Years ago, in a science fiction senior seminar, my students and I were studying Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. We had reached that pivotal moment where John the Savage delivers his famous rejection of artificial comfort: “But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” The passage never failed to provoke intense discussion, but that year, the conversation took an unexpected turn.
In discussing soma — the government-issued happiness pill — my students began drawing unsettling parallels to their own lives.
“But isn’t that exactly what we’re doing now?” Sarah’s hand shot up, her copy bristling with Post-it notes. “We’re not taking soma, sure, but every time we’re uncomfortable, we reach for our phones. Every time something’s hard, we Google it.”
Sustaining Insights
The class fell into that kind of silence that happens when seventeen-year-olds realize they’ve stumbled upon an uncomfortable truth. Another student — let’s call him Marcus — added, “At least the people in the book knew they were being controlled.” The class laughed, but it wasn’t their usual laughter. It had an edge to it, a recognition that perhaps they weren’t as immune to technological pacification as they’d like to believe.
That conversation reverberates with immediacy now. Last month, when I surveyed my middle school girls about artificial intelligence, their responses echoed those earlier insights. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell what the AI wrote and what the human wrote,” a student observed. Another worried that while AI “won’t ever replace human curiosity,” it might reshape their future profoundly. Even our youngest children sensed the stakes: “I’m worried it might take over our brain,” a fifth-grader confided, unknowingly echoing Huxley’s warnings.
The Efficiency Paradox
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting we unplug our routers and return to card catalogs. As co-chair of our school’s AI Task Force, I’m fascinated by AI’s potential to bring equity and innovation to education. I’m also generally camped with the techno-optimists.
But lately I’ve been wrestling with a paradox: Could our well-intentioned efforts to make learning more efficient be undermining the very cognitive muscles our children need to develop?
Neuroscientists tell us something counterintuitive: Struggle isn’t just an unfortunate side effect of learning; it’s a critical ingredient. Jonathan Haidt describes childhood as “an extended cultural apprenticeship” where play and risk-taking build essential developmental tools. Children need to fail — often — in environments where failure isn’t catastrophic. They need to feel the weight of challenge, experience the frustration of setbacks, and discover the dopamine-fueled satisfaction of hard-won victory.
But here we are, in 2025, armed with an arsenal of digital tools promising to eliminate nearly every cognitive obstacle. Need help with that history essay? There’s an AI for that. Stuck on a physics problem? Another AI stands ready to break it down into digestible fragments. Can’t conjure the perfect college-application opener? AI writing assistants await your command.
Our students grasp this dilemma with striking clarity. One seventh-grader captured it perfectly: “It’s like having to choose between walking and driving. Sure, a car is faster, but maybe our brains need the exercise of figuring things out on our own.”
The metaphor is apt. Research shows that neural pathways, when unused, begin to weaken and wither. It’s a phenomenon that’s becoming increasingly relevant as we witness what experts term “cognitive bleed” — the fluid integration of human thinking with digitally constructed neural networks. Like muscles that weaken without resistance training, our mental capabilities may diminish without the productive struggle of genuine problem-solving.
The Friction of Learning
We’re sleepwalking into this new reality, accepting each small erosion of intellectual effort in exchange for convenience. Each step seems harmless. Who wouldn’t want to make learning more efficient? But as Marc Watkins, a columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Education, observes, “Learning is friction. Using AI in learning cannot be so lightning-quick that a user doesn’t bother to examine the output or take ownership of it.”
The parallel to Brave New World is stark. Huxley’s soma offered “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.” Replace “soma” with “AI” and “happiness” with “effortless achievement,” and the comparison becomes uncomfortably apt. Today’s bots don’t just solve problems — they create immersive realities of effortless accomplishment.
What fuels my midnight ruminations is this: The systematic elimination of constructive struggle is partly to blame for our youth mental health crisis. The very tools we’ve created to support our children are preventing them from developing the resilience they need.
Navigating at a Crossroads
At our school, we’re responding by creating what I call “productive friction zones” — spaces where students can struggle safely, fail constructively, and build those essential coping muscles. Sometimes this means carving out “AI-free spaces” for certain assignments, not because we’re Luddites, but because we understand the value of cognitive heavy lifting.
A former student once wrote: “What’s the scariest is not that they’re forced to take soma — it’s that they want to.” Bingo. The most insidious aspect of our digital world isn’t coercion but seduction. AI tools don’t twist arms; they bat eyelashes, promising frictionless achievement with a siren song that makes the harder path seem downright irrational.
So here we are, at the crossroads of convenience and capability. Our children will inherit a world where machines handle the mundane, but humans must still master the meaningful. The skills that matter most? Tackling thorny problems, embracing uncertainty, and maintaining fierce curiosity when answers are just a prompt away. These aren’t just nice-to-haves — they’re the secret handshake of future success.
And perhaps that seventh-grader with the walking-versus-driving metaphor was onto something profound. Mental calluses form from rough terrain, not smooth highways. Or as another student put it with devastating clarity: “The opposite of happiness isn’t sadness — it’s growth.”
