It’s 12:30 PM; you finally escape that meeting they keep booking during your lunch, and your GLP-1-tolerated stomach starts grumbling. But you didn’t meal prep on Sunday, and the emails and Slack messages have started piling. No one respects your “lunch”, and neither do you, because you and over forty-two million other people this month are about to do the “what do I want to eat” dance. A dance so familiar you practically sleepwalk the moves with your credit card out.

For me, it started with a “free perk” on my credit card. Free, huh?

The Brothers Grimm tried to warn us with “Hansel and Gretel,” where the witch lured the kids with a house made of candy. Yet they don’t even bother with a witch; they know you’ll walk into that house because everyone else already did.

Slow creep

In Hansel and Gretel, the danger was obvious to the reader: the cage the Witch locked Hansel in, the oven she wanted Gretel to step inside of, the witch herself, old with red eyes… the same color my eyes glowed when I opened the app for the first time.

It came gift-wrapped to me as an annual subscription with a click of a button from my credit card dashboard. It didn’t feel like walking into a witch house. But with every purchase, I also stepped into the cage myself, setting up each bar, one by one, like a breadcrumb trail that became my credit card transaction history.

The first doses felt like I was getting away with something, the deals were good, the convenience, obvious as the food arrived at my door with a few taps of my screen. But slowly the deals evaporated, the fees increased, and my habit was already formed; I got comfortable. The sugar glass window from the witch’s house dissolved into the IV, the morphine kicked in, and I was hooked.

What the friction was doing

Sometimes a painkiller is the right solution. I had some morphine flowing through my veins as a teen after a sledding accident; this scar is the receipt. But that pain was real, and most importantly, temporary. I recovered and never had another drip of the pale-yellow, sweet mercy liquid.

But DoorDash sold me convenience, removing the pain of deciding, the pain of dodging terrible tail-gating drivers, wading through double-parking-infested neighborhoods, and waiting for the food I wanted to be handed to me hot, in a plastic bag, ready to be consumed. Except none of that was actual pain; it was friction, the small daily work of feeding oneself.

Unlike an open wound, this pain isn’t temporary, every day I’ll get hungry, and if I don’t plan accordingly, I’ll have to make this decision every day. With DoorDash, the numbing is always a tap away.

Without it, something stranger happens; the choice to make pasta at home is easier. Take away the painkiller, and the body realizes it was never actually hurting.

“But Gil, the convenience tradeoff is worth it! Totally not the same as sedating myself.”

Isn’t it?

Let me shoehorn AI into this. The MIT Media Lab wired up participants with electrodes for an EEG study. They wanted to see brain wave differences between people who write with ChatGPT and those who don’t.

No surprise, those who used AI to write showed reduced alpha and beta connectivity, indicating under-engagement. They called it “cognitive debt”. You know where else the engaged-brain activity goes quiet? Under anesthesia. We’ve been talking about sedation as a metaphor, but flip on the EEG in your closet, and it stops being one.

Dr. O’Leary Will See You Now

A month ago, Kevin O’Leary went on “Diary of a CEO” and scoffed at Kids making 70 grand a year spending $28 on lunch. He says to invest in that instead. The internet piled on him in the comment section.

The hard truth is he’s right; the math checks out. Gen Z spends about $210 a month, which is over $2,500 a year. That money invested could be hundreds of thousands in retirement.

The problem is that he’s a doctor diagnosing a sedated patient as a lazy one. He thinks discipline is the problem. But nobody’s standing at a register, calmly weighing $2,500 against a $21 vegetarian burrito with 50-cent extra salsa. They’re tapping an app at 12:30 with no time, no plan, and everything else asking for their attention.

The choice only looks free. You can’t lecture the anesthesia out of someone. I didn’t lack willpower; I lacked the friction to break bad habits that hurt my wallet and my health.

Reintroduce the friction

You can’t reason your way out of anesthesia. Your senses slowly come back after you stop taking it.

The cure for convenience and frictionlessness is, well, friction. Deliberately and purposefully adding friction to the habit that you want to stop, even when it’s annoying. Especially when it’s annoying.

So I deleted the app and removed the credit card link. I’m done with takeout-food delivery apps. I’m keeping grocery delivery because I want to cook more, even if I have to suffer receiving under-ripe bananas. I’ll live with that.

I’m not quitting take out cold turkey, there are new rules in place: If I want take out, I walk or drive there and deal with the friction. I make it the hard choice it should be. Dr. O’Leary won’t be proud, but at least I’ll be seeing the doctor less. They can put away the IV drip. I want to keep my brain waves active.

Exit through the forest

In the Brothers Grimm story, Hansel and Gretel get out. They don’t logically reason with the witch that there’s better protein in the deer or that if she waits 20 years, they’ll taste better and it’ll be worth it. Gretel shoves her into her own oven, and they walk home through the forest that almost killed them.

That’s the true ending we should seek and is available if we unplug from the app and resist the extra perk. Just the willingness to feel the forest again, to feel hungry at 12:30, to put on sneakers and see a neighbor, to cook badly and then less badly the next time, and surprise yourself.

The urge for convenience will always swell up when the friction pops up, but remember, you don’t need the needle.

When you find yourself in a house made of bread and cake next time, don’t panic; the door was never locked, and they didn’t bother putting in a witch. You just need to have the willingness to walk out and continue through the forest.