The Tax On Our Time

There is a peculiar fatigue that does not come from labor but from friction, from the endless small resistances that greet us at the threshold of modern life. It is the exhaustion of hold music and chatbots, of forms that must be re-entered because a system cannot speak to another system, of promises of care routed through scripts of deflection. It is a tiredness that accumulates invisibly, like dust in a room no one quite inhabits anymore.

I have been thinking about this ever since I lost eight hours to a dental insurance labyrinth, a situation so banal it might seem beneath reflection and yet so revealing it now feels emblematic. My daughter had dental surgery under one insurer. Between the procedure and the billing, the insurer was acquired. The new company inherited the premium but declined the obligation. What followed was a sequence of calls, transfers, re-explanations, requests for documents already submitted, a two-hour 3-way conference call between me and the insurers (most fun I’ve ever had!), and the peculiar indignity of having to prove that a child’s teeth once existed in a different corporate era.

Eight hours is not a tragedy. It is not even a scandal. And yet it is something: a subtraction from life. A quiet tax levied not in money but in time, and more insidiously in attention and dignity.

Researchers at Groundwork Collaborative have given this phenomenon a name: the Annoyance Economy (link). They describe a marketplace structured less around service than around endurance, in which consumers are made to navigate bureaucratic mazes, delayed responses, opaque billing, and automated barriers, all of which transfer cost from corporations onto individuals. Companies save money not only by cutting staff or service but by making resolution difficult enough that some people simply give up. The friction itself becomes profitable.

This is not inefficiency. It is design.

The genius, or the tragedy, of the Annoyance Economy is that it disperses harm so thinly that it rarely registers as injustice. Each episode is small: a disputed charge, a canceled subscription that continues, a claim denied and re-denied. Yet in aggregate these micro-exactions form a system of extraction measured in hours lost, patience depleted, and quiet humiliation endured.

And it is here that one begins to notice something unusual in our political moment. In a country where nearly every policy question fractures along predictable lines, annoyance appears strangely bipartisan. The indignities of insurance calls, airline refunds, pharmacy authorizations, and customer service purgatories do not discriminate by ideology. They are suffered across red and blue counties alike.

Groundwork’s research highlights this convergence with striking clarity. As they note:

Perhaps most eye-opening is that many Americans put eliminating these pain points at the top of their wish list. In a polarized nation where few policies garner widespread support, new polling from Data for Progress found that more than two-thirds of Americans say it should be a priority for Congress to address these seemingly small-bore frustrations.

There is something quietly radical in this finding. It suggests that beneath our grand disagreements lies a shared, lived experience of daily obstruction and a shared desire for systems that simply work. Not heroic government. Not sweeping ideology. Just institutions that answer phones, honor commitments, and do not require citizens to perform administrative pilgrimages for services already paid for.

The Annoyance Economy also reveals a subtler divide, not left versus right but buffered versus exposed. Those with wealth often purchase insulation from friction: concierge medicine, private assistants, premium service tiers, legal counsel, brokers, and advocates who navigate systems on their behalf. Their time remains largely intact. Their encounters with bureaucracy are softened or outsourced.

For everyone else, friction is personal. You are your own case manager. You are the one on hold, the one assembling PDFs, the one re-telling the story. Time becomes the currency through which you access what you already own.

This is why annoyance feels different from inconvenience. It is not merely delay; it is dispossession. The sense that your time, the finite substance of your life, is being appropriated in increments too small to litigate yet too numerous to ignore.

There is a moral dimension here that our language has not quite caught up with. We speak of fees and charges, but not of temporal extraction. We regulate prices but rarely processes. Yet in a service economy, process is power. Whoever controls the maze controls the outcome.

One might say that modern inequality is experienced less through visible deprivation than through invisible friction. Some lives move through doors that open; others through corridors that stall. The difference is measured not only in income but in unbroken attention, the ability to direct one’s hours toward chosen purposes rather than forced navigation.

It is telling that the dental insurance episode did not end with resolution so much as surrender. After enough loops, the mind quietly recalculates: is this worth more hours? Is the money worth the time? Many people, often the most burdened, conclude it is not. And so the system wins not by justice but by attrition.

Yet perhaps something hopeful is emerging. The very universality of annoyance may make it politically visible in a way other inequities struggle to achieve. When frustration crosses class and party lines, it begins to look less like private failure and more like public design. The maze is recognized as a maze.

The Annoyance Economy reminds us that dignity resides not only in wages or rights but in the texture of everyday transactions. A society reveals its values in how easy it is to resolve a mistake, to reach a human being, to be believed without ordeal. Civilization, one might say, is the reduction of unnecessary friction.

Eight hours on the phone about a child’s dental bill will not change policy. But it may change perception. It is difficult, after such episodes, to believe that inconvenience is accidental. One begins to see the architecture: the delays calibrated, the responsibilities shifted, the human cost externalized.

And one begins, perhaps, to recognize others in the same corridors, strangers whose politics may differ yet whose hold music is identical. Maybe we agree on something afterall. Maybe AI comes to the rescue to talk to the call center AI and we all get a summary, and we have AI to summarize the summaries. How convenient.

In our shared annoyances, there is the faint outline of solidarity: a recognition that time, too, is a public good, and that its quiet theft in small increments may be one of the defining injustices of our age.