I had many moments of thinking “is there a product here?” Most things that help aren’t products. We nibble around the logistic edges with buying our time back:

I had many moments of thinking “is there a product here?” Most things that help aren’t products. We nibble around the logistic edges with buying our time back: a front-door laundry service, a lot of delivery meals when we had a newborn during peak Covid, Amazon Prime for virtually everything. “Acquiring consumer stuff” is fairly solved. We had a nanny for a while, and that had a lot of upsides, but having a family-like relationship that’s actually transactional is extra overhead to manage. Nice while it was working well, though. My local pizza joint’s app has a “repeat last delivery order” that comes in handy. Ultimately, though, the hard parts remain hard. When a kid is sick or doesn’t sleep through the night, who’s skipping work tomorrow? How do we tag-team our way to survive till bedtime? Do I not bill out a client today so my wife can get enough of a break from the kids to stay sane—and vice-versa? It’s very isolating. This feels like a fabric-of-society issue to which the product-and-services-to-solve-it mentality, however well-intentioned in the moment, is kinda how we ended up here in the first place. There isn’t an app or a service that’ll make living in the states (or, I gather, much of the west, albeit to a lesser degree) less individualized and more communal.