Why Outsourcing Our Struggles to AI Freezes Human Growth

When the 14th-century poet Dante Alighieri imagined the deepest, most terrifying circle of hell in his epic Inferno, he didn't fill it with fire and brimstone. Most of us remember the flames, the pitchforks, and the torment of the upper levels. But Dante placed something entirely different at the very bottom.

The deepest circle of hell was a frozen lake called Cocytus. All movement had stopped. It was a literary representation of absolute zero—a place of complete stillness, where the inhabitants were locked in ice, entirely stripped of their agency and ability to change.

I’ve been thinking about Dante’s frozen lake a lot lately. It perfectly captures a quiet, creeping possibility that rarely makes it into our mainstream debates about artificial intelligence. We spend endless hours arguing over what AI will eventually become—whether it will take our jobs, cure our diseases, or achieve sentience. But we are ignoring a much more intimate question: What happens to us when the everyday struggles that historically shaped human character become entirely optional?

As we integrate AI into our daily routines, we are brushing up against a phenomenon that goes far beyond technological reliance. We are flirting with existential surrender—the gradual, voluntary relinquishing of the very experiences, frustrations, and friction that forge our identities.

The Three Stages of Surrender

To understand how AI might freeze our personal development, it helps to look at how this technology is subtly changing our relationship with effort. The shift isn't happening all at once; it is occurring across three distinct dimensions of the human experience.

• Cognitive surrender changes how we think. This is the gradual transfer of human reasoning to machines. We already saw a mild version of this with GPS navigation; studies in cognitive psychology have shown that over-reliance on GPS actually reduces the grey matter in our hippocampus, diminishing our innate spatial memory. With AI, we aren't just outsourcing directions; we are outsourcing brainstorming, problem-solving, and critical analysis.
• Emotional surrender changes how we connect. This is the temptation to replace the messy, difficult work of human engagement with AI interactions that demand less of us. It’s using ChatGPT to draft an apology text to a partner, or relying on AI companions to simulate friendship without the reciprocal demands of a real human relationship.
• Existential surrender changes who we become. This is the culmination of the first two. When we continuously bypass cognitive and emotional friction, we slowly surrender the formative experiences that build our character.

By existential surrender, I don’t mean a dystopian abandonment of life or purpose. I mean something much more practical: the quiet, daily erosion of the internal resistance required to grow.

The Psychology of "Desirable Difficulties"

Generally speaking, we don’t feel human development as it happens. You don't wake up feeling 1% more mature. Yet that development—bumps, bruises, and all—is precisely what creates who we are.

We tend to think of personal growth as the accumulation of positive experiences. But cognitive scientists and developmental psychologists have long argued that growth is actually the accumulation of overcome resistance. In cognitive psychology, there is a well-documented concept known as desirable difficulties, a term coined by Dr. Robert Bjork. The theory posits that introducing certain struggles and friction into the learning process actually improves long-term retention and mastery. If learning is too easy, it doesn't stick. The brain requires the struggle to trigger neuroplasticity—the rewiring of neural pathways that makes us smarter, more adaptable, and more capable.

A life without resistance sounds incredibly appealing until you realize how many uniquely human capacities are forged exclusively in the fires of friction:

• Patience develops because some things refuse to be rushed.
• Judgment and wisdom develop because we are forced to navigate environments where absolute certainty is unavailable.
• Resilience develops because failure remains a very real possibility, and we have to learn how to survive it.
• Empathy develops because we have to actively listen and interpret the complex, often confusing emotions of others.

The friction of life isn't a bug in the human operating system; it is the environment in which human beings compile their source code.

When Resistance Becomes Optional

Historically, technology has reduced physical friction, almost always for the better. From the washing machine to the tractor to the search engine, these tools have liberated humanity from backbreaking labor and tedious information retrieval. Few rational people would argue that we should wash our clothes by hand just to "build character."

But artificial intelligence reaches into a fundamentally different layer of the human experience. It doesn’t just reduce physical effort; it actively eliminates cognitive and emotional effort.

Consider the modern digital experience. A difficult question receives an immediate, synthesized answer. A terrifyingly blank page receives an immediate, perfectly formatted draft. A moment of career uncertainty receives an immediate, AI-generated action plan.

The operative word here is immediate. AI offers us a frictionless, instantaneous trip from Point A to Point B, entirely bypassing the lived experience of the journey.

None of this is inherently evil, and much of it is genuinely, breathtakingly useful. What is concerning is the cumulative effect over a lifetime. Historically, answers were scarce, and questions were abundant. We are rapidly moving toward a world where answers are essentially infinite and instantaneous. The great challenge of the 21st century may no longer be finding a response, but forcing ourselves to live within the uncomfortable space of a question long enough to actually learn, adapt, and change.

The Cost of Absolute Stillness

The risk of existential surrender is so insidious because it doesn’t look like decline; it looks exactly like convenience.

Nobody wakes up and consciously decides to stop developing as a human being. We choose efficiency because it works. We choose convenience because, in a fast-paced world, it feels entirely rational. Each individual decision to let an AI write a difficult email, summarize a complex book, or solve a coding problem makes perfect sense in isolation. The danger only becomes visible when viewed across the span of years.

A person who rarely wrestles with uncertainty develops a very shallow relationship with critical judgment. A romantic relationship that never encounters the awkward difficulty of miscommunication develops a fragile depth. A creative goal pursued without the terrifying risk of staring at a blank page leaves a fundamentally different mark on the creator.

A self isn’t built from answers alone. It is built from messy encounters with questions, obstacles, failures, and ambiguities that cannot be resolved in milliseconds by a large language model.

Practicing "Conscious Friction"

If we want to avoid Dante's frozen lake, we don't need to throw our computers into the ocean. Instead, we need to develop a practice of conscious friction—intentionally choosing to do things the hard way when the process matters more than the output.

Here is how we can start pushing back against the freeze:

• Protect your emotional labor: Never outsource your interpersonal communication. If an email, text, or letter carries emotional weight, write it yourself. The awkwardness of finding the right words is what makes the communication genuine.
• Embrace the blank page: Use AI as an editor, not a drafter. Force yourself to outline your own thoughts and write the messy first draft. Discovering what you actually think is a process that cannot be automated.
• Sit with uncertainty: When faced with a complex problem, delay the urge to immediately prompt an AI. Give yourself 15 minutes to struggle with the concept, map it out on paper, and hit dead ends. Let your brain do the heavy lifting before you ask for the answer.

The deepest concern raised by existential surrender isn’t that AI will make us less intelligent or less economically productive. The concern is that a life relentlessly optimized for efficiency will gradually strip away the very experiences that make us human.

Yes, AI will help us solve monumental problems and extend human capability in ways we can barely imagine. But we must remain vigilant. Movement matters. The warmth of the human experience is generated by the friction of living it. If we outsource all our struggles, we may eventually find ourselves perfectly efficient, perfectly comfortable, and completely frozen in place.