When was the last time something took a long time and you were grateful for the delay?

The line at the DMV doesn’t count. That kind of waiting is just punishment. I mean something else. The book that resisted for three weeks before it opened even a crack. The hard conversation you walked away from without having won, head aching, and came home somehow different. Your grandmother’s recipe that only worked on the fifth try, when your hands knew the dough was right before your eyes did.

I ask because I’m suspicious of the answer. I suspect most of us have to think hard to remember. And I suspect, even more, that this forgetting is no accident.

Never have so many people tried to squeeze the most out of everything. Sleep has become a project, with goals, graphs, and a ring on your finger that grades your night. Faces have become projects. Reading has become a summary of a summary, played at double speed during the commute. Friendship has become a calendar. Even rest has its metrics now, and some people wake up tired because the app told them they slept badly, when minutes earlier they felt fine. The number arrived before the feeling, and the feeling obeyed.

There’s a trendy word for it, born in internet slang, that sticks to any noun like a hungry suffix: maxxing your sleep, maxxing your looks, maxxing your time. The word itself doesn’t interest me. What interests me is what it gives away without meaning to: the belief that life is a badly filled-in spreadsheet, and that friction is a bug waiting for a patch.

*

And then, right in the middle of all this, a piece of news appears that should go unnoticed and doesn’t.

At one of those universities the whole world watches, one of the most sought-after courses among first-year students is precisely the heaviest. A dense book every week. Written essays. Mandatory attendance. No screens in the room. Texts from three thousand years ago sharing the table with texts from the last century. And at the heart of it all is debate, live conversation between people who read the same thing and ended up in different places. A former student says classmates hold each other accountable for the reading, because whoever shows up unprepared makes the conversation poorer for everyone.

Read that last sentence again. Nobody is policing them. The students police themselves. Not for a grade. Out of respect for what happens inside that room.

A class of ninety people doesn’t prove a generational shift, and it would be dishonest of me to sell the case as prophecy. I don’t need prophecy, though. The symptom is enough. When something that demands a lot starts being wanted precisely because it demands a lot, something is moving underneath the floor.

*

Here’s what I think, and I want to think it out loud with you: maybe we never actually wanted the shortcut. We wanted what we believed was waiting on the other side of it.

The difference sounds small. It isn’t.

A shortcut promises the destination without the road. It works beautifully when you need to get to the airport. For almost everything else in life, it hides a quiet trap: in so many human things, the road doesn’t lead to the destination. The road is the destination in disguise.

Someone who learns a language by memorizing ready-made phrases gets to the restaurant and manages to order the dish. Someone who learns by stumbling, getting genders wrong, being corrected by an impatient waiter, laughing at themselves, gets to the restaurant and manages something else: they manage to be someone in that language. Both of them ate. Only one of them changed.

This is where optimization culture goes blind, because it doesn’t fit into any metric. There’s a kind of result that only happens inside the person who made the effort. It can’t be delivered. It can’t be outsourced. It can’t be downloaded. It forms in the body, in the slowness of repetition, in the discomfort of not knowing yet, like a trail through tall grass that only appears after many feet have stepped on the same spot, over and over, until the grass gives up.

The brain, if I may speak of it without asking academia’s permission, is that tall grass. It keeps poorly what was merely seen. It keeps deeply what was walked.

*

Let’s get to the debate, because that’s where things get really interesting.

Holding your ground in front of someone who read the same book and disagrees with you is an experience that’s hard to name. Your face gets hot. A small vertigo. The feeling that the floor of your certainties was made of cardboard and someone just stepped on it. And, at the same time, a strange joy, almost physical, at being taken seriously.

No machine offers that in full. It can offer counterarguments, very good ones, I know. It can even disagree with elegance. What it can’t offer is risk. There’s nobody on the other side who will remember you next week, who’ll give you a look in the hallway, who’ll bring the subject back up over coffee because what you said got under their skin. A person’s disagreement has consequences. It has a face. It has memory. It has a cost.

And it’s exactly the cost that transforms.

Notice what happens in a work meeting where everyone agrees too fast. The decision comes out in twenty minutes, everyone goes back to their desks satisfied, and three months later the project collapses because of a flaw anyone in that room could have pointed out. Nobody did, because pointing it out had a price. The embarrassment, the extra hour, the boss’s glance. The meeting was optimized. The thinking was aborted.

Now notice the opposite meeting, the one everybody hates, where someone insists, pushes back, asks the question nobody wanted to hear. It’s unpleasant, slow, exhausting. And it’s usually the only meeting of the week where something was actually thought through.

I’ve been developing people and teams for many years, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching organizations from the inside, it’s this: the companies that make people sickest aren’t only the ones that demand too much. They’re the ones that demand the wrong thing. They demand speed where they’d need friction. Consensus where they’d need honest conflict. Delivery where they’d need digestion. And then they wonder why their people seem so productive and so empty at the same time.

*

Still, I have to challenge myself here, or this piece turns into an easy hymn to suffering. And that’s not what it is.

There’s an effort that destroys. Everyone knows it. Repetitive work with no meaning, the double load of those who care for children and parents at once, the pressure that teaches nothing and only drains. Romanticizing that effort would be cruel. It would mean telling the exhausted worker to be grateful for the fatigue. They shouldn’t be.

So what’s the difference?

I have a hypothesis. The effort that destroys is the one the world extracts from you. The effort that builds is the one you offer to something that matters. From the outside, they can look identical: the same sweat, the same hours, the same furrowed brow. On the inside, they’re opposites. One empties, the other fills. One erases who you are, the other writes it.

And here’s the irony that keeps me up at night, when I let it: optimization culture aimed precisely at the effort it should have spared. It didn’t ease the work that wears us down. That’s still there, often more intense than ever, only now measured in real time. What it eliminated, or tried to, was the effort that shapes us. The kind with no immediate return. The kind nobody can demand, because nobody can measure it.

We ended up with the worst of both worlds. Tired, and unmarked.

*

There’s a scene that stays with me. A mother is helping her son with his math homework. The boy gets stuck on a problem. She sees the solution in two seconds, and her hand is already moving to show him. And then she stops. She holds the pen. She waits.

Those few seconds of waiting are among the hardest things an adult can do.

Because she knows, without being able to explain it, that if she solves it for him, the problem will be solved and the boy will stay the same. And that if she waits, if she bears the discomfort of watching her son struggle, there’s a chance something will happen inside him that no answer key can deliver: the moment his mind flips the switch on its own. That small flash on a child’s face when he discovers he can.

Her waiting, though, has an invisible condition. It works because the boy has something to try with: he learned something before, he has a notebook full of examples, he knows where to start. It works because he knows his mother is still there, that he hasn’t been left alone with the problem. And it works because getting it wrong, at that table, doesn’t turn into humiliation. Take away any one of these and the same waiting, the same seconds, the same still pen, become something else. They become abandonment. A child who is stuck, alone, and afraid of being wrong isn’t making an effort. He’s just drowning slowly.

Friction alone doesn’t shape anyone. It shapes when there’s ground beneath it. When whoever goes through it can look back and understand what happened, adjust course, try again. A debate room where disagreement turns into mockery doesn’t teach people to think; it teaches them to keep quiet. A company that throws the new hire into the middle of the fire and calls it learning is just saving itself the work of teaching. The effort that transforms depends less on the size of the difficulty and more on how we’re able to take part in it.

Every tool that promises to spare us intellectual effort is, in a sense, the hand that moves too fast. Not out of malice. Out of efficiency. And efficiency, applied in the wrong place, steals the very thing it claims to protect.

I use these tools, I appreciate them, I benefit from them every day. The question is a different one: when do you still wait? When do you still hold the pen, your own, and let the problem hurt a little before asking for help?

*

Maybe the most uncomfortable question of our time isn’t what machines can do. It’s what we still want to do, knowing they can do it.

It’s a new question in human history. For thousands of years, we did hard things because there was no alternative. Effort was the only road. Today, for a growing number of intellectual tasks, there is an alternative. And, for the first time, effort stops being an obligation and becomes a choice.

A choice that, by the way, gives you away. When you could simply ask for the summary and still decide to read the whole book, that gesture says something about you that no résumé ever would. It says there’s something you refuse to receive ready-made. Something you want to have gone through.

There was a recent case of an academic official who stepped down after his writing was flagged as machine-generated. I’m not interested in judging the episode. I’m interested in what it reveals: nobody really knows where the line is anymore. Not even the people who are supposed to draw it. And when nobody knows where the line is, each of us has to decide, on our own, where we want it to be in our own lives.

That decision isn’t technical. It’s a matter of character.

*

Back to those students in the room with no screens.

What moves me about the story isn’t the difficulty of the course. Difficulty has always existed. What moves me is the desire. They could have picked the lighter path, and many of their classmates did. They went to the room where they’d have to read, write, show up whole, and be contradicted by someone looking them in the eye.

I’ll risk a reading, with no guarantees: maybe a generation that grew up with everything within reach of a thumb has discovered, before the rest of us, that easy reach produces a strange hunger. A hunger for resistance. For something that doesn’t give way at the first touch. Like someone who’s spent their whole life walking on marble floors and one day steps onto soil and feels, with surprise, the foot sink in a little, and finds that it’s good.

Friction has a quality we tend to forget: it gives us back to ourselves. When everything glides, we get lost in the gliding. It’s at the point where something resists that we notice where we end and where the world begins. A conversation without disagreement is like walking through a dark, empty room: you never quite know how big the place is. The wall, when it appears, hurts. It also informs.

Whoever disagrees with you is, in some way, drawing your outline.

*

And what if the truth is even more uncomfortable than it looks?

What if the obsession with getting the most out of everything is, deep down, fear dressed up as ambition? Fear of not being enough. Fear of wasting something. Fear of falling behind in a race nobody knows the finish line of. Optimizing sleep, appearance, routine, the early hours of the morning. Behind every spreadsheet of existence, I suspect, lives a frightened child trying to prove they deserve to take up space.

Desired effort is something else. It isn’t born of fear. It’s born of a kind of appetite. You don’t read the difficult book to prove anything. You read it because you want to be someone who read it, who went through it, who was touched by it. The difference between the two lies in where you start from. One starts from lack. The other starts from wonder.

And wonder, unlike lack, isn’t satisfied by shortcuts. Nobody wants a shortcut to a first kiss. Nobody wants to skip the part where their child learns to walk, falls, gets up, falls again. Nobody in their right mind asks for the summary of an afternoon with someone they love.

Some things lose all meaning when they become too easy. Maybe those are precisely the ones that give meaning to all the rest.

*

I’ll end with a confession.

Writing this cost me. There were sentences that came back five times. There was an idea I loved and had to abandon because it didn’t hold up. There was an entire hour staring out the window with nothing happening, and it was after that hour that the image of the mother holding the pen arrived.

I could have skipped that hour.

I’m not sure what I’d be if I had. I know I’d be less of what I am now, as you reach the end of these lines and maybe remember something that took you a long time. Something that resisted. Something that, somehow, is still in there, because it cost you.

Now look at the week ahead of you.

What in it do you still allow to be difficult?

Starting point: column “O desejo pelo esforço” (The desire for effort), ICL Notícias, 11/07/2026.

If this piece stirred something in you, hundreds of other reflections on human and organizational cognitive-behavioral development and on healthy human relationships are waiting on the blog. Visit marcellodesouza.com.br and keep the conversation going.

#valueofeffort #friction #criticalthinking #debate #learning #optimization #artificialintelligence #humandevelopment #organizationalbehavior #education #marcellodesouza #marcellodesouzaoficial #coachingevoce

Marcello de Souza | Coaching & Você

marcellodesouza.com.br

© All rights reserved