Good morning,
I’ve been reading and talking to friends a lot lately about how hard “life admin” is—you know, that category of responsibilities that feels like an avalanche of things you should have done a long time ago but keep piling up instead?
An incomplete list: paying bills that somehow still come in the mail, renewing or cancelling subscriptions, updating policies, paying or preparing for taxes, restocking basic necessities, buying the next size up for little ones or replacing your own as your body changes, figuring out why you can’t ever find X, finding the best prices, unboxing, recycling, returning, finding doctors, paying old doctor bills, saying happy birthday properly to all the people far away, sending a thank you on time, replacing the broken thing, booking the flights, navigating the logistics.
It never ends, and yet it owns no real place in our life, except perhaps secret office time when you’re squeezing these things into a lull or a lunch break. Or, late at night on your couch while putting out a fire that only erupted because you didn’t take care of things sooner… on a screen that’s way too small for the task, with its auth codes and please try again later and why is the credit card upstairs, now I can’t do it, I’ll try again tomorrow. For retirees, I notice, entire days are filled with this work. Where is the retirement?
It also seems to have spawned an entire world of commentary and solutions: some people blame the industries that purposefully make these things hard for us. Others offer tools to help organize these noisy, invisible parts of our lives. Others suggest hiring it out like the wealthy do; we were never meant to do this much, build a team! And of course, there are those of us building teams of AI agents to do the work for us.
Until recently I’ve also viewed the life admin problem as a time issue—when do I do all this stuff? How can I outsource or automate it to get it off my plate? But lately, my view has begun to change.
I’m currently reading Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff, a study of how parenting works in non-Western cultures, specifically: Maya families in Mexico, Inuit families above the Arctic Circle, and Hadzabe families in Tanzania.
The introduction alone, which is about how and why western ways of living are not at all representative of most of human culture across ethnicity or history, gave me pause. In it, Doucleff explains that the nuclear family is one of the most non-traditional structures for human living and hasn’t been around very long at all. She references a 2010 study describing WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies as cultural outliers across many dimensions—how we cooperate, how we think about the self, even what we think is fair, arguing that because most of human psychology has studied only people from European backgrounds (just 12% of the world’s population), most of us in the west don’t realize how "weird” we really are.
She writes:
Over the past thousand years or so, the Western family has slowly shrunk down from a multigenerational smorgasbord to a tiny amuse-bouche, consisting solely of Ma, Pa, two kids, and maybe a dog or a cat. We not only lost Grandma, Grandpa, Auntie Fay, and Uncle Bill in the home, but also nanny Lena, cook Dan, and a whole slew of neighbors and visitors just hanging around the front porch or sleeping on the couch.
Once these people disappeared from the home, most of the parenting burden fell on Mom and Dad. As a result, for the first time in human history, moms and dads are suddenly doing this crazy-hard thing, called parenting, all by themselves (or even solo).
Most modern cases for rebuilding “the village” to raise children in are drawing on this very context. This isn’t new to me. At the same time, being from a South Asian culture where joint family living is still the norm for many, unless immigration or relocation has severed the possibility, I’m well aware of the problems of patriarchy that can make intergenerational a challenge for many.
Still, this week, reading that chapter while grappling with lots of admin work made a lightbulb go off for me that speaks more broadly to the experience of being an adult in 2026 than just parenting.
What if life admin feels so hard because in the absence of a culture where we have a smorgasbord of people around us, we lose what I can only think to call ambient social momentum?
Whether or not you’re a parent, what Doucleff is describing affects all of us. If you think about it, communal life has not only shrunk in terms of what’s happening within homes but also around them.
There is no need to walk to the bank to deposit the check, no need to meet the accountant during tax season, no need to shop at the store for the next size of shoes. We can do it all alone, on our devices, at any time of day. But that also requires us to be our own source of motivation to do any of this kind of work. There is no social pressure. There are no physical cues.
In other words, in the absence of communal structure and unfettered access to convenience, we need to rely on our own internal engine to do everything.
Consider how this looks in my life.
Within my home:
There is no grandparent starting the stove at 5pm to boil rice. When I get home, there is nothing on, nothing simmering, no voices chatting over empty tea cups, no soft snoring from a person napping on the couch, no rake in the garden making piles of leaves, no greasy child running to the door with flour-covered hands because they were helping auntie make the dough.
The greasy child is with me because I just picked him up from daycare, and I am holding his backpack, jacket, my purse, the mail, an Amazon package and my empty coffee cup as I try to push open the door without letting the dog run out of the house.
The lack of ambient social momentum means that I have to turn the rice on. I have to wash the empty coffee cup in my hand, put on the music, dig through the fridge, wipe muddy paws, and maybe get to wash my face while mentally trying to disconnect from the work I didn’t quite finish today and the deep breath I never quite took.
Around my home:
There is no gang of kids playing ball in the street, I have no appointments to keep with the plumber or the banker, no door to answer to the vegetable vendor or mailman. If I don’t have tomatoes it’s because I forgot to go to the store; maybe I can do a quick pick up or delivery. If the faucet is leaking, we’ll YouTube it. If taxes are due, I’ll sit on the couch tonight and work through a website that tells me to do what I need to.
In my physical environment, I need nothing more than the square footage of my home, a place to sit, and good internet to get things done.
What is missing in both settings is environmental cues.
If the vegetable vendor was showing up to the door, as he did in my grandmother’s town in India, I’d know when I could get the produce for dinner. I’d smile at him, say thank you, and pick my okra as she did. If I had to put on a pair of real pants and meet my accountant, as I once did, I might feel like tax season is a communal event: dreary, but still, dreary things are best done together. If the rice was already boiling on the stove, I might be able to take that deep breath, because life is moving, it doesn’t depend on me to move.
Perhaps life’s work has become so difficult not only because there’s so much of it, not only because I’m doing it alone, not only because it’s so digital and optimized and I can’t see it, but because it depends on me having a large reserve of energy to constantly mode switch without any visual cues. Isn’t it the movement of other people’s lives that actually pulls us forward toward action? How strange it is, to have to generate the energy all by yourself.
Of course there are modest gestures one can implement to help, but these, too, require astounding executive functioning to put in place: I treat the first of every month like an appointment to face the thornier parts of financial admin. I invite people over for food more often, and prepare less, so we can work together. I study the environments where I feel most alive and try to bring some version of that home. The fact that an entire industry exists to influence us to take better care of ourselves feels like an approximation for something that used to simply exist on its own—and still does, in many places.
I never really thought about the beauty of ambient social momentum before. Now, I notice it everywhere: it’s why sitting in a cafe, writing to you, as the people around me all do their own thing—waiters, workers, even the people in line for the bathroom, all moving forward in time—feels so easy.
I think human beings were meant to merge into a river of side-by-side living, and maybe the relentless offerings of convenience have stealthily robbed us of this option.
The other night, my 2-year-old son asked to “cook” pasta. So I gave him a large bucket of dry pasta and he took a spatula and busied himself pouring “soup” into a number of vessels, stirring and slurping with a satisfied smile.
The same child who ordinarily clings to me in the kitchen, begging me to hold him as I cook, pushed me away each time I tried to look over his shoulder.
“Mama, cook!” he would say, pointing to the stove.
By which he meant: you do your work, I’ll do mine.
Happy Monday,
Jihii
You have such a gift for finding insights in the seemingly ordinary! Thank you for your reflections on why so many mundane tasks seem hard. I wonder what it will take to find our way back to a way of living where the messiness of being in each other's lives is also what makes life sweet.