A few days ago I sat in a room full of young entrepreneurs pitching to investors. There is something particular about that kind of room. The energy is unmistakable. Young men and women, glow in their eyes, a certain purposefulness in the way they walk in and set up. They believe in what they are building. That belief is visible before they say a word.
I was there as an observer and commentator, sitting with the investors rather than the founders.
Every single pitch opened the same way. The problem they were solving was described as friction. Removing it was the solution. The word appeared so many times it stopped meaning anything by the third presentation.
That is when I started wondering whether we have overextended the metaphor. Removing friction makes complete sense in product design. Fewer steps. Less resistance. Smoother experience. But the language has migrated into places it was never meant to go. A difficult conversation is not a poorly designed interface. The friction is not the bug. It is frequently the feature.
But friction is how things move. A tyre without grip does not go faster. It just slides. The resistance is not the obstacle. The resistance is what makes progress possible.
What fifteen years of relationship advice actually shows
Millions of people take their most difficult relationship problems to the internet. Not to friends, not to family. To strangers. On a platform called Reddit, one section dedicated to relationship advice has been collecting those questions and answers for fifteen years. This tweet explains it well.
In 2010, one in three people who posted about a struggling relationship were told: leave. By 2025, nearly one in two were told the same thing.
That is a lot of people. Over fifteen years. All moving in the same direction.
The advice of earlier generations — work on it, talk it through, find a middle ground, give it time — was given less and less. Every year. Without anyone noticing.
This wasn’t deliberate or co-ordinted. Three things have made it easier in today’s times.
Western psychology gave people a vocabulary for exit that felt responsible. Boundaries, emotional safety, knowing your worth. Useful concepts, carefully applied. At Reddit scale, applied to everything equally, friction got reclassified as harm. And once friction is harm, removing it feels like health.
The algorithm did the rest. On Reddit, the most popular answers rise to the top. Leave is a clear, confident answer. It gets voted up. This relationship is complicated but worth working through is not. It gets ignored. After fifteen years of that, the advice that survived was not the wisest. It was the most decisive.
And now there is a third force. A recent study from Oxford and Stanford found that people who regularly used sycophantic AI, the kind that validates and agrees, began reporting lower satisfaction with their real human relationships. Not because those relationships had worsened. Because the standard had shifted. Frictionless understanding, delivered reliably by a machine, had quietly raised the bar against which the friction of real conversation was being measured.
Together, these three forces are making exit feel not just acceptable, but mature. Leaving, nowadays, is about knowing your worth. The difficult conversation is no longer necessary. It is becoming optional, then unusual, then quietly brave.
The professional version looks more respectable. It works the same way
The coaching referral that arrives before the manager has actually tried. The offsite that resets the culture without naming what broke it. The strategy review that sidesteps the conversation about why the last strategy quietly died.
Psychometric tools have the same appeal. A report, a score, a set of acronyms that explains the person across the table. Useful when they open a conversation. Dangerous when they close one. The report arrives and the uncertainty lifts. That is not knowledge. That is the feeling of knowledge.
The tolerance for sitting inside an unresolved conversation is declining. ‘Cleaner’ options are more available. A restructure instead of a conversation. A resignation instead of a reckoning. An app instead of an argument.
When everything is frictionless, nothing really grips.
What friction actually builds
Friction builds something that cannot be shortcut. The manager who sits inside a difficult conversation comes out knowing more about the person across the table, more about themselves, and more about what the team can hold. That knowledge does not come from the offsite or the report. It comes from the struggle.
You do not become a leader by avoiding difficult conversations. You become a leader by learning to have them. Not in a workshop. In the room, with the discomfort, and the other person not saying what you expected.
The relief of outsourcing is real. So is the cost.
What remains unresolved
What I have not resolved is whether this is loss or adaptation. Whether the declining appetite for difficult conversations reflects a culture that has forgotten what friction is for, or one that has honestly recalibrated what it believes it owes. Both readings are possible. Neither fully satisfies.
I am not saying stay in a relationship that is genuinely broken. Sometimes leaving is exactly right. But there is a lot of territory between a broken relationship and one that requires working through. And we have stopped exploring it.
Manu Prasad, writing about the decline of shared culture and the rise of hyper-individualised life, put it precisely: “We made an enemy of friction and in eliminating it without mercy, also took away what was holding us together.” He was writing about civilisation. The Reddit data suggests the same thing is happening inside our closest relationships. The Oxford and Stanford research suggests AI is now accelerating it.
Friction gives meaning to movement. Without it, energy is expended but nothing is changed. You arrive somewhere, but the journey has not altered you. The difficult conversation is hard not despite its importance but because of it. The effort is the point.