I first came across the term “the annoyance economy” in The Week, which in turn appeared to draw heavily from The New Republic. But the moment I read the phrase, I realised this is not just an American problem. South Africans are living inside the annoyance economy every day.
In fact, many of us are drowning in it.
The annoyance economy works like this: companies make systems deliberately difficult, frustrating, time-consuming, or irritating because it either saves them money or makes them more money. Your time becomes their profit model.
Take medical aids.
Try matching up a day clinic with a specialist under your plan for a procedure. I recently tried doing this through Discovery Health for a family member. It became such a maze of authorisations, approved providers, conflicting information, call centre loops, and administrative nonsense that eventually we gave up and went through the public hospital system instead.
Think about that for a moment.
People are paying enormous monthly medical aid premiums partly to avoid state healthcare, yet the bureaucracy becomes so exhausting that some eventually surrender and go back to the public system anyway.
That is the annoyance economy in action.
Then there are insurance claims.
You phone. You wait. Your airtime disappears while some recorded voice thanks you for your patience. Eventually somebody answers and asks for documents, proof, serial numbers, maintenance records, photographs, invoices, forms, more forms, and then perhaps another form.
Sometimes it feels as if the entire system is designed not to help you claim, but to wear you down until you abandon the claim altogether.
And in South Africa, where mobile data and call costs remain painfully expensive for many people, this irritation has a real financial cost attached to it. People increasingly avoid normal cellphone calls unless absolutely necessary because it simply costs too much.
Now add spam calls to the mix.
The volume of spam and scam calls has become ridiculous. Insurance sales. “Investment opportunities.” AI-generated robocalls. Debt offers. Solar offers. Medical aid upgrades. Funeral plans. Somebody somewhere always wants five minutes of your life.
And who has to deal with it?
You do.
You block the numbers. You report them. You delete them. You waste your own time protecting yourself from other people invading your attention. Government promises legislation every few years, but like many things in this country, enforcement seems to drift somewhere into the void.
Then we move online, where the annoyance economy becomes industrial-scale.
You open an app and are forced to sit through three adverts before the thing even loads. Some apps have become almost unusable. They interrupt you constantly with pop-ups, autoplay videos, subscription demands, notifications, upgrade prompts, cookie warnings, surveys, and flashing banners begging for your attention.
Even YouTube has become increasingly aggressive with advertising. It used to be one advert. Now it can be several before the video even starts, followed by interruptions during the video itself.
Nothing is free anymore.
Or perhaps more accurately, your attention is the payment.
And this is where the annoyance economy becomes more serious than mere irritation. Economists can probably calculate the financial loss fairly easily. Hours wasted on hold. Time spent navigating systems. Extra mobile costs. Lost productivity. Delayed claims. Emotional fatigue.
Across a year, it probably costs ordinary people thousands.
But the deeper cost is psychological.
Modern life increasingly feels like an obstacle course deliberately designed to exhaust consumers into submission. Every interaction becomes friction. Every service becomes a battle. Every platform wants more of your time, more of your data, more of your patience.
The irony is that many large corporations talk endlessly about “customer experience” while creating systems that actively punish customers.
Consumers are slowly learning to fight back. People delete intrusive apps. They block ads where possible. They abandon services that waste their time. Some refuse to answer unknown numbers entirely.
That may be the only real defence left.
Because the annoyance economy is expanding rapidly, and the uncomfortable truth is this:
Much of it is being driven by very large corporations that already make enormous profits from consumers while simultaneously making consumers’ lives more frustrating.
Further Reading
The Week — “How Much Is the Annoyance Economy Costing You?”
