Notification underload
When I order takeout from the restaurant down the block, they send me three or four texts. Order confirmation, one or two status updates, then a ready message. Apps let you track delivery of pretty much anything in near real time. Go progress, yay us.
But for slightly less trivial interactions: doctors' offices, senior care, flights, health insurance, home insurance, appointments, recurring billing, and at least six different systems I rely on at work, important changes happened and I never knew about them. Not because I didn't set up notifications. They just never came. Or more insidiously, they came only via one of a myriad of proprietary platforms, sites or apps, each requiring proactive login. No single organization is responsible for the aggregate cognitive load of all the rest, and this is a fact of which they are not unaware.
When critical information is obscured, especially when passive or unknowing acceptance can be monetized, prompt notification is disincentivized. Once again, Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was prescient: "[plans were] on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard."
The expectation is now that individuals are responsible for checking, confirming, following up. Increasingly enshittified organizations might or might not have accurate or accessible information on their sites, reps who might or might not answer the phone, call back, or provide accurate information. But if you miss the change or the deadline, the consequences are on you. Then you have to re-enter each individual broken system to figure out how to untangle and recover from it.
A single dashboard with reliable status updates for everything modern life requires us to track and be responsible for. Bear Blog feature request? :)