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#125. The IKEA effect
Shem Opolot
June 13, 2025
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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 On Twitter the other day, someone reflected on how they used to write 5-page essays in college before generative AI, and someone else quoted the tweet, saying, astutely: “AI will be our ‘I used to walk 1000 km to school uphill both ways,’” and that was the most profound thing I read this week.
I can’t wait to exaggerate the difficulty of A-levels in Uganda.
LIFE.
The IKEA effect.
Let’s get this out of the way—I’m a staunch soft life advocate.
For me, an individual’s ability to fully control how they spend their time defines true wealth.
A certain corner of the internet erupted this past week, lambasting yet another product from the obstinate Tyler Perry movie factory. I haven’t watched the movie, nor do I plan to, but I gleaned that, unsurprisingly, the protagonist was a Black woman who suffered throughout the entire runtime.
The discourse online, like swarms of arrows from opposing armies colliding in the sky, made me think about the importance of suffering.
And yes, this song is overplayed, what with tropes like “hard work pays,” “no pain, no gain,” and some other permutations tattooed on our high school uniform badges, our bodies, and our psyches.
But bear with me.
When my son was born, we bought many things: a bassinet he outgrew in 3-5 business days that was supposed to ensure he slept like Jesus in a manger, or rather, Jesus on a sinking ship in a storm, surrounded by terrified disciples; a crib I assembled by hand; soothies to simulate a teat in his mouth and buy us a fEw MoRe MiNuTeS at 4 am; books and toys that all but guaranteed the short, picky, and often closed-fisted hand of Harvard would personally punch down our double-locked front door and pluck him from our living room when he turned 18. We bought many things.
Of all those things, I still remember the crib I assembled by hand.
One of the things that fascinated me during my early days in America was how most people ordered their furniture online, and it came in a box with all its component pieces, a manual, and the necessary tools all included. Coming from a culture where full-time, live-in housemaids can cost $50 a month and we prostrate ourselves before [unreliable] carpenters, this DIY culture was “the ghetto” to me.
But the bits-and-bolts-in-a-box model was brilliant.
And like many brilliant ideas I loved in America, I asked myself if the concept could work in Uganda. Because being born with poverty within reach forcibly turns everything into an entrepreneurial opportunity. In the war against poverty, there can be no frivolities. No hobbies. Even sleep has to be “productive.”
Anyway.
That habit of superimposing foreign ideas onto Ugandan soil vanished along with the tendency to convert every dollar price to Uganda shillings before making a purchase.
But I loved the DIY furniture model so much that I did more research on it.
I soon learned there was more magic and method to the madness of the model beyond mere creative commerce. The company that popularized the model is a Swedish company you might’ve heard of called IKEA.
You see, IKEA found that you’re more likely to love the things you work for. And by extension, you’re more likely to love your furniture if you build it yourself. So, their [business] model made sense in the head and in the heart.
The effect that links labor to love was eponymously and aptly baptized “The IKEA effect.”
I thought about the IKEA effect when I used AI to deep-research my dissertation research topic to compare its output with the results of my rudimentary approach. After the AI exceeded my expectations, I realized I could use it to write my entire thesis.
And I almost did.
But there was one problem. Okay, two problems. Besides the fear of going viral 40 years later for using AI to write my thesis, I knew that if I wanted to be intimately familiar with my topic, I’d have to grapple with it. Suffer with it.
You see, learning happens by grappling with concepts. You tackle problems, you fail, you write down your ideas, and you connect dots. You fail again, realize there are gaps in your knowledge, and read more to fill those gaps in knowledge. You repeat this process until you know so much about the topic that you know how much you don’t know. At which point you can build a career out of figuring out the known unknowns, and, if you’re lucky, the unknown unknowns.
I wouldn’t be an authority on my topic if I didn’t type it by hand or physically download and read over 100 PDFs. I wouldn’t know it well if I didn’t write 60 pages on it before the actual research was done.
So, if you want to learn something, toiling, grappling, and, I shudder to say, suffering are important. Particularly in the AI age, you should outsource much of your mental load to AI, especially to create time for thinking about the things you deem more important.
But as you outsource more and more of your mental load, don’t outsource your own thinking. Because that’s a slippery slope that blurs the lines between what you know, what you think you know, and what you should know.
THINGS.
An excerpt.
There is no way to determine how to make a memory, or how important that memory might be to the people experiencing it. Recently, I told my mom that I made “fruit plate” for dinner, a treat I remember from busy nights during the years when she was a single mom. I sliced oranges, kiwis, and apples, and arranged grapes, cheese, and popcorn around a bowl of strawberry yogurt topped with granola, and presented the meal to my delighted daughter.
My mom was flabbergasted that I not only remembered this, but that it had been a favorite. “Those were the nights when I was too late coming home to cook,” she told me. “Those were the nights I thought I had failed.”
A TV show
This show doubles down on the rich-people-are-evil trope, but not enough to dissuade me from wanting to become wealthy myself. Jon Hamm, who shines at playing a rich, arrogant prick, carries the show on his back. He makes you feel sympathy and frustration for his character in equal measure.
A picture
I was heading for a quiet Saturday indoors last weekend before a friend called me and asked if I wanted to go on a boat ride. This is where the boat picked me up.
📍The National Harbor, Maryland, U.S.A.
WORK.
Here’s a quick trick
You have data:
The two lists are nearly identical. But you want to highlight the entries in the second list that differ from the first one.
Step 1. Select both lists
Step 2. Press Ctrl + \
Done.
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ The world’s most beautiful castles
✅ Spend 60 seconds in a park somewhere in the world
✅ How much is the movie actually based on a true-life story?
✅ How to get most flavour out of your spices
✅ See the views from people’s windows
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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