The Solution Problem (Part 2/3)
The problem with solutions is that they create more problems.
In Part I, I reviewed three answers to the question: “Why are diagnoses of mental illness on the rise?” These answers were: because of progress, because of evolutionary mismatch, and because of the solution problem. I threw my weight behind the final two and promised to bust the first like a piñata.
Next, I divided problems into three types—unknown, tolerable, and regular—as part of my argument that in order to judge a solution, we need to ask what kind of problem it solves, whether it improves experience, and what it costs. The milder the problem, and the less its solution enhances quality of life, the harder it becomes to justify the solution’s costs. Let’s turn to those costs now.
The Costs of Solutions
Cost #1: Death by a Thousand Cuts
Outside of every sentence in Walden, the quote I probably think about most is from A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century by Heather Heying and Brett Weinstein: “The benefits [of a new technology] are obvious, but the hazards aren’t.”1
We should keep this in mind for every new technology, recognizing as we do that innovations are not restricted to the physical realm of SnotSuckers. Therapy, as I argued in Placebo (Part I), is a relatively new method for making sense of emotions and experience. As was religion, once upon a time.
New products, processes, services, and so on arise to solve problems. (Necessity is—or at least used to be—the mother of invention.) We tend to judge these solutions on that basis alone—by how well they solve—discounting their myriad, subtle, and ongoing costs. We even fail to appreciate the full extent of their most obvious costs: money and time. Solving my kid’s booger problem might only require $15 and a few minutes per week, but what about the total cost of all the solutions my life requires, from the New York Times subscription that fixes my worldly ignorance to that third bottle opener, which alleviates my worry that I’ll lose the other two?
A few years ago, having become intrigued by Juliet Schor’s argument that Americans are not “material enough”—if we were, we would insist on fewer, better-made products—I tried to count how many distinct items I owned. (As in, my 500+ books counted as one item.) The number was over a thousand. A true calculation of the time and money demanded by our solutions, then, of which material possessions are a single category, would involve acknowledging that every solution has a life-cycle and must be cared for throughout:
Again, the effect is cumulative. Death by a thousand cuts. To varying degrees, Americans have become “tools of their tools.”2 I mean, the other day I saw an ad for a subscription-based service that manages subscriptions. Huh?
Cost #2: Opportunity Costs
In addition to time and money, solutions incur Rob’s favorite cost to talk about—opportunity costs.
Put simply, when people are given braindead solutions to their problems, they become braindead. The opportunity to figure it out is eliminated. Yet the hard way has its rewards, such as pride, knowledge, skill, camaraderie, ingenuity, and confidence. Now that I live in the suburbs, I’m all too familiar with the experience of having a neighbor lean back, shield his eyes from the sun, and say “Yep, stained her myself.” It’s annoying for me, of course, but nice for him. Furthermore, most of these rewards continue to pay dividends. Confidence, for example, has a habit of spilling over from one domain to the next, so that staining a porch maybe translates to speaking up at work. Confidence is as confidence does, but when technologies do more, people do less.
I acknowledge that when it comes to something like old can openers, the ease of modern alternatives isn’t all that regrettable. But what about solutions for the most personal and defining moments of our life? In Returning to Ivan Illich, I worried that those who automatically turn to medication and therapy in bleak moments forego the opportunity to learn how to suffer well, which includes identifying one’s true friends and discovering what can be done with pain. I stumbled on writing in my darkest hour, sort of like Bilbo stumbled on the ring.
Cost #3: Emergent Effects
For the third cost of solutions, let’s use “emergent effects” as a catch-all for:
the accelerating pace of societal change, which, among other things, renders old people obsolete faster
the increasing complexity of the world, which, among other things, leads to decision fatigue and overwhelm
climate change
evolutionary mismatch
There are more, but these will suffice for now. Typically, these kinds of costs accumulate in the background until some critical threshold is passed, such as when global temperatures began melting ice caps. But, as that example illustrates, the surpassing of critical thresholds often produces domino effects, many of which cannot be controlled and most of which cannot be foreseen. Another good example is microplastics. Who would have guessed that Tupperware might one day threaten male fertility?
Cost #4: The Creation of Winners and Losers
No gizmo or gadget ever gets adopted by everyone at once, meaning that for most of its tenure in a society, some have it and others don’t. Those who have it (winners) feel great and those who don’t (losers) feel envious, although winners don’t feel as good as losers feel bad.
“Don’t get mad,” though. “Get E*Trade.”
All else equal, introducing another way to divide society’s members into haves and have-nots isn’t ideal. The genetic lottery that influences much more than we commonly think—from how easily a person becomes disgusted to how attractive they are to mosquitos—already provides enough disparity to bemoan. Through sheer luck, some people are more intelligent, good-looking, creative, and athletic than others. Adding another dimension in which some people can be superior to others only adds fuel to the fire. Sure enough, research indicates that material inequality is bad for society in a number of ways, from undermining pubic trust to incentivizing crime. There is some truth to what Thoreau said of his experiment in simple living:
I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.3
In addition to making us less neighborly toward each other, the piecemeal adoption of solutions changes our perception of what constitutes a problem. What is it, after all, that misery loves most? Company. If everybody is suffering the same thing, then in some sense it must be tolerable, no? Indeed, it must not really be much of a problem. The opposite is true, too. My hands feel a bit colder after I learn that my neighbor’s car has a heated steering wheel. In fact, a good design choice for Hell would be to make someone suffer something that everyone around them most obviously was not.
Private solutions especially—meaning those you can buy with your own hard-earned money—tend to individualize pain, discomfort, and inconvenience that was previously shared. Everyone’s steering wheel used to be cold in the winter, until—.
What Role Does Capitalism Play?
The fifth cost of solutions, which I am most interested in, is the tendency of solutions to create problems. A.k.a. the solution problem. We already saw an example above. When my neighbor has a heated steering wheel, my hands feel colder. Indeed, the very existence of a solution “escalates” the problem from unknown or tolerable to regular—because all of a sudden, something can be done. The opposite is true, too. If you want to make something more tolerable, ensure that everyone has to deal with it. That nothing can be done.
Before exploring the other ways solutions tend to create problems, though, we first need to understand capitalism’s role.
Now, I’m not one of those who tends to lay modernity’s problems at the feet of capitalism. You’ll never catch the words “late-stage capitalism” escaping my lips, unless it’s to make fun of them. The way I see it, capitalism responds better than other systems to market demand, but this isn’t always positive. A key vulnerability, as Akerlof and Schiller write in Animal Spirits (2010), is that capitalism:
…does not automatically produce what people really need; it produces what they think they need, and are willing to pay for. If they are willing to pay for real medicine, it will produce real medicine. But if they are also willing to pay for snake oil, it will produce snake oil.4
The fact that snake oil sells—often quite successfully—is unsettling given that those who need the least (at least from a Maslow’s hierarchy perspective) tend to buy the most. This happens, in part, because those with more money can buy more stuff, but another piece of the puzzle is that, as we saw in Part I, there is no end to improvement. There is no magic line beyond which the mind becomes content. Instead, once a person is no longer hungry, their attention shifts to something else, like whether their toes are properly spaced or their clothes hangers match.
But framing this in terms of snake-oil—products and services that don’t do what they purport to—misses the important point that, actually, most products and services work well and are priced competitively. Capitalism’s real trick isn’t selling useless junk—it’s convincing people that they need what they didn’t before.
For example, I linked to those toe-spacers because I used them once upon a time—and they worked. But were my cramped toes actually a problem that needed addressing? As an animal shaped by scarcity, now surrounded by abundance, I don’t really know. That’s the point. But what I do know is that there is a robust infrastructure for pouncing on every little ache, pain, uncertainty, or inconvenience I might have. That infrastructure is capitalism.
It's not enough for capitalism to merely be ready, though. Not when it could, with a little effort, make the imperfection of my life much more apparent. So, capitalism does what it can to nudge consumers into the next improvement, to undermine their already-brief periods of contentment.5 As Akerlof and Schiller acknowledge: “Capitalism makes it profitable for producers to sell what consumers want to buy,” but it “also makes it profitable to cause consumers to want to buy what producers have to sell.”6
As people's basic needs are met, the significance of this second part of the equation grows—a point that economist J.K. Galbraith made 50 years prior in The Affluent Society (1958):
A man who is hungry need never be told of his need for food. If he is inspired by his appetite, he is immune to the influence of Messrs. Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn [an advertising agency]. The latter are effective only with those who are so far removed from physical want that they do not already know what they want. In this state alone, men are open to persuasion.7
According to Galbraith, once desires “original” in consumers are satisfied, desire must be manufactured. After a while, “Production only fills a void that it has itself created.”8
If you’re wondering how desire can be manufactured, look around you. Americans are exposed to about 5,000 ads a day. What are those ads doing if not producing want and/or undermining satisfaction? And because the human mind operates at the frontier of improvement—ultimately, because genetic success is relative—it will always find something to improve, no matter how cushy the life surrounding it. (If not this, what else is Amazon a testament to?) Not only are human pain points infinite, the awareness of them will grow with affluence, not shrink as might seem intuitive at first.
That said, what if a person is not yet aware of a pain point, or considers the pain tolerable for now? It is clear in these instances that capitalism must roll up its sleeves and get to work. It must raise awareness and erode tolerance. One way of doing this is by creating a solution and working backward to a problem.
Cost #5: The Solution Problem
We now have enough to put it all together. The fifth cost of solutions is that they create problems in at least four distinct ways, by: making the current option less than, providing proof of concept, clearing the deck for new problems, and raising societal standards.
New solutions make the current solution “less than.”
We saw two sections ago that the invention of the heated steering wheel made cold steering wheels less tolerable.9 The reason is simple: comparison. As soon as a better option exists, it makes the current one less than. As the Reddit cofounder Alex Ohanian wrote, sometimes “we don’t even realize something is broken until someone else shows us a better way.” No doubt he meant it as a humble brag for his company, though, and not an indictment of thousands of years of technological progress.
Capitalism wants to bring this discrepancy home—often literally, through the TV. It wants to show the consumer how much better off they could be. Virtually every other commercial turns on this dynamic, of one person with a product or service (the winner) being contrasted with someone who doesn’t have the product or service (a loser).10 The message is clear: time to level-up. Here is Progressive’s version of “Don’t get mad. Get E-trade”:
Once people are aware of a better alternative, they are fairly powerless to resist it, even if they don’t actually think it is better. Perhaps it’s just easier. For example, a major theme in my practice around the time of covid was that clients wanted to be reading more and watching less TV. The problem, of course, is that reading demands more upfront effort. Cracking a book takes more mental energy than clicking a remote. But the long-term payoff is greater, too—a fact every client who wasn’t reading enough seemed acutely aware of.
Similarly, in the Grapes of Wrath, the Joads’ car breaks down in California. As Tom and Al get out to fix it, Ma remembers that she has a dollar. Instead of grateful or relieved, Tom is wistful. “You shouldn’ a tol’ about that dollar,” he says. “We’d a fixed her some way.” The implication is clear: now that they know they have a dollar, they’re going to use it. It’s easier, but not necessarily better.
So, solutions represent “better” ways of doing things that aren’t always better, but due to our evolved nature, difficult to resist. “Laziness,” as Daniel Kahneman writes in Thinking, Fast and Slow, “is built deep into our nature.”11
Solutions provide proof of concept.
Solutions also make problems more concrete. It is one thing to say, “Hey, wouldn’t it be nice to remove snot from your baby’s nose?” It’s quite another to have a proof of concept. Showing has always been more powerful than telling.
In the movie The Joneses, a fake family of “stealth marketers” tries to boost sales in their suburban community by using the products they hope to sell as part of their apparently-normal lives. It’s one thing to suspect that your golf clubs suck, but quite another to see the ball fly an additional fifty yards with your neighbor’s new driver.
An existing solution is also required for that classic bait-and-switch in which a salesperson sells you on a problem you likely haven’t thought of before so that they can whip out a solution. The salesperson can’t say—“Have YOU ever struggled to open a pickle jar?”—without having the handy do-hickey behind their back. So, in many cases, the solution must be manufactured before the problem can be brought to attention.
Solutions clear the deck for more problems.
Because the mind lives at the frontier of what can be improved, as soon as one thing is fixed, there is room for another. Shortly after the pickle jar no longer poses a challenge, the dead space in your cabinets will.
It’s a bit like Scrabble. If you have a really good round, you’ll clear many tiles from your rack and score a lot of points. But that also means you’ll draw a bunch of letters, which represent new problems to solve. The solutions in our lives are no different: the SnotSucker solves one problem and makes room for another. This explains why the consumer’s quality of life doesn’t change all that much: they’re still dealing with roughly the same number of problems.12 Perhaps even more. As Oliver Burkeman notes in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,
The technologies we use to try to ‘get on top of everything’ always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the ‘everything’ of which we’re trying to get on top.13
In some cases, solutions clear room for unrelated problems. Now that my hands are nice and toasty on the way to work, I have the mental bandwidth to prefer better coffee. Other times, solutions cause subsequent problems, which are generally less serious but require additional solutions nonetheless (and don’t feel any less serious). For example, babies no longer sleep on their stomachs due to the danger of SIDS, which is a good thing—but sleeping on their backs gives them flat heads, which in some cases necessitates a helmet. One problem solved, another created.14
Solutions raise societal standards.
Finally, solutions raise societal standards. Body odor is less tolerable now that we have running water, deodorant, washing machines, and easy access to affordable clothing. Meanwhile, wrinkled clothes have become much less acceptable since the Wrinkle Shield. Just because you can tolerate wrinkles doesn’t mean the society around you can. Raised societal standards ultimately raise the cost of ignorance and tolerance, the first two kinds of problematic attitudes.
The rising tide of societal expectations, combined with the mind’s preoccupation with improvement, is what makes the sentiment from this minimalism blog—“the importance of buying only what you need”—both well-meaning and misinformed. “Need” is a moving target not only because our minds don’t know when to stop, but because society’s requirements change, too.
A Summary Stretch
Ok, let’s summarize. There are three kinds of problems: unknown, tolerable, and regular.
There are at least five costs of solutions:
Time and money: Typically small for each solution, but large cumulatively.
Opportunity costs: The opportunity cost of finding an easy way to solve a problem is the benefit you get from solving it the hard way. These benefits include pride, skill, camaraderie, ingenuity, and confidence.
Emergent effects: What accumulates while we continue to produce solutions which for the most part don’t improve anyone’s experience anymore? Various forms of trash and waste, which we ignore until it’s too late.
Inequality: Generally, when people in a society are in the same boat and face the same problems, they feel better about those problems and each other—and vice versa.
The solution problem: The ironic tendency of solutions to create problems.
Solutions create problems by:
Rendering the current solution less than a better one.
Making the difference visceral via proof of concept.
Clearing the deck for new problems (and thus, eventually, new solutions).
Raising societal standards (and thus the price of tolerance or ignorance).
So, why do so many people have mental health problems these days? In part, because our society has solutions for them.
I’ll explain that answer in further detail in Part III. In the meantime, thanks for reading this essay—a solution to my inability to speak with you, a stranger, which at some point in history became a desire and thus a problem.
References
Akerlof, G. A., & Shiller, R. J. (2009). Animal spirits: How human psychology drives the economy, and why it matters for global capitalism. Princeton University Press.
Burkeman, O. (2021). Four thousand weeks: Time management for mortals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Galbraith, J. K. (1998). The affluent society. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. (Original work published 1958)
Heying, H., & Weinstein, B. (2021). A hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century: Evolution and the challenges of modern life. Portfolio.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Steinbeck, J. (1992). The grapes of wrath. Penguin Books. (Original work published 1939)
p. 98
And thus my streak of articles with at least one Thoreau quote continues…
Granted, Steven Pinker’s response would be that there are always mates to fight over, and Jared Diamond would chime in that there are pigs/horses/cattle, too.
p. 26
Really what it comes down to is the relationship between awareness of problems and availability of solutions. A society that is generally unaware of problems—because, say, they are hunter-gatherers whose sum of problems has either been solved or accepted—is similar to a society that is daily becoming aware of new problems yet has the ability to easily resolve them (which is how I would describe American society). The worst-case scenario would be a society in which problems are apparent and acute but the process of addressing them inefficient.
p. 129, my italics
p. 129
p. 125
This is true, by the way, for those with the heated wheels as well as those without. The difference is just that those with heated steering wheels have a solution, at least until they rent a car on vacation and are reminded of how the other half lives.
Sometimes the loser is the same person, only in the past. Rendering the “then” picture in black and white, and the “now” picture in color, is a common tactic.
p. 35
There’s probably a critical threshold thing here. So solving for hunger, thirst, and safety makes people happier. But solving for boogers doesn’t.
p. 47
I made a similar point in Vacation Insights about our chores. Often, trying to whittle down our To-Do list expands it, as “take car to mechanic” becomes “take car back to mechanic for brake pad installation” and “rent car for a week.”
Brilliant. That humans are "animals shaped by scarcity now surrounded by abundance", evolved for optimising/ maximising rather than satisficing, and thus simply DON'T KNOW if a snot remover will make absolutely no difference, will make things actually worse, or wil be a life changing improvement is really one of the most succinct insights into the issues of post-scarcity society.
(of course we all know all too well, hopefully from historical accounts, what happens if actual, survival-level, scarcity kicks in, but that's a different story)
Josh, this work is truly remarkable. You have a knack for being very congenial while also delivering valuable informed insights. This id great stuff that therapists (like myself) should be consuming. Thank again