An ex-colleague, who is pursuing an MBA from a prestigious college, reached out urgently, asking me to reactivate my LinkedIn account. As part of his CV verification for the placement process, his MBA college checked LinkedIn profiles of past managers. I reactivated it — and instead of closing the tab, I treated myself to some professional doom scrolling on LinkedIn.
I noticed more ads and more suggestions on who I should follow, but the rest was pretty much the same – plenty of humble brags, insights drawn from random anecdotes, data, or events, along with unnecessarily detailed professional updates.
A post that caught my attention was from an acquaintance who had just visited his native village with his niece. My acquaintance, an educator by profession, asked his niece to write a small note summarising her trip. His niece wrote a few sentences, then quickly outsourced the task to ChatGPT. The final note was polished, but my acquaintance's point was not about ChatGPT's brilliance or his niece's quick thinking. His assertion was that ChatGPT and other tools took out the friction from most learning experiences, and according to him, friction was what made learning possible.
Friction is the small resistance that forces the brain to work — remembering numbers, summarising experiences, and struggling to express an idea in your own words. I couldn't agree more with the idea that friction enabled and improved learning experiences. This small anecdote with the young girl reminded me of an experience I had with someone from a very different generation.
Not too long ago, I had accompanied my wife to the gynaecologist's office for a scheduled check-up. My wife was pregnant with our second child. Our elderly gynaecologist was one of the best in her field and came highly recommended. You would never guess her age if you saw the speed at which she moved or if you overheard her diagnosing her patients.
As we entered the doctor's office, the assistant doctor placed a sheet of paper in front of our gynaecologist. The paper contained the results of various tests done before every visit, including the current one. The gynaecologist looked at the results and said the numbers out loud. It felt strange, but I realized that she was doing the mental math to calculate the change in the numbers.
In that moment — perhaps because of our intense gaze, or the realization that a calculator would have been faster — she remarked, "I always do these in my head to keep my brain healthy."
I have no doubt that our gynaecologist used her brain in complex ways — not just to help patients, but to run a hospital and manage daily life. In contrast, the girl in the LinkedIn post, like many children growing up with powerful tools, could outsource the effort almost instantly. The older one rejected a simple calculator to keep her brain active, whereas the younger one used a fancy LLM to avoid — probably unintentionally — any meaningful effort.
Generational gaps have always existed. This gap has often made it harder for generations to understand each other. I wonder whether the way we outsource our thinking today will widen and reshape the generation gap in ways we don’t yet understand. We may become faster, more polished, and more productive — but less practiced at thinking through difficulty. A generation gap built not on values but on cognitive habits may be a difficult one to bridge.