a blockbuster class of drugs that reduces much of the friction of losing weight. Simply take a weekly injection and watch the pounds melt away. Within a few months everyone starts to notice. No crash diets, no crazy exercise schemes and no more diet shakes or pre-packaged foods. Just a simple injection…and patience. Prior to 2020, it was difficult to place bets on a sporting event. You had to have a “guy”, a shady bookie to accept your illegal bets. Or travel to Las Vegas or Atlantic City to a casino.
That friction created speed bumps-obstacles to keep you from gambling your life away. In much of America, that friction is gone. With legal sports betting apps, the casino is effectively in your pocket. Half of all men ages 18-49 have an active account with an online sports book. Even more concerning is the leakage of discretionary savings into online gambling. Some young men see sports betting as an alternative to investing in a 401(k)-retirement plan.
Historically, dating required an enormous amount of friction. At least it did for me. It was a combo platter of attraction, conversation, dating, compromise, rejection, embarrassment, etc. Sorta like Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Today, dating apps have largely removed that friction. See someone you like, swipe right, have a date, meh, swipe right again, meh, swipe right again, etc. It’s nearly frictionless. Even that is too much friction for some. Free, high-definition pornography is more popular than on-line gambling. In a study of 14,000 men, 17.2% of those aged 16–24 reported daily or near-daily use of pornography. Yes, I said daily. Whether it’s weight-loss, gambling, dating, or sex, modern technology has removed nearly all the friction. And maybe that’s where things started to go astray. See, some of that friction is instructive. The discipline of weight-loss. The challenge of finding a bookie and placing bets. The negotiation and problem solving of traditional dating. And the difficulty of building a relationship that leads to a real relationship with another human.
Young adults today enjoy technology that increasingly remembers, calculates, navigates, recommends, entertains, and now even writes and reasons for them. Perhaps developing discipline, problem-solving, and logical thinking was more important than we thought. As George Orwell once wrote, "If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them." We have finally achieved what our ancestors dreamed of: a world in which you can get dinner, lose weight, find a date, place a bet, watch pornography, buy a sofa and have someone write a thank-you note without putting on pants. That might sound like progress. But maybe we misunderstood what all that inconvenience was doing for us. The effort, waiting, practice, embarrassment, failure, repetition weren’t just obstacles standing between us and what we wanted. They forced us to reason and to solve complex problems. We’ve spent decades taking the friction out of modern life. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if some of the abilities that friction helped build are beginning to disappear with it.
I’m just a regular guy sitting in a Waffle House pecking on a keyboard. Shoot me an email at t@tomgreene.com. I promise that you’ll hear back from me cause, you know, I’m a real person and all.