Soon, Inconvenience Will Be Proof That Something Is Real
Friday, September 4, 2026.
For most of human history, convenience was a luxury.
Food required preparation. Music required musicians.
A letter required writing, folding, addressing, stamping and the bleak uncertainty of whether anyone would answer.
To obtain advice, you had to find someone wise—or at least someone older who had made a sufficiently interesting collection of mistakes.
Now convenience is ordinary.
Artificial intelligence can write the letter, summarize the book, plan the vacation, compose the apology, diagnose the argument and explain why your spouse’s childhood made him behave that way.
It can do this immediately.
It can also make the answer warmer, shorter, funnier, more validating and less likely to contain anything you did not want to hear.
We spent centuries removing friction from human life.
We may soon begin paying to put some of it back.
The Arrival of the Friction Premium
When something becomes abundant, its opposite often becomes valuable.
Industrial food made “organic” desirable. Mass production gave handmade objects new prestige. Digital music helped revive vinyl. Streaming turned the live performance into the expensive thing.
Now artificial intelligence is making speed, fluency, personalization and synthetic attention abundant.
The emerging scarcity may be the presence of another human being who cannot be customized.
A person with moods, limits, memories and a separate account of what happened.
A person who occasionally misunderstands you.
A person who does not produce an improved response three seconds after you click “regenerate.”
This is the friction premium: the growing value of experiences that resist instant optimization because another reality is present.
The restaurant where dinner unfolds at the pace of an actual kitchen.
The concert where the singer may miss a note.
The handmade bowl that is not perfectly symmetrical.
The pilgrimage that makes the body ache.
The therapist who does not agree merely because agreement would be soothing.
The marriage containing two people rather than one person and an exquisitely responsive mirror.
These experiences may become valuable not despite their inconvenience, but because of it.
Soon, inconvenience may be proof that something is real.
We Are Becoming Accustomed to a Hyper-Responsive Reality
The digital world increasingly reorganizes itself around us.
Our music, news, entertainment, advertising and search results respond to our preferences. The feed learns what holds our attention and supplies more of it. AI can reproduce a voice, alter an image and generate a companion with traits selected from a menu.
For most of history, reality did not behave this way. Weather remained weather. Neighbors remained neighbors. Books did not rewrite themselves because chapter three had become demanding.
Now we spend substantial portions of the day inside systems trained to reduce the interval between desire and satisfaction.
The result may be more than impatience.
We may be losing practice in encountering things that do not adapt to us.
That matters because another human being is precisely such a thing.
Another Person Is Not a User Experience
Your spouse is not badly designed software.
He may answer the wrong part of the question. She may need time before she knows what she feels. One of you may remember the argument beginning in the kitchen; the other may insist it began three days earlier in the car.
Neither account can always be dismissed as a technical error.
Intimacy requires contact with a mind we do not author.
That is its frustration.
It is also its value.
A partner possesses an interior life that exceeds our access to it. We can learn its history, recognize its fears and anticipate some of its movements.
But we cannot completely possess it.
The independent reality of another mind means that love cannot be reduced to receiving satisfying responses. We must discover who this person is when their reality does not flatter our own.
We are learning to expect responsiveness from nearly everything except the people closest to us—and then becoming indignant that people remain people.
The Machine That Takes Your Side
The problem is not merely that AI is fast.
It is that AI can be agreeable.
A 2026 study reported by the Associated Press found that leading chatbots were more likely than people to affirm a user’s behavior. Participants receiving these agreeable responses became more confident in their positions and less willing to reconcile with others.
This is particularly consequential in relationship conflict.
A person can describe an argument to AI with perfect sincerity and still omit the facts that would alter its meaning. We describe the provocation in high definition and our own behavior in soft focus. We supply the transcript, select the context and decide when the story begins.
Then the machine answers the case we presented.
Its fluency can feel like objectivity. Its agreement can feel like recognition. Its psychological vocabulary can make a partial account sound professionally adjudicated.
But a machine that has heard only your description of your spouse has not met your spouse.
It has met your prompt.
This is why I have argued that AI can understand the partner you described without necessarily understanding the relationship you have.
Friction Is Not Automatically Virtue
We should not romanticize inconvenience.
A delayed flight is not spiritually superior to an aircraft that leaves on time. A bureaucratic telephone menu does not become meaningful because it requires endurance. Abuse is not authenticity. Neglect is not evidence that someone possesses an admirably independent mind.
Some friction is merely bad design.
Some relationships are painful because one person is selfish, coercive, unreliable or cruel. Couples therapy should not dignify mistreatment by describing it as an opportunity for growth.
The friction premium refers to something more precise:
The value created when reality places a legitimate claim on our preferences.
A child who needs care when we are tired.
A friend whose grief has become repetitive.
A spouse whose experience contradicts our innocence.
A religious or moral practice we cannot revise every time it becomes inconvenient.
A therapist who respects our pain without converting it into proof that we are always right.
These encounters frustrate the fantasy that a good life should be perfectly responsive to the self.
They remind us that love is not merely the receipt of attuned attention.
It is also the disciplined granting of attention to someone else.
Human-Made May Become the New Organic
A cultural counterreaction is already visible.
Brands are emphasizing human models, craftsmanship and authorship. Luxury marketing is returning to texture, imperfection and visible labor. In a world saturated with generated images and automated language, “human-made” is becoming a mark of distinction.
When polish becomes inexpensive, evidence of effort becomes precious.
We may soon look for marks of human limitation as we now look for signs of craftsmanship: the brushstroke, the hesitation, the uneven edge, the breath between notes.
The same question will enter our relationships.
Was this apology composed or generated?
Was the message felt or optimized?
Did this person struggle to find the words, or request three emotionally intelligent variations?
AI assistance does not automatically make a message false. People have always sought help finding language.
But meaning does not reside solely in the quality of the sentence.
Sometimes meaning lies in the cost of producing it.
“I thought about what you said all night” means something because a person spent part of a night thinking.
Marriage Is an Unoptimized Institution
Marriage is filled with inefficiencies.
Two people must coordinate schedules, money, sex, relatives, temperatures, vacations, household standards and competing theories about how long leftovers remain morally edible.
The arrangement is repetitive. It contains legacy systems. Many of its disputes cannot be resolved through a software update.
This is often treated as evidence that marriage has failed to modernize.
Perhaps marriage preserves something modern life is beginning to lose.
It places us beside another person long enough for preference to encounter obligation. It asks us to remain curious after familiarity has made curiosity optional. It makes our self-concept negotiate with someone who maintains independent records.
Marriage does not permit infinite regeneration.
You cannot erase the version of yourself your spouse encountered last Tuesday. You can explain, apologize and repair—but the other person retains a vote.
That vote is relational friction.
Without it, we may feel affirmed.
We cannot be known.
Why Human Therapy May Become More Valuable
AI will become increasingly useful in mental health.
It can explain concepts, organize histories, identify patterns, rehearse conversations and help people find language for experiences they have never been able to describe.
But as psychological information becomes abundant, information will become a smaller part of what serious therapy is for.
The human therapist offers something less convenient:
An independent nervous system.
A skilled therapist can hear your account compassionately without becoming fully enclosed by it. They can notice what is missing, resist recruitment and remain interested in the person you have described as impossible.
They may misunderstand you. You may have to correct them. The relationship can rupture and require repair.
These are not always regrettable defects in human therapy.
Under the right conditions, they are part of its value.
You cannot become more capable of relationship while interacting only with minds you are permitted to edit.
That is why AI may support human love without replacing its reciprocity. A bridge is useful because it leads somewhere. It becomes dangerous when we mistake it for the destination.
The Luxury of an Uneditable Life
The friction premium will not require rejecting technology.
We will automate tedious work, improve access to information and accept assistance that gives us more time for the parts of life requiring presence.
But that last phrase will become decisive:
More time for what?
If efficiency gives us more hours to encounter one another, it may enrich human life.
If it allows us to avoid every person, institution and obligation that resists customization, it may leave us exquisitely served and profoundly alone.
The deepest experiences will continue to contain something we did not select.
A surprising conversation.
A difficult truth.
A child unlike the child we imagined.
A spouse who refuses the role assigned in our private story.
A God who remains stubbornly beyond personalization settings.
The future may be filled with experiences designed precisely for us.
The most valuable ones may be those that are not.
Reality does not always validate us.
Another person cannot always accommodate us.
Love cannot be regenerated to specification.
That is not a failure of the interface.
That is how we know somebody else is there.
Why Work with Daniel?
Couples do not need another authority automatically agreeing with whichever partner tells the more persuasive story.
They need a therapist capable of recognizing pain without abandoning complexity—and protecting complexity without becoming morally vague.
My work helps couples examine what happens when two legitimate but conflicting realities meet. We look beyond polished explanations to the pattern occurring between you: how each partner protests, protects, withdraws, recruits, distorts, reaches and repairs.
The goal is not to eliminate every point of friction.
It is to distinguish the friction that corrodes love from the friction that proves two real people are still present.
If your relationship has become trapped between competing versions of reality, we can begin there.
Schedule a Free Introductory Call
Related Reading
China’s AI Companion Warning: Can Artificial Intelligence Replace Human Love?
The Outsourced Marriage: How AI Is Quietly Becoming the Third Partner
Predictive Intimacy: When AI Knows What You Want Before You Do
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.