Why Don't You Just…

Posted 2026-05-20

In 2013, the United Kingdom launched Universal Credit, a welfare reform ostensibly intended to simplify the benefits system by merging six separate payments into one. The new system was designed to be applied for online, but many claimants had no reliable internet access. Those who did often lacked fixed addresses, which the system required before it would register them. without registration they couldn’t receive payments; without payments they couldn’t maintain an address, and without an address they couldn’t register.

Government officials and advice workers, when presented with this loop, would sometimes suggest that claimants “just go to the library” to use a computer. They did not know—or had not thought through the fact—that some libraries require a membership card to use their computers, that membership cards require proof of address, and that the Universal Credit application times out and loses your work if you do not complete it in a single session. The word “just” was doing an enormous amount of lifting.

“Just” does that in a lot of conversations. When someone with relative power is told about a problem they have not personally faced, a common response is to suggest an individual solution: “Why don’t you just move to a better neighborhood, just report the harassment to HR, just open a bank account, just apply for a scholarship.” The suggestion is not usually made in bad faith. It is made because the person offering it has, at some point in their life, moved, or reported, or opened, or applied, and found the process manageable. What they cannot see is what made it manageable for them and what makes it unmanageable for someone else.

Peggy McIntosh described this as an invisible knapsack: a set of advantages so routine to those who carry them that they are not experienced as advantages at all. You do not notice that your accent marks you as non-threatening, that your name gets you callbacks, that your neighborhood has a library, or that the official you need to speak to treats you as a legitimate claimant rather than a probable fraud. You don’t notice it because none of it has ever caused you a problem. The person offering the “just” solution is usually describing what they would do, which is not the same thing as what the other person can do.

The most obvious thing “just” conceals is cascading prerequisites. Many systems assume that the person using them already has a set of prior resources in place. FIXME: give an example other than Aadhaar

A second thing “just” hides is the cost of the transaction. Taking a day off work to stand in line costs money that people without savings cannot spare. Challenging a decision by a government agency or a platform company requires knowing how to challenge it, having the literacy and the time to fill in forms, and being willing to risk the relationship with the institution you depend on. The last point matters more than it might seem: if the institution denying you a benefit is the same institution you are hoping will pay your rent next month, asserting your rights has a price.

A third thing the word hides is cognitive load. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir spent years studying what poverty does to decision-making, and their conclusion was not what most people expect. Poverty makes people worse at decisions in the same way that keeping someone awake for twenty-four hours makes them worse at decisions: it depletes a finite resource. Managing an unpredictable income, keeping track of which bills are overdue, or calculating whether buying the cheaper item in bulk saves more than it costs to store consumes cognitive bandwidth that is then not available for navigating bureaucratic systems. The person telling someone to “just” do something is typically not paying this tax, so they have the mental capacity to think about the solution that the person being advised does not.

The invisible knapsack metaphor is useful, but there is a complementary image that captures something different: the invisible staircase. People who have always lived in buildings with functioning elevators do not think about stairs. When they suggest that someone in a wheelchair “just take the stairs,” they are not being cruel. They have simply never had to think about stairs, because stairs have never been an obstacle for them.

This is why the “why don’t you just” response so often lands badly. It is not merely that the solution is wrong; it’s that is reveals that the person offering it has never had to think about the problem. They are announcing their distance from it, and the person who has been living inside the problem knows, at once, that the advice is coming from outside.

South Africa’s apartheid pass laws required Black South Africans to carry a document showing they had permission to be in a given area. The document had to be produced on demand by any police officer. If a man had left his pass book at home, or lost it, the advice “just get a replacement” required traveling back to the township administrative office where the original had been issued—not the office nearest to where he was stopped. This meant taking time off work and navigating a bureaucracy that had been designed to make compliance difficult.

A further problem with the “just” response persists even when the individual solution actually works. If a person successfully navigates the broken system, the system sees this as proof that it is functioning correctly. Virginia Eubanks documented this pattern across multiple American welfare systems: people who managed to get the automated system to approve their application had often spent dozens of hours learning its quirks, calling hotlines, finding advocates, or simply applying repeatedly until an error cleared itself. None of that effort was visible to the system. The system recorded a successful outcome. The structural problem—that the system was failing the people it was supposed to serve—was continuously obscured by the individual successes of the most resourceful claimants.

The pattern is particularly vicious on tech platforms. Companies routinely advise users to “just report” harassment, “just use a VPN” to avoid surveillance, or “just switch platforms” when a service degrades. Each suggestion assumes that the user has time, technical literacy, and social capital that many do not have, and none of them fix the underlying system. They transfer the cost of a structural failure onto the person least able to bear it.

Eubanks2018: Virginia Eubanks: Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. St. Martin’s Press, 2018, 9781250074317.
McIntosh1989: Peggy McIntosh: “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Peace and Freedom, July/August 1989.
MullainathanShafir2013: Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir: Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Times Books/Henry Holt, 2013, 9780805092646.