When astronaut Christina Koch, the first woman to fly around the moon, reported a problem from space that could have been copied and pasted from an IT help desk ticket, something clicked for Americans. Her complaint? “If you forget your Bluetooth and then try to re-pair it, you won’t be happy to see it in the list of available devices.”
Commander Reed Wiseman, orbiting Earth on the Artemis II mission, radioed Houston about a problem shared by millions of company workers. “I have two copies of Microsoft Outlook, and neither one works.” So much for the old “One small step for man.”
Internet commentators found these moments painfully relatable and shared them widely. Why did a quote about technology maintenance go viral in April 2026?At the root of the comedy lies the underappreciated cost of modernity. We’re getting richer, and wealth means owning more stuff. More stuff means more stuff to break, more stuff to update, more stuff to troubleshoot guides to, and more to recover from forgotten passwords. Even multi-billion dollar space hardware runs the same glitchy consumer software that we all use every day. There is a kind of democracy of frustration here.
Old problems never went away either. The Artemis project has been plagued by toilet malfunctions. Even with new technology, old problems remain. There are still pipe leaks and dead batteries. We’re also experiencing Wi-Fi dead zones, incompatible Bluetooth drivers, and cloud storage accounts that are inaccessible due to changing phone numbers.
Wealth and happiness: an ongoing debate
This is a question EconLog readers are familiar with. Does being rich actually make us happier?
This is one of the oldest discussions on this site. Arnold Kling launched the system in 2003, arguing that revealed preferences should lead to higher levels of happiness. Otherwise, why would people choose to earn it? Compounding the situation further, David Henderson expressed skepticism about cross-national happiness surveys.
In his review of Tyler Cowen’s book on economic growth, Scott Sumner accepts the widespread finding that wealth and happiness are positively correlated, but points out that the relationship is threaded through many indirect channels: improved health, a cleaner environment, less violence, and expanded human rights. He argued that growth should be the default policy stance, even if its direct impact on well-being is uncertain.
Recently, Brian Caplan advocated an interesting position by calling himself an economic optimist but a happiness pessimist. He looked at the data and saw very strong growth. He also looked at the data and found that income does little to move the happiness needle. He concludes that we should be happy about our material wealth, even if survey respondents don’t report feeling much better.
I believe that progress is good and that there are reasons why people pursue higher incomes. Having more makes us richer, but astronauts’ dissatisfaction speaks to the cognitive strain that comes with it. This helps explain, in part, why the increase in happiness is not as large.
Consider the distribution of the burden of more things across a typical household. Parents are dealing with a level of complexity in their homes, such as choosing between subscription services and managing multiple accounts. Dads who once needed to know how to change the oil or fix a leaky faucet may now double up as the family’s de facto IT department, managing passwords and troubleshooting smart TVs. Children face being locked out of school because they forget their passwords.
As the astronaut example makes clear, none of this is a “skills issue.” It’s a structural thing. NASA crews have teams of engineers on the ground to deal with technical issues, but most of us have YouTube tutorials from four years ago.
Our devices connect us and entertain us. I plan on syncing my phone to my car stereo and flipping through my entire Apple Music library until something breaks. Are we happier today if we have more things? Overall, I think our situation is improving. But in the words of The Notorious BIG, “More money means more problems.”
Featured image: NASA’s “Illumination of Orion.”
