The Labyrinth of Efficiency

The synthetic voice on the other end of the line chirped, ‘For billing inquiries, press eight.’ I pressed eight. The phone was slick in my hand, a combination of sweat and the strange, primal rage that only an automated customer service loop can produce. This was the third time I’d navigated this particular electronic labyrinth, trying to dispute a charge for $878 on my mother’s long-term care statement. A charge for ‘ambulatory assistance’ on a day she never left her room. Each time I called, I felt a familiar, modern desperation, the same kind that made me clear my entire browser cache last week just to get a single website to load properly. A scorched-earth approach to a problem that required a surgeon’s touch.

The music, a Vivaldi piece mangled by digital compression, returned. It was a sound designed to placate, but it felt like a countdown timer for my sanity. My initial target for this rage was, of course, the system. The vast, impersonal corporate machine that assigns billing codes and designs phone trees to be just difficult enough to make people give up on a $878 error. It’s a battle of attrition, and they have all the resources. We are told this is efficiency. We are told these systems are built to streamline, to simplify. But sitting there, with a cramp in my neck and the phantom music still echoing after I was disconnected for the third time, I realized the lie wasn’t the efficiency.

I used to think the goal was to make my mother’s life simpler. I was wrong. I was dangerously, condescendingly wrong.

The Architecture of a Life

I stumbled upon the work of an elder care advocate named Indigo G.H. by accident. She wasn’t a celebrity or a CEO; she was a woman who had spent 28 years navigating the very systems I was cursing. She didn’t write books about hacking bureaucracy or finding loopholes. Her core message was far more unsettling. She argued that our frantic mission to simplify the lives of our aging parents is a profound, if well-intentioned, act of disrespect. We see a desk piled high with bills, a mess of passwords, a confusing appointment calendar, and we see a problem to be solved. Indigo saw something else: the architecture of a life. The complex, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately personal system a human being had built for 88 years to manage their own existence.

Our first instinct is to swoop in. We create spreadsheets. We consolidate accounts. We set up automatic payments and funnel everything through a single email address we control. We feel organized. We feel helpful. We feel virtuous.

Reading that, I felt a sickening lurch of recognition. I remembered the ‘Password Incident’ with my father two years prior. His banking website was, admittedly, a nightmare. It required a 12-character password with two special characters and a number that couldn’t be sequential. He kept forgetting it. My solution was brilliant, I thought. I created a master password for everything-his bank, his email, his pharmacy portal-and wrote it on a card for his wallet. I solved the problem.

He stopped checking his accounts because he felt like he needed my permission. The little rituals, the small frustrations he had successfully navigated for decades, were gone. I hadn’t cleared a path for him; I had cleared him out of the way.

The Human Cost of False Simplicity

It’s a subtle form of violence. And the systems we build encourage it. They are designed for a theoretical ‘user,’ not for an 88-year-old woman who has her own method for paying a gas bill, a method that involves three different colored pens and a specific day of the month. When that system fails, the consequences aren’t just a frustrating phone call. A billing error, like the one I was fighting, can lead to a lapse in medication delivery. A missed supply order can lead to a fall. The stakes are much higher than a simple database error. When a clerical mistake can cascade into a broken hip or worse, you’re suddenly dealing with a crisis where the initial inefficiency is the least of your problems. The line between incompetence and negligence gets terrifyingly thin, and it’s in those moments that families realize they might need to speak with a personal injury lawyer just to protect the person they love from the ‘simplicity’ that was supposed to help them.

This obsession with frictionless living is everywhere. We want one-click ordering and seamless logins. We design apps to anticipate our needs before we do. There’s a place for that, but we’ve started to believe it’s a universal good. Sometimes, friction is what proves we’re still here. It’s the effort of remembering a story, the physical act of writing a check, the mental puzzle of a difficult password. These aren’t bugs in the system of life; they are features. They are the cognitive traction that keeps a mind engaged. When we smooth everything down in the name of convenience, we risk sanding away the very texture of a person’s autonomy.

Rediscovering Autonomy

Indigo G.H. tells a story about a man in a facility she consulted for, a resident named Arthur who was 98. The staff was concerned because he insisted on walking down 238 feet of hallway every morning to get his own newspaper, even though they offered to bring it to him. He was slow, and it was ‘inefficient.’ It held up the breakfast cart. They saw it as a problem. Indigo saw it as his job. It was his reason to get out of bed. It was his daily, defiant act of independence.

I never did get through on the phone that day. I hung up. Instead, I drove the 48 miles to my mother’s residence. I brought the bill with me. We sat together at her small kitchen table. She pulled out a magnifying glass, a specific blue pen, and a ledger book filled with her spidery, elegant cursive. It took us an hour. She was the one who found the original service order and proved the charge was an error. She did it her way. It was complicated, a little messy, and one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.