The CEO of an AI music platform recently announced, with unmistakable pride, that his software democratises music creation. You type a prompt. The song appears. No instruments required. No years of practice. No late nights in a studio agonising over whether the compression on the kick drum is right. Music, instant and effortless, for everyone.
I've spent a significant time in recording studios. I know what it takes to learn how a compressor works, not conceptually, but physically, twiddling knobs and training the ears, spending hundreds of hours getting it wrong before getting it right. I know the satisfaction of a mix that finally sits correctly, when every element is in its right place and the whole thing breathes the way you intended. That satisfaction is rightfully earned.
When I heard about this CEO's announcement, I didn't feel threatened. I felt sadness. AI music and other quick ways to achieve something are missing the point entirely.
What the science says about effort
Psychologists have a name for what I'm describing. The IKEA Effect, documented by researchers Norton, Mochon, and Ariely at Harvard, Yale, and Duke, demonstrates that people value things they have invested effort in creating significantly more than identical things that were handed to them.
Participants in their studies were willing to pay 63% more for furniture they had assembled themselves than for pre-built versions of the same piece. The quality was identical. The effort was the difference.
This is not a quirk of consumer psychology. It runs deeper. Research published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that effort increases learning rates and reinforces positive outcomes in the brain, greater effort literally changes how the brain processes and remembers a reward. A separate study in ScienceDirect confirmed that exerting effort increases the sense of meaningfulness in a task, independently of the outcome's quality.
The researchers describe it as the "Effort Paradox", effort is simultaneously costly and valued. We avoid effort when we can as we are experts in efficiency, but we are often poorer for avoiding it.
The science is telling us what many of us already know intuitively: the struggle is not the price you pay for the reward. The struggle is a big part of the reward itself. Remove it, and you don't get the same thing more conveniently. You get something fundamentally different, and less.
Two turntables and the truth about shortcuts
I learned to DJ on vinyl way before digital music ever existed. If you've never tried it, the learning curve is unforgiving. Beatmatching by ear. Reading the grooves to find your cue point. The physical relationship between your hand and the platter, developing the muscle memory to hold a record in place against a spinning motor while you wait for the exact moment to release it. Watching time run out as you desperately try and cue up the next record before the current one ends. You develop an ear. A feel. An instinct built from thousands of hours of practice and it sometimes going horribly wrong in front of people and desperately having to recover.
I left vinyl for years, moved to a Pioneer controller a couple of years ago, and came back to vinyl record mixing recently. What struck me was how much harder it is than I remembered, and how much more frustrating and satisfying it is for exactly that reason.
Even with all the musical experience I've accumulated, vinyl demands something of you every single time. It doesn't forgive inattention. It rewards presence. It’s something like the difference between driving a classic rear engined Porsche 911 without all the modern day electronics and a modern day one.
The classic model requires way more skill and attention, don’t pay attention, you might end up in a ditch! Get it right and it's a joy for the senses beyond words. The latest models are easier to drive and way more forgiving.
I don't think this is purely nostalgia for me. I think this is a meaningful distinction that we are in danger of losing entirely.
The broader problem with making things easy and friction free
Music, DJing and cars are just a few examples I know from my own personal experience. The same dynamic is playing out across almost every field where skill and technology intersect.
The smartphone has democratised photography, we take more photos than ever before, yet the considered eye that comes from understanding light, composition, and the technical relationship between aperture and shutter speed is rarer, not more common. Why cook when you can use an app to get food delivered, why take the time to make a pasta sauce from scratch when you can heat up a supermarket pasta sauce that's ready in minutes with zero effort required.
The pattern is consistent. Convenience removes friction. Friction, it turns out, was in fact providing something important and meaningful all along.
What are we actually losing?
Our perceived self-efficacy, our belief in our own ability to do things, to learn, to improve, is one of the most significant determinants of mental health and resilience. Research consistently shows that people with high self-efficacy cope better with setbacks, recover more quickly from failure, and experience more intrinsic motivation: the kind that comes from finding something genuinely satisfying rather than merely rewarding.
Self-efficacy is built through the experience of difficulty overcome. Not difficulty avoided. Not difficulty automated away. Overcome.
When we remove the effort from the learning, when we give people the output without the process, we are not being generous. We are depriving them of the experience through which genuine confidence and capability are built. The CEO democratising music creation is not giving people the ability to make music. He is in fact devaluing the whole music making process and robbing people of what is ultimately the most joyful part.
The person who spent years learning to make or mix records knows something the person who typed a prompt does not know. Not just about music. About themselves. About what they are capable of when they stay with something difficult long enough for it to become something they can truly be proud of.
What this has to do with how we make things?
I think about this when I'm working on Global Circler.
The easy path in fashion is clear enough. Source the cheapest blank that passes as acceptable. Apply a brand. Move volume. The entire fast fashion industrial complex is built on this logic, the removal of effort, the elimination of friction, the shortcut to something that looks like the thing without being the thing.
The collar construction I specify requires more skill and more time than a standard rib collar. The fabric weight I insist on costs more. The fit requires genuine pattern-making expertise rather than adjustment of an existing block. None of these choices make the process easier. All of them make the result better, not just in quality, but in meaning. In the sense that something was made properly rather than made acceptably.
In designing our Essential GC Tee, a huge amount of time and effort is going into making the best t-shirt we can, not the cheapest t-shirt we can. Every detail is obsessed over until it feels right. We want to push the limits of the t-shirt to see what can be done.
I am not interested in the shortcut. Not because I am a purist, or a romantic, or a person who thinks difficulty is inherently virtuous. But because I have spent enough time on both sides of the effort equation to know, with certainty, that the thing made thoughtfully and with effort is wildly different from the thing made cheaply and conveniently.
We are rapidly building a world in which the prompt replaces the practice, the algorithm replaces the ear, the shortcut replaces the skill. The things produced are sometimes impressive. The people producing them are not developing what their predecessors developed by doing it the hard way.
I am not sure we have thought carefully enough about what we are trading away.
The CEO of the AI music platform is proud that anyone can now make a song without learning anything. I keep thinking about what the learning was actually for, what it built in the people who did it, what it gave me and what happens to the generation that skips it entirely.
Something worth pausing and thinking about as AI grows in influence.
The satisfaction of effort is not a side effect of achievement. According to the science, it is constitutive of it. Take away the effort and you don't get the same satisfaction more efficiently. You get something that resembles it from the outside and is hollow in the place where the meaning should be.
Some things are worth the difficulty. Most of the things worth doing are exactly those things.
Global Circler makes premium clothing for people who move through the world with curiosity, intention, and an appreciation for beautiful things that endure.