I spent day Saturday doing life admin and accomplished nothing

or my thoughts on the adulting tax and why we're subsidizing our own survival

A month ago, I burst into tears in the bean aisle in the grocery store.

I was looking for capers. I’d been stalking up and down the aisles for ten minutes, increasingly frantic, scanning every shelf in what I thought was the right section. And somewhere between the olives and the pickles, tears burst out of my eyes.

It was the culmination of a day filled with micro-frustrations, bubbling up into a meltdown in the condiments aisle.

Here’s what my day had looked like up to that point:

I’d spent the morning on hold with Fidelity trying to roll over an old investment account. I’d called National Grid to pay an overdue bill I kept forgetting about because they don’t accept autopay. I’d taken the subway forty-five minutes to the Upper East Side to pick up a prescription that couldn’t be transferred to a pharmacy closer to me due to nationwide shortages. I’d returned library books that were so overdue I was too embarrassed to check the fine. I’d finally dropped off a bag of clothes for donation that had been sitting under my bed for a year. I’d bought a birthday gift, booked a hotel for a trip, googled “flowers in Charleston” for my mom’s birthday and felt so overwhelmed with options I closed out of the tab.

And I still had to grocery shop. And meal prep. And vacuum. And do laundry.

None of these tasks were hard. All of them were necessary. And by 4 PM, I was crying in the condiment aisle because I couldn’t find capers.

Sure, maybe I need better emotional regulation. But most of us have probably been there before. This feeling of depletion.

I’d spent an entire day doing things that needed to be done, and I had nothing to show for it except a checked-to-do list and a kind of bone-deep exhaustion that sleep was not going to meaningfully fix. I got no sense of accomplishment. It just felt like I was wading through the mud I had to get through before I could do anything that actually mattered.

Was I the only one that felt like being a functional adult was just so … hard?

Based on the sheer amount of posts on the internet complaining about the exact same thing, I suspected not.

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The life admin problem

There’s a name for what ate up my Saturday. Elizabeth Emens, a professor at Columbia Law School, calls it “life admin” — the office work of life. All the invisible tasks that keep your existence running: scheduling, calling, emailing, returning, renewing, disputing, transferring, updating.

You know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s:

Rescheduling your 6-month dental cleaning. Updating your address with the DMV. Calling your insurance company to dispute a claim. Renewing your passport. Transferring your 401(k) from your old job to your new one. Scheduling your dog’s annual vet checkup. Ordering new contact lenses. Filling out that reimbursement form. Updating your W-4. Filing your taxes. Filling your medication prescription. Ordering a replacement filter for your Brita. Booking a haircut appointment. Sorting through 847 unread emails. Canceling that gym membership. Calling your landlord about the leaky faucet they keep “forgetting” to fix.

These are all mundane, mostly brainless tasks. And they are often incredibly, incredibly annoying.

The data confirms what you already feel. The average adult will spend five years and five months of their lives doing admin. Around 60% of Americans say they struggle to keep up with day-to-day tasks.

When complexity outpaces capacity

Errands have been around forever, I know. And thanks to technology, we can do much more in much less time. This, of course, raises the expectations for how much we should accomplish in a given day.

We’re also experiencing a fundamentally different kind of demand on your brain today — a sprawling architecture modern admin: Dozens of separate portals requiring different passwords, notifications interrupting every other task, decisions nested inside decisions inside decisions.

Source: WSJ

Technology promised to make life easier. But in many ways, it made individual tasks faster while multiplying them exponentially and scattering them across platforms that each demand a login you can’t remember.

The “mental load” captures this perfectly: anticipating needs, identifying options, deciding, monitoring — invisible labor that never completes because life’s demands are constant. It follows you everywhere. Modern adults make roughly 35,000 decisions daily, each drawing from finite cognitive resources. By evening, when that reservoir is empty, we default to what requires least effort: fast food, Netflix, scrolling.

Survey data confirms it: 71% of American adults say “adulting” is harder now than thirty years ago. The median American says adulthood doesn’t “feel real” until age 27.

I think this is in part because we’re operating in an “adult” world while being denied the markers that are supposed to define it. Things like homeownership, stable employment, children, etc. And meanwhile, the machinery of just maintaining a life has gotten more complex.

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Designed friction

So back to my Saturday from hell, which started as an earnest attempt to combine my two investment accounts.

When I logged into my old account and clicked “rollover,” the website told me I needed to call. I called. I waited on hold for twenty-three minutes. I finally reached someone who asked me to verify my identity, then told me I needed to be transferred to a different department. I waited on hold again. The second person asked me to verify my identity again, then told me they couldn’t complete the transfer because my new account needed to send a “letter of acceptance” first. I called my new brokerage. They said they’d never heard of that requirement. I called the first bank back. Different rep, different answer. Three days later, I was still calling.

The process was not complicated because it had to be. It was complicated because making it simple wasn’t profitable.

This is what behavioral economists call “sludge” — friction that’s deliberately added to discourage you from doing something a company doesn’t want you to do. Freakonomics has an entire episode on it. The concept is simple: every extra step, every form, every phone tree is a filter. The harder something is, the fewer people complete it.

And designed friction is everywhere.

• Canceling a subscription: Signing up for a gym membership takes five minutes online. Canceling often requires a certified letter, an in-person visit, or navigating a phone tree designed to make you give up.

• Hospital billing: You often have to call to get an itemized bill, call again to dispute charges, call your insurer separately, then reconcile conflicting information yourself

• Free trials that require a credit card and auto-renew at full price unless you remember to cancel before

• Airline refunds: Booking takes 10 minutes, getting a refund for a canceled flight requires hours on hold and repeated follow-ups

As Tim Wu wrote in his essential New York Times essay “The Tyranny of Convenience”: “Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today.”

He was warning us. But he was also describing a business model.

The thing about designed friction is that it works best on exhausted people. When you’re depleted, you’re more likely to give up. You’re more likely to accept the default. You’re more likely to pay the fee rather than fight it.

Your exhaustion is someone else’s revenue stream.

Because what do exhausted people do? They pay someone else to deal with it.

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Buying fragments of your life back

I’ve written before about how convenience culture is changing us — making us more impatient, less empathetic, more likely to treat other humans as obstacles to efficiency. But there’s another angle I want to explore here: the economics.

The marketing is explicit. DoorDash sells a “seamless and quick delivery experience.” TaskRabbit lets you outsource furniture assembly, errands, and the administrative debris of life. The messaging targets exhausted people directly: you deserve this, save time for what matters, life is too short.

As Kyla Scanlon wrote in “The Most Valuable Commodity in the World,” time has become the thing everyone is trying to buy — and entire industries exist to sell it back to us at a markup.

Of course, many conveniences cost more than the alternative, which means you need to work more hours to afford them. You pay for meal delivery because you’re too exhausted to cook. You’re too exhausted because you’re working to afford meal delivery.

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The same forces that create the exhaustion — stagnant wages, rising costs, time poverty — also make convenience feel like survival rather than luxury.

Since 1979, productivity has grown eight times faster than typical worker pay. Workers produce more, earn proportionally less, and spend what remains buying back time they can’t recover. If you’re working two jobs to make rent, you don’t have time to cook from scratch. You need the fastest option. You need services that save you time because you literally don’t have time.

The system creates the problem and sells you the solution.

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The circular trap

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’s research on scarcity explains why this trap is so hard to escape.

“Scarcity creates its own trap. This provides a very different explanation for why the poor stay poor, why the busy stay busy.”

Scarcity creates “tunneling” — heightened focus on immediate shortages that neglects everything outside the tunnel. It imposes what they call a “bandwidth tax” equivalent to losing 13-14 IQ points, comparable to missing a full night’s sleep.

When you’re running on empty, the “hot system” — impulsive, emotional, seeking immediate relief — dominates the “cold system” — deliberative, cognitive, thinking about long-term consequences. In this state, whatever’s most accessible wins. Scrolling. Shopping. Delivery. The immediate dopamine hit over long-term restoration.

@sarah.faithhhi will be in bed until further notice

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Tim Wu identified the deeper problem: convenience creates dependency while eroding capability. “Every convenience gained is a skill lost. To resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.”

The convenience economy addresses symptoms of time poverty without touching causes. It provides coping mechanisms while the underlying conditions worsen.

I do this too. I order delivery when I’m exhausted. I pay for conveniences I can’t really afford because I can’t afford the time to do it myself. I’m not writing this from some position of having figured it out. I’m writing this because I wanted to understand why.

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You can’t optimize your way out, unfortunately

So what do we do with this? Here’s what I think:

The adulting tax is real. It’s the cost of operating in systems designed to extract from your depletion.

Some conveniences are worth paying for. If ordering dinner means you have the energy to be present with your family, that might be money well spent. If paying for a cleaning service means you don’t spend your weekend in resentful exhaustion, that might be worth it.

But you can’t optimize your way out of a system designed to exhaust you. No amount of batch cooking or time blocking or inbox zero will fix the fact that life admin has become a part-time job, that designed friction is profitable, that the gap between what you earn and what you need keeps widening.

Anne Helen Petersen put it better than I can: “Burnout isn’t a personal problem. It’s a societal one — and it will not be cured by productivity apps, or a bullet journal, or face mask skin treatments, or overnight fucking oats.”

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I eventually found the capers. They were in a section I’d walked past three times. I’d been so frazzled I couldn’t see what was right in front of me.

I bought them. I went home. I did not meal prep. I ordered Indian food and re-watched four episodes of Heated Rivalry and went to bed still feeling behind.

And I’ve been thinking about that day a lot, not because it was unusual, but because of just how usual it was. It was a completely ordinary Saturday spent doing completely ordinary things. That’s what made it so exhausting.

How much of your life are you spending just keeping up with being alive?