Jezz...things get complicated as you get older.

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By all accounts, the Annoyance Economy has gotten worse. Over the past two decades, time spent on the phone with customer service is up 60%. Text messaging, once reserved for conversation with friends and family, now resembles our email spam folders, dominated by unsolicited offers from companies, politicians, and fraudsters. Surprise fees have spread from the travel and banking sectors to everything from concert tickets to food on DoorDash.

While seemingly minor, these little annoyances add up. A 2019 survey found that one in four respondents delayed or chose to forego health care due to an administrative task, like scheduling appointments, obtaining information, or resolving premium problems. Excessive fees on rental applications can trap people in place. A single mother hoping to move closer to a better job and school might need to apply to a half-dozen apartments — but at $50 or $60 per application, the cost of even trying becomes prohibitive. Spam calls, dismissed as a minor nuisance, exact a real toll. In 2023, Americans lost billions of dollars to phone scams, many of them targeting older adults.

Some of these annoyances may be unintended — the result of clunky technology, legacy paperwork requirements, and outdated regulations. But many forms of annoyance are more deliberate — cynical attempts to slow consumers down, wear them out, or quietly extract value. Simply put: Companies make it easy for us to do things that they want, but conspicuously difficult to do things that we want, but are not in their interest.