The Solutionist's Dilemma

My dad fell off a jungle gym when he was 13, and he's been adapting ever since.

The doctors missed the hip fracture entirely. By the time anyone figured out what had actually happened, the damage had begun compounding through his skeleton like interest on a debt he never agreed to take on. A half-dozen surgeries across six decades followed: back, hip, knee, ankle, both shoulders. A childhood accident that became a lifelong lesson in physics.

My dad is 77 now and walks with two hiking poles almost everywhere we go. Watching him move through a room, you can see the quiet arithmetic happening in real time: weight distribution, joint load, route planning. It is a continuous negotiation with gravity that most people never have to think about.

I have never, not once, heard him complain.

This Thanksgiving, I tried to offer a solution. I bought him a wearable exoskeleton. He tried it on, took a walk, and handed it back. It left me thinking about what technology can and cannot solve, and what we lose when we assume every human struggle is a product gap waiting to be filled.

His verdict was measured. He appreciated the engineering, but he couldn't see himself wearing it. Ultimately, I returned it.

The product isn't quite ready yet, though it's getting close. The most notable thing was the oddly casual nature of the transaction. The cyborg future arrived in my parents' kitchen, was tried on like a pair of shoes, and went back to Amazon because the fit wasn't right.

When you think about it, we’ve been building cyborgs for almost a century.

Three million Americans walk around with pacemakers regulating their heartbeats. Over a million people hear through cochlear implants: computers fused to their skulls, routing sound directly to the auditory nerve. Diabetics wear continuous glucose monitors that talk to insulin pumps, creating closed-loop systems that manage blood sugar without conscious intervention.

The trajectory is clear: my children will likely regard mobility limitations the way I regard nearsightedness: a solvable problem with a store-bought solution.

American life expectancy is 77.5 years, but our healthspan (the years spent in good health with full mobility) is only 66. That creates an 11-year gap where people are technically alive but increasingly dependent.

76 million Baby Boomers are now entering that gap. They are the wealthiest generation in history, they are terrified of losing independence, and they will spend almost anything to delay the nursing home. The global assistive technology market is projected to hit $30 billion by 2030, purely to address this need.

I believe in this future. The Hypershell I bought my dad was a bet on that thesis, applied personally.

Solutionism is my religion. I don't go to church, but I do have Amazon Prime! I have a tendency to believe that every problem must be solved. Preferably with a gadget and an app.

To the solutionist, friction is failure. Constraint is a bug. For any human struggle, there exists a purchase, a protocol, or an optimization that can remove it. I scan the horizon for upgrades the way previous generations scanned it for salvation.

This worldview has built extraordinary things, but it is also blind to what it cannot fix.

I wanted the Hypershell to work because I wanted to fix something that wasn't mine to fix. I wanted to hand my dad a device and watch sixty years of adaptation become unnecessary. I wanted to outsource his struggle to a battery pack and a toggle on his phone.

That impulse came from a good place, but it missed the point entirely. It treated his adaptation as a temporary condition. A holding pattern until the real fix arrived. As if anyone still struggling just hasn't found the right tool yet.

My dad didn't wait for the technology to arrive. He built something else entirely.

He picked up kayaking because it doesn't require bearing his own weight. He bikes because the machine extends what his joints cannot do alone. He walks every single day because he decided his limitations wouldn't dictate the boundaries of his life.

He did this without bitterness. Without ever asking anyone to feel sorry for him or make accommodations. He just kept solving the problem, one day at a time, for sixty-four years.

The Hypershell is a commodity. Anyone with a credit card can have one by Tuesday.

But the thing my dad built, the capacity to absorb limitation without resentment, to calculate the cost of every step and take it anyway, to show up decade after decade and find the next workaround, is something else entirely. It is resilience.

You cannot expedite shipping on resilience. You can only build it, slowly, through years of refusing to quit.

The Hypershell went back to Amazon. I'll probably buy the next version when it comes out. That's who I am. Some lessons land and still don't change you. I still believe the world will be better when the hardware catches up to the need.

But I’m also pausing to remember that some struggles aren't product gaps. Not all friction is failure. Some parts of life just stand outside the reach of a clean solution. Some things are just hard.

Up and to the right.