Throwing money at (un)solvable problems
What works, what doesn't, and why
Your Five-Year Plan is a newsletter about embracing life’s profound uncertainty.
Maybe your own plans went up in flames; maybe you’re considering a big, scary leap. This is your trusty companion while you’re writing the next life chapter.
Welcome to the conversation—and to the adventure that unfolds when your plans go sideways. This is letter #8. ✨
☀️ How was your week?
This past Sunday, I took a plein air watercolor class. I slathered myself in sunscreen, headed to the beach, and spent six hours learning from Claire Giordano, whose beautiful work you see above. (Regardless of where you live, you can paint alongside her online!)
It was an impactful experience—one I’ll be writing about in the coming weeks. My own paintings weren’t nearly as lovely as Claire’s, of course, but I walked away feeling confident about my new skills, and inspired to keep practicing.
On to today’s letter!
Throwing money at (un)solvable problems
Advertisers exist to convince us that, for every concern in life, there’s a product or service to address it. But we, as consumers, are willing participants in this deception.
We want to believe that every problem has a neat solution—that the messiness and discomfort of life isn’t a feature, but a bug we can squash with a portion of our paycheck.
This is true of some problems to some degree, and not true at all of others. Let’s talk about the distinctions.
Identifying solvable problems
Solvable problems are annoyances or unsatisfying work that can be definitively resolved.
Simple solvable problems
As your income grows, you’ll start seeking help for life’s simple solvable problems: straightforward concerns with one-time solutions.
Take the problem of your pesky lawn, which—for some reason—insists on growing week after week. The solution? Hire your neighbor’s kid to mow it every other Saturday. Problem solved, forever.
Paying to solve these problems is, for most people, a straightforward path to happiness. If we mapped “money spent on solutions” against “peace of mind,” we’d call this space the “Zone of Relief.”
Complicated solvable problems
At some point, you’ll run out of simple solvable problems. You’ll have successfully identified and tackled them all. Wahoo!
As demands on your time and energy grow, you’ll start throwing discretionary income at your life’s more complicated solvable problems: multifaceted concerns whose solutions require ongoing management.
Take the problem of feeding yourself dinner each night. Solving this problem requires addressing intertwined questions like:
How much free time do I have during my evenings?
Do I want to cook, or have the cooking done for me?
Do I care about making healthy eating choices?
Who else is sitting at my dinner table, and do I have to take their preferences into account?
The answer to each question might change from week to week. (Like I said: complicated.)
Because complicated solvable problems involve elements of coordination, preference, and administrative overhead, throwing money at them doesn’t always neatly relieve your burden.
If you have more money than God, this conundrum won’t apply to you. You can hire a private chef, plus a personal assistant to manage your chef, so each additional dollar spent to outsource meal prep will genuinely enhance your peace of mind.
At a certain level of income or wealth, you can make even the most complicated solvable problems disappear. Let’s call this the “Beyoncé Zone.”
For those of us with limited resources, there’s a messy middle—the “Zone of Disappointment”—in which additional spending might lead to diminishing peace-of-mind returns, or make life more difficult by introducing new problems to contend with.
Here’s what the Zone of Disappointment looks like IRL.
You sign up for a meal kit service to answer the ever-present question “What’s for dinner tonight?” only to be faced with replacement responsibilities:
Setting reminders to pick each week’s menu before the deadline,
Retrieving your delivery before someone steals it from your doorstep,
Learning how to cook new meals each night from unfamiliar recipe cards,
Remembering to skip deliveries or change your address when traveling, and
Dealing with guilt about food waste if you haven’t cooked everything by the next delivery’s arrival.
You might find that, if you’d simply grabbed the building blocks for a few easy dinners from the grocery store, it would’ve required less brainpower from your finite executive-functioning reserves.
Identifying unsolvable problems
Here’s the other tricky thing about the Zone of Disappointment. Often, its complicated solvable problems exist alongside unsolvable ones.
Unsolvable problems are lifelong struggles inherent to the human condition. They have no solution, and no end—but wrestling with them is painful, so we desperately want to purchase our way out.
Unfortunately, throwing money at unsolvable problems isn’t correlated with relief. In fact, it can add to our pain—because not only have we not solved our problem, we’ve wasted a bunch of money to boot.
Say you’re an aspiring author struggling to make time for your craft. To pop over this roadblock, you consider renting a beautiful Airbnb as a creative retreat, or securing a spot in a writer’s workshop.
Neither purchase will solve this fundamentally unsolvable problem: the writing process just straight-up sucks. Creating art from scratch is, and will always be, uncomfortable.
You might decide that booking an adorable writing cabin would give you immense pleasure; that the workshop would teach you important skills, or introduce you to new writerly friends. Great! Just don’t click “buy” to avoid the necessary misery of constructing, revising, and editing your own sentences. It won’t work.
The same goes for caregiving, which brings up myriad solvable problems: determining what kinds of medical and household tasks need doing, identifying the skills required of each volunteer or paid caregiver, and figuring out appropriate schedules for everyone involved.
But don’t confuse those solvable problems with the unsolvable ones of aging and dying. There is no salve for the pain of contending with a loved one’s passing. There is only the act of learning to sit in the present moment with your own discomfort in a way that, someday, you can hope you’ll be proud of.
Avoiding the Zone of Disappointment
The Zone of Disappointment exists for all of us (except, presumably, Beyoncé). Finding yourself there isn’t indicative of a personal failing on your part.
Still: the challenge, for each of us, is to find our own personal sweet spot where paying for solutions doesn’t create new problems to solve.
Next time you’re staring down a problem in your own life, get clear on whether it’s solvable or unsolvable. Try identifying which solvable problems are simple, and which are complicated. Notice when it pays to outsource the complicated ones, and when it doesn’t. And practice sitting with the discomfort of life’s unsolvable problems.
These are exercises that will help you identify the tipping point between relief and disappointment—enabling you to stay, more often than not, on the right side of that line.
💬 What do you think?
I’m curious to hear from you. Tell me about a problem you purchased a “solution” for. Did that solution bring relief or disappointment?
Had your own plan-in-flames experience? Taking a leap into the unknown? I’d love to hear more. Just hit “reply” to get in touch, or introduce yourself here.
Warmly,
Maddie
I love this framing — it's a very novel but relatable one for me — and I love the graphics even more! Thanks for sharing.
This is an excellent post and certainly has me thinking about problems in a new light. I feel like I spend a lot of time (and money) in the Zone of Disappointment. I have also had to learn how to accept the unsolvable problems (easier said than done), which requires a degree of humility and an admission that some things are just out of our control.