When I was the marketing manager for Citibank’s Upstate New York retail banks in the mid-1970’s, I introduced an advertising campaign that used the slogan: “There is a hard way and an easy way, Citibank is the easy way”. We backed the claim up with an array of convenient products and services that actually made Citibank more attractive to retail customers. The campaign was a success because, at the time, consumer banking was inflexible and cumbersome and most customers preferred convenient and easy.
Unfortunately, what might have been true in banking in the 1970’s doesn’t always translate to life more broadly. Maybe in banking, the easy way is the better way; But in life, that is generally not true. Let me show you two examples, one from the world of ideologies and the other from the world of AI, that illustrate how the easy way may not be the best way after all.
First, religious and political ideologies have been well-established in human society for millennia. The leading ideologies have hundreds of millions, even billions, of followers. In general, we are extremely dependent on religious and political ideologies to give us the comfort, certainty, self-esteem and hope we think we need to live our lives. As a result, we have a tendency to blindly accept the ideological ideas and claims presented by our leaders because it’s easy and takes a big burden off our shoulders.
The problem is that once we buy into the dictates of ideologies, we have a strong tendency to accept those ideas as unchallengeable and never again question the creeds or dictates of our belief systems. They become a hard and fast set of principles which quickly become a substitute for real thinking about important life issues. Rather than doing the difficult thing—intensive research and analysis--we allow ourselves to become lulled into blind acceptance.
As Lior Zmigrod, the author of the Ideological Brain, has said “Ideologies numb our direct experience of the world. They narrow our capacity to adapt to the world, to understand evidence, and to distinguish between credible evidence and not credible evidence.” In other words, in matters of belief formation, ideologies take the place of critical thinking and research,
the very activities that, as I show in my book, Path to Power, Road to Ruin, produce the best results for people in all walks of life.
Unfortunately, we risk having the same thing happen with the rise of AI. AI is increasingly capable of performing complex tasks that once required significant human effort and ingenuity — writing reports, analyzing data, solving problems, even generating creative work. This may save us time, but it comes at a hidden cost. When we outsource our thinking to AI, we deprive ourselves of the very struggle that builds intellectual capability. Just as a muscle weakens without exercise, our capacity for deep research, critical analysis, and original thought atrophies when we stop using it. The ease and speed of AI may feel great, but there is a difference between getting an answer and developing the ability to find one yourself. A student who uses AI to write every essay may graduate with a diploma but without the thinking skills that education was meant to build.
The risk runs even deeper when it comes to our personal lives. AI agents have grown remarkably skilled at conversation — responding with apparent warmth, curiosity, and empathy, and in some cases forming what feels like a genuine bond with the humans who use them. It is easy to see the appeal, especially for people who are lonely or struggling. But this is precisely the problem. When an AI can simulate companionship so convincingly, we are tempted to skip the far harder work of building real human relationships — the vulnerability, the patience, the inevitable conflict and repair that forge genuine trust. A friendship with an AI asks nothing of us. A friendship with a person asks everything — and that is exactly what makes it worth having.
In both cases, the pattern is the same as with ideology: we reach for the easy way, and in doing so, we quietly surrender something essential about ourselves. The Citibank slogan was right about banking — convenience matters when you are choosing where to do your checking. But the broader lesson it inadvertently teaches is a dangerous one. In the most important areas of life — how we form our beliefs, how we develop our minds, how we build our relationships — the easy way is often the way that costs us the most. Ideology relieves us of the burden of thinking. AI relieves us of the burden of struggling and connecting. And each time we accept that relief, we become a little less capable, a little less discerning, and a little less human. The hard way — questioning what we believe, doing the intellectual work ourselves, showing up fully for the people in our lives — is hard precisely because it is the way we grow.
We might prefer the easy way. But the easy way is not always the better way, and knowing the difference may be one of the most important choices we make.