Embrace Mental Effort

David Brooks argues that the people most likely to thrive in the age of AI are those who have a high need for cognition and enjoy mental effort. I don’t know whether he’ll be right, but I share his view on agency. For the things I care about, I find it more rewarding to put in the effort, do the work, and create something within my abilities. I’ve learned to like the things I value, and in most cases to see discomfort and stress as positive catalysts for growth. I like his idea of a hero’s journey. It doesn’t have to be grand, just something we think is worth striving for that helps us grow in the process.

Excerpts:

…what will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort. Right now, some people have what psychologists call a high need for cognition. They enjoy thinking hard. These are the people who enjoy playing difficult games and reading dense books. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the cognitive misers, the people who find it unpleasant to think hard and take any opportunity not to do it. In the middle are the people who have a medium need for cognition. They will put in the effort when they really care about something, but they don’t intrinsically enjoy it. Need for cognition correlates with intelligence but is not the same thing. We all know a lot of really smart people who don’t like to work hard…

God seems to have been a puritan. He created us to be the kind of creatures who don’t experience gain without some pain, don’t gain reward without some effort. That’s as true in the world of knowledge work as it is in the world of bodybuilding. Humans learn best when they are in the zone of optimal difficulty, when engaged in tasks that are not so hard as to be overwhelming but not so easy as to require no work…

At first, AI sucks you in. You really do become more productive when using it. But then it threatens to hollow you out, as you become less capable and less knowledgeable. The saddest cases are people who get used to the AI crutch for a bit and then have it taken away…

People with a cultivation mindset seek friction; people with an optimization mindset want their life to be frictionless. Modern technology wants to turn you from a mental muscle builder into a mental couch potato…

The crucial task before us is to cultivate people’s desire to seek out cognitive complexity. Not to go all Joseph Campbell on you, but the essential challenge is: How do we train people to see their life as a hero’s journey in which they take on difficult missions that they may fail at and that will certainly involve pain and suffering? How do we form people so they have an explorer’s heart, a willingness to endure, an ability to struggle on, even when their body and mind are telling them to give up, to reach new destinations and figure stuff out?…

Life is a pilgrimage, a journey—it’s going somewhere, growing from experience, expanding yourself, reaching for some possibility that you do not yet possess. The defining human features therefore are propulsions—the drives that push us to take on mental effort and overcome difficulty—and aspirations: knowing where you want to go, what purpose you serve, what kind of person you’d like to be…

If we can help people learn to want more, hunger more, they’ll be willing to undertake the mental effort to do hard things, and we’ll avoid the cognitive polarization that is staring us in the face. If we can educate people to be clear and wholehearted about what they truly love, then AI will do the calculating and the synthesizing, but humans will still define what matters, what is worth exploring, what missions we go on, and where we end up. That would produce a bot-filled society in which human dignity is preserved, and perhaps even enhanced.