I have recently begun to suspect that the most exhausting part of modern life is trying to make it less exhausting.
This realization came to me while attempting to solve a fairly ordinary business problem: how to connect people who need something with people who can provide it. Not exactly a revolutionary concept. Humanity has been doing this for thousands of years, although presumably there was a period when finding someone who could repair your roof didn't require creating an account, comparing fourteen subscription tiers, and watching a webinar about leveraging your personal brand.
I started with a simple question. Why is it so difficult for talented people to find work, and for people who need work done to find someone capable of doing it? There are entire communities full of consultants, writers, designers, developers, strategists, accountants, coaches, and other professionals who would very much like to be paid for the things they're good at. There are also businesses desperately in need of consultants, writers, designers, developers, strategists, accountants, coaches, and other professionals. You would think these two populations might eventually bump into each other.
Instead, one group spends its days explaining its value to the internet while the other spends its days trying to determine which of the approximately six hundred people explaining their value to the internet can actually solve the problem.
Between LinkedIn, Indeed, Upwork, Fiverr, recruiting agencies, professional associations, networking communities, referral groups, business directories, and enough specialized marketplaces to give every conceivable professional relationship its own login credentials, you'd think we could find each other by now. And somehow, everybody is still looking for somebody.
Naturally, I decided there should be a better system. This was my first mistake.
Within a remarkably short period of time, I had begun contemplating AI-generated professional profiles, intelligent matching algorithms, community partnerships, client acquisition channels, referral structures, and the possibility of building an entirely new platform to connect needs with resources. All because I wanted people to have an easier time finding someone to help them.
At some point, I realized I was about to create another solution that people would have to discover, evaluate, learn, and possibly pay for. I had become part of the problem, which is a little embarrassing when the problem is your entire premise.
The Solution to the Solution
The modern economy has an extraordinary talent for identifying inconvenience and turning it into a business opportunity.
Don't have time to cook? Meal delivery. Don't have time to grocery shop? Grocery delivery. Don't have time to plan your meals? Meal-planning software. Don't have time to figure out which meal-planning software works with your grocery delivery service? I'm sure someone is developing an AI assistant for that.
For $19 a month. Billed annually.
The remarkable thing is that many of these products are genuinely useful. Some are brilliant. Some have transformed people's lives, created opportunities, reduced costs, and made previously inaccessible services widely available. I'm not particularly interested in arguing that innovation is bad. I happen to love innovation. I have more ideas for improving things than any reasonable person should be allowed to have.
But I am beginning to question whether we've confused the abundance of solutions with the accessibility of solutions. They are not the same thing.
A solution can exist and still be functionally unavailable to the person who needs it. Maybe it costs too much. Maybe it requires specialized knowledge. Maybe the setup is complicated. Maybe the service is available in another city, or only to people with the right insurance, or only after completing a seventeen-page application that requires documents you don't have.
Maybe the answer is sitting on page four of a Google search, behind twelve sponsored results and a company that has spent more money optimizing its website than improving its product. Or maybe you simply don't have another three hours to investigate the matter.
The solution exists. Congratulations. Now you need a solution for accessing it.
We tend to think of affordability in dollars. Can I pay for this service? Can I hire this person? Can I afford the subscription? But money is only one part of the transaction. There is also the cost of figuring out what you need, researching the available options, comparing them, deciding whom to trust, learning how the thing works, coordinating its implementation, and dealing with whatever happens when it doesn't work as advertised. Sometimes the cheapest option is expensive in every other currency.
A free tool that requires twenty hours of setup isn't necessarily free to someone who barely has twenty minutes. A service that saves ten hours a month might be wonderful, provided you have the six hours and mental energy required to get it running. A consultant who could solve your problem in an afternoon might be worth every penny of their fee. That doesn't make the fee magically appear in your bank account.
And when you can't afford to outsource the work, you become the researcher, project manager, implementer, troubleshooter, and quality-control department. You were already the person with the problem. Now you're also the entire staff responsible for solving it.
I know this arrangement intimately. I spend a considerable amount of time developing ideas, researching problems, building frameworks, designing systems, and imagining how things could function more intelligently. I enjoy that part. Immensely. It's the part afterward that gets complicated: the implementation, the marketing, the administration, the maintenance, and the endless sequence of small tasks required to make something that exists beautifully in your head function in the actual world.
And because I understand how many things could be improved, I keep seeing opportunities to improve them. It's an unfortunate combination: a brain that keeps finding problems worth solving and a life that has not provided the corresponding implementation department.
The Marketplace of Everyone Looking for Everyone
Consider the strange situation we've created around hiring. A business owner needs help. They may not even know what kind of help. Their business is disorganized. Their website isn't working. Their customers aren't following up. Their systems don't communicate. Their marketing isn't producing results.
They post a job, perhaps asking for a virtual assistant because that's a term they've heard before. Within days, they have seventy-three applications from people who may or may not have the skills to solve a problem the business owner hasn't correctly identified. Now the owner has another job: evaluating seventy-three strangers.
Meanwhile, applicants are tailoring resumes, purchasing application credits, following up, and trying to stand out in a marketplace where being qualified is only one requirement for being noticed. Some will never hear back. Some postings will never result in a hire. Some buyers will give up and do the work themselves.
Everyone has spent time. Very little has been accomplished. And somewhere, someone is selling a course on how to improve your application conversion rate.
The absurdity isn't that these platforms exist. They serve real purposes, and plenty of people find meaningful work through them. The absurdity is how much labor we've built around the process of trying to avoid labor.
Between professionals who want to work and customers who need work done, we've constructed an elaborate obstacle course of visibility, positioning, applications, algorithms, reviews, interviews, fees, and follow-up emails.
I understand why recruiting agencies exist. Sometimes people are willing to pay a substantial premium just to have someone else deal with the obstacle course. They're not only buying access to candidates. They're buying relief from the responsibility of figuring everything out.
Which makes perfect sense, until you remember that the people who most desperately need relief are not always the people who can afford to purchase it.
I don't hate capitalism. Although I will admit that after comparing my fourteenth software subscription, I have entertained some thoughts.
Competition has produced remarkable advances. It has also produced seventeen companies offering nearly identical products, each with a slightly different pricing structure, a different vocabulary for the same features, and a website insisting that its particular approach will revolutionize the way I work.
I don't need seventeen revolutions. I need the invoice to send automatically.
And the problem extends far beyond business software. People looking for childcare, medical services, financial assistance, housing support, or help caring for a family member encounter their own versions of the same maze. The resources may exist, but they're scattered across organizations, eligibility requirements, websites, applications, referral systems, and people who happen to know someone. Sometimes the difference between receiving help and going without it is whether you know the right person to ask.
We often talk about access as though it begins and ends with availability. But something being available doesn't mean it's discoverable, understandable, affordable, or usable. And if obtaining it requires more capacity than a person has left, the distinction becomes painfully academic.
The help is out there. Somewhere. Good luck finding it.
Maybe the nineteenth century wasn't so bad. Sure, there was no modern medicine, indoor plumbing wasn't guaranteed, and the average household chore required an alarming amount of physical labor. But at least nobody expected you to maintain a personal brand while doing it.
On second thought, I'll keep the plumbing.
Of course I was. That's what I do when something bothers me. I start trying to design a better system.
I imagined a place where people could explain what they needed without knowing the correct terminology or professional category. A system that could understand the problem, identify relevant resources, account for constraints, and connect people without requiring everyone to become an expert in navigating the marketplace first.
It sounded wonderful. Then came the practical questions.
Who would build it? Who would maintain it? How would people discover it? How would we verify the providers? How would we pay for it? What happens when the match is wrong? What about privacy? Liability? Existing competitors? Customer acquisition?
And, perhaps most importantly, how was I going to create a business dedicated to reducing unnecessary effort without adding another enormous amount of unnecessary effort to my own life?
I could practically hear the business plan assembling itself. (Or possibly disassembling. It was getting difficult to tell.)
There would be a website, naturally. Probably an assessment. Some sort of AI integration. A provider directory. An onboarding workflow. A matching engine. Maybe a subscription model.
Before long, I would need to hire someone to help me build the system that was supposed to make it easier to find someone to hire. At which point I would presumably need to use the very platforms I was trying to improve.
You can see how this gets away from a person.
Perhaps We Don't Need Another Solution
I don't mean that literally. There are plenty of problems worth solving, and better systems are worth building. But I wonder whether we've spent so much time creating new things that we've neglected the experience of trying to use the things we've already created.
Maybe progress shouldn't always be measured by how many additional options become available. Maybe it should sometimes be measured by how much less effort it takes to accomplish an ordinary task.
How quickly can someone find appropriate help? How much do they have to understand before they can ask for it? How many decisions are required? How much of the process can happen without another account, another application, another sales call, another explanation of the same problem?
And what happens when the person doesn't have the money, time, or energy to navigate the available solutions?
I don't have a complete answer. That's an uncomfortable admission for someone who enjoys finding answers.
I can see the architecture of possible solutions. I can imagine the systems, the connections, the efficiencies, and the ways we might make things work better. I can also see the amount of work required to make any of them real.
And sometimes, after spending hours trying to solve a problem that began as a relatively simple observation, I arrive at a different conclusion.
I don't want to build another company today. I don't want to evaluate another platform. I don't want to compare another set of features or figure out whether the annual plan saves enough money to justify committing to twelve months of something I haven't even used yet.
I just want life to be a little easier to operate. I want people who need help to find people who can help them. I want capable people to spend more time doing meaningful work and less time persuading strangers to let them. I want solutions to be accessible to people who don't have an unlimited supply of money, time, knowledge, or energy.
And I would very much like the process of making things easier to stop being so damn complicated.
So instead of building the platform, I've written an essay. It's considerably cheaper, and for once, I actually finished something.
Now I just need to figure out how to get paid for it.
Which, unfortunately, sounds like another problem in need of a solution.