Don’t Rawdog Your Life — Why Discomfort Is Not Automatically Growth
The same generation rediscovering vinyl records, film cameras, handwritten notes and phones that do little more than make calls is also deliberately putting inconvenience back into life.
People are deleting shopping apps so buying something requires more thought. They are walking rather than ordering a car, listening to an album from beginning to end and choosing hobbies that involve their hands. The emerging label is friction-maxxing: intentionally making parts of life less seamless to recover patience, presence, competence or meaning.
There is something useful here.
But the internet has an extraordinary ability to take one intelligent idea, remove all discernment and turn it into an endurance competition.
Hence the long-haul-flight “rawdoggers”: no film, no music, no book, sometimes no food or water— just a man staring at the flight map for seven hours as though hydration were a moral weakness.
So, let’s get our geek on.
Hormesis versus entropy
In physics, entropy is not simply “mess.” It describes, among other things, how energy disperses and how many microscopic arrangements can produce the same visible state. In an isolated system, entropy tends to increase over time.
As a life metaphor, entropy is useful because unattended systems drift.
The inbox grows. The cupboard fills. The body deconditions. The temporary workaround becomes company policy. The relationship full of unspoken resentments gets harder to repair. The little pain you keep ignoring starts shaping how you move.
Maintaining useful order requires energy.
Hormesis, however, is a dose-dependent adaptive response. A small or moderate challenge may stimulate adaptation; a larger, sustained or badly timed dose can inhibit function or cause harm. The curve matters. The dose matters. Your baseline matters. Recovery matters.
Why does this matter in your life?
Because not everyone needs to rawdog their way through a flight, refusing water and movement to prove absolutely nothing. Sitting quietly without entertainment may be a useful boredom exercise. Prolonged immobility on long-distance travel is a recognised blood-clot risk, while staying hydrated is reasonable even though hydration itself has not been proved to prevent travel-related clots.
Do not confuse surviving a stupid decision with becoming stronger.
Not all hard things are good.
Not all easy things are bad.
And discomfort is not evidence that growth is occurring.
What friction-maxxing gets right
Modern ease can weaken selected capacities.
I have watched clients become so used to AI that they hesitate to write a basic email without consulting it. Some no longer know how to reply to an ordinary chat message without asking a machine to make them sound warm, professional, funny and emotionally calibrated.
AI is not the villain. It can provide scaffolding, examples, feedback and extraordinary leverage. The risk comes when it replaces the cognitive process instead of supporting it. Reviews of generative AI research describe this dual effect: used actively, it can aid thinking; used as a quick-answer substitute, it can encourage automation bias, overreliance and shallow engagement.
The principle is simple: What you repeatedly outsource, you may stop rehearsing. What you use as feedback, you may learn faster.
The same applies to boredom.
Every empty moment now seems to require a snack. Sometimes potato chips. Sometimes reels. Both are immediate, highly stimulating and conveniently packaged so you never need to experience the awkward few minutes before your own thoughts arrive.
We have also friction-proofed awkward conversations, waiting, navigation, uncertainty, manual skills and the ordinary discomfort of not immediately knowing.
Useful friction might mean:
- drafting the first version before asking AI to improve it;
- sitting through ten minutes of boredom without feeding it;
- making the phone call instead of sending six increasingly ambiguous messages;
- walking a short journey;
- learning how the underlying system works before automating it;
- performing a basic calculation before trusting the dashboard;
- allowing someone to take time to reply without catastrophising;
- creating something imperfectly with your own hands.
The question is not: How can I make life harder?
It is: Which capacities do I refuse to let convenience atrophy?
Three states that look similar from the outside
A person resting on the sofa may be avoiding life — or recovering intelligently.
A person training hard may be developing capacity — or running themselves into injury.
A person working late may be completing a meaningful surge — or borrowing heavily from tomorrow.
You need to distinguish three states.
1. Protective Rest
Your body is depleted, sick, injured, hormonally strained or overstimulated. Lowering demand protects future capacity.
Protective rest is not weakness. It is sometimes the most disciplined response available.
2. Useful Challenge
The demand is specific, bounded and recoverable.
It may be uncomfortable, but after recovery you become more capable. The same task gradually gets easier. Your baseline expands.
3. Destructive Strain
The demand exceeds your accessible fuel, support or recovery.
You may still produce. High performers often can. But the performance is funded by adrenaline, fear, guilt or borrowed energy — and followed by a delayed crash.
Your baseline does not expand. It slowly deteriorates.
Ask:
- Did I return to baseline?
- How long did recovery take?
- Did the same challenge become more manageable?
- Am I building capacity or merely demonstrating that I can override myself again?
- Is my body adapting — or keeping receipts?
Muscles are not built by suffering indiscriminately
We often say: Muscles are broken in the gym, fed in the kitchen and grown during rest.
The truth is slightly more sophisticated. Resistance training challenges muscle; nutrition and recovery support repair and adaptation. Muscle damage is not a reliable proxy for muscle growth, and training to complete failure is not required to increase strength or size.
A cleaner version is: Muscles are challenged in the gym, fed in the kitchen and built during recovery.
And not everything that hurts grows muscle.
Sometimes you are simply getting injured.
Protract that into life.
A difficult conversation may build courage. Living in perpetual relational warfare does not.
A controlled deadline may sharpen execution. Chronic urgency destroys judgement.
A demanding season may expand leadership capacity. A permanently chaotic workplace merely trains hypervigilance.
A little uncertainty may build tolerance. Years of needless ambiguity from someone who refuses to communicate simply drain you.
Harder is not automatically better.
Ease is part of habit architecture
Ease has become oddly shameful.
People think that if they need to design an environment that supports a habit, the habit does not count. They want to prove they possess enough willpower to overcome an inconvenient home, a draining commute, an impossible schedule and their own neurobiology every day.
As someone with ADHD, my kettlebells sit beside my desk. My gym is downstairs. I have very few credit cards. My investments are automated.
Friends think I am nuts when I pass on a free gift, another financial account or even the possibility of a return above 15 per cent because I do not want the extra cognitive clutter.
I am not rejecting opportunity.
I am asking whether that opportunity will make my head less easeful, create more administrative tabs and quietly demand attention for years.
Research on health-habit formation supports the role of repetition, stable contexts, implementation plans, enjoyment and environmental support. Habit formation varies enormously between people; the point of good architecture is to make repetition less dependent on daily motivation.
So put the medication where you see it.
Lay out the training clothes.
Use the beautiful water bottle.
Keep nourishing food convenient.
Automate savings.
Move the distracting app off the home screen.
Choose the gym you will actually enter, not the impressive one requiring a heroic commute.
Wear the supportive shoes.
Feng shui, interior architecture, environmental psychology, sensory design and choice architecture come from different traditions, but they all begin with a related question: How is the environment shaping the person inside it?
Why would you deliberately live or work somewhere that gives you a headache, strains your senses and depletes your battery — then call the daily battle discipline?
If ease helps you repeat what is good for you, ease is part of the training.
The Friction Audit
Before deliberately making anything harder, divide your life into four categories.
Make easier
What do you want to compound? Perhaps:
- strength training;
- nutritious meals;
- saving and investing;
- deep work;
- sleep;
- taking medication;
- contacting people you love;
- closing administrative loops;
- practising a craft.
Reduce the friction around these.
Make harder
What reliably harms you? Perhaps:
- impulsive purchases;
- doomscrolling;
- contacting someone who destabilises you;
- accepting meetings without agendas;
- eating purely from agitation;
- saying yes automatically.
Add a pause, a password, a physical barrier or a clean rule.
Practise tolerating
Which discomfort produces a capacity you genuinely need? Perhaps:
- receiving feedback;
- waiting for results;
- saying no;
- progressive physical training;
- allowing someone to be disappointed;
- having a dignified difficult conversation;
- starting before you feel perfectly ready.
Dose it. Practise it. Recover. Repeat.
Stop tolerating
Which strain is shrinking your baseline? Perhaps:
- chronic sleep deprivation;
- recurring disrespect;
- untreated pain;
- preventable sensory overload;
- chaotic collaborators;
- endless ambiguity;
- relationships in which you are always rescuing, repairing and chasing.
Then look at three time windows:
- Short term: What does this cost or give me today?
- Medium term: What habit or identity is this rehearsing?
- Long term: What will this compound into over five, ten or thirty years?
The intelligent life is not frictionless.
Nor is it friction-maximal.
It is selectively difficult.
Continued in Part II: Build Strength, Not Strain—What to Remove, Train and Stop Tolerating.
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