The Solution Problem: Why Solving Problems Often Creates More

Consider someone who’s perfectly content with their office chair. It’s not ergonomic, it doesn’t have lumbar support, but it works.

Then, during a meeting or a visit to a friend’s office, they sit in a high-end, adjustable, memory foam chair. And suddenly, their old chair isn’t just basic—it’s uncomfortable.

Nothing changed about the original chair. But their expectations did. What was once “good enough” is now a problem in need of fixing.

That’s the essence of an argument Josh Zlatkus (2025) made in the context of mental health [1]. In the final post of a three-part Substack series, he proposed that the rise in reported mental illness might not be due solely to increased suffering but to an expanding mental health infrastructure that subtly redefines what counts as a problem. As more solutions arise, more people come to see themselves as requiring one. The solutions, in other words, may be helping, but they’re also changing what needs help.

While Zlatkus focused on therapy, diagnoses, and the mental health industry, the underlying pattern he describes extends far beyond clinical settings. In fact, it reflects a broader psychological dynamic: When solutions become abundant, they start to shape how we perceive the world. They shift our expectations. They narrow our tolerance for discomfort. And sometimes, they create new problems in the act of solving old ones.

This is the solution problem—and it’s not just philosophical. Research suggests our minds are wired to recalibrate what counts as a problem based on what remains. As real adversity declines or gets addressed, we often redefine milder experiences as equally pressing. And when solving problems becomes a profitable enterprise, the cycle accelerates.

When Less Adversity Feels Like More

There’s nothing wrong with reducing adversity. Most of us would prefer fewer obstacles, fewer stressors, fewer things going wrong.

But there’s a paradox here: The fewer genuine threats or hardships we face, the more sensitive we seem to become to the ones that remain. In a 2022 post, I argued that too little adversity can be just as problematic as too much—not because adversity is inherently good, but because it helps us develop the coping strategies we rely on when things go wrong. Without enough experience navigating difficulty, even minor challenges can feel overwhelming.

And when those more serious stressors are removed, what remains often ends up feeling just as stressful—because our frame of reference adjusts. The baseline shifts, but our reactions don’t always shrink to match. This dynamic echoes what Haslam (2016) called concept creep: the expansion of harm-related concepts—like trauma, bullying, or mental disorder—over time.

Concept creep occurs in two ways: horizontally, when concepts come to include qualitatively different types of phenomena (for example, extending “bullying” from schoolyard aggression to include workplace exclusion), and vertically, when they expand to cover less severe cases of the same basic experience (such as describing routine stress or sadness as "trauma" or "depression"). As society becomes more attuned to psychological well-being, it’s more likely to treat everyday discomforts as significant problems—worthy of attention and intervention.

Vertical forms of concept creep may not be purely cultural—they appear to reflect a deeper psychological tendency. As Levari et al. (2018) demonstrated, when the frequency of a particular stimulus decreases, people tend to broaden their definitions to maintain the same rate of detection.

In one experiment, participants were shown a series of blue and purple dots and asked to identify which ones were blue. As the number of actual blue dots declined, participants began labeling more of the purple ones as blue.

Researchers found the same pattern when participants were asked to identify threatening faces and unethical behavior. As severe cases became less common, people started labeling milder expressions and less problematic behaviors as threats or violations. The mind, it seems, doesn’t use fixed standards—it adjusts to what remains.

The parallels to vertical concept creep are hard to ignore. When genuine adversity becomes less common, we don’t simply update our standards—we adjust our perceptions, often without realizing it. What once seemed neutral now registers as harmful. And when that harm maps onto a preexisting category—like anxiety, trauma, or abuse—the conceptual boundary expands to accommodate it.

Real-World Evidence: Concept Creep in Mental Health Diagnoses

The parallels between perceptual recalibration and vertical concept creep are particularly evident in how people interpret mental health symptoms. Schumann et al. (2024) presented participants with vignettes describing individuals experiencing varying levels of psychological distress. As the severity of symptoms declined, participants became more likely to endorse mental health diagnoses for cases that would traditionally fall below clinical thresholds.

In other words, as exposure to more severe cases diminished, people became more willing to label milder forms of distress as disordered.

This pattern aligns almost perfectly with the mechanism identified by Levari et al.: as the frequency of clear-cut cases goes down, the standards for what counts shift. Schumann et al. explicitly interpreted their findings as evidence of concept creep: the diagnostic net widens, not necessarily because suffering has intensified but because the definitions used to capture it have expanded.

This shift may stem in part from increased attention to psychological well-being—a generally positive development. But it also introduces new challenges. When everyday struggles are increasingly framed in clinical terms, it blurs the line between dysfunction and normal variation. Once those experiences are labeled as problems, they become candidates for solutions—even if those solutions offer little benefit.

When Solutions Become the Business Model

As more experiences are categorized as problems, the demand for solutions naturally grows. In many domains—especially healthcare, education, and technology—solutions become both responses to need and products to be sold.

Once a solution becomes a source of revenue, there’s a built-in incentive to promote the conditions that justify it. The logic is straightforward: The broader the definition of the problem, the larger the potential market for the fix.

This doesn’t mean individuals or institutions are necessarily acting in bad faith. But it does mean that as mental health awareness campaigns, wellness industries, educational support services, and digital tools proliferate, they bring with them a subtle but persistent incentive: to keep the problem visible and, ideally, to expand it. As more people come to see themselves as having a problem, more will seek out solutions—and more solutions will be created to meet that demand.

Over time, this cycle becomes self-sustaining. Diagnostic tools evolve to detect milder forms of distress. Digital platforms offer personalized mental health tracking for anyone “feeling off.” Schools expand accommodations for everyday challenges. And therapy, once targeted to the treatment of clear disorders, is increasingly framed as essential for navigating life itself.

Each shift may be defensible on its own. But together, they widen the scope of what counts as a problem—and increase the perceived need for help.

The Costs of Expanding Problems

As more of everyday life is framed in terms of problems to be solved, the bar for what counts as “acceptable” continues to rise. Mild discomfort becomes distress. Ordinary struggles become symptoms. And in the pursuit of better solutions, we may gradually lose the capacity to tolerate anything less than optimal.

That’s the hidden cost of the solution problem. When every imperfection invites intervention, we not only expand the range of what counts as a problem—we also erode our ability to cope without help. We look for a solution to fix a problem that, in many cases, was caused by a previous solution.

Solutions are often valuable, but we need to distinguish between solving meaningful problems and manufacturing them through redefinition. As we keep looking for problems to solve, we should pause to ask: Are we actually improving people’s lives, or just making them more sensitive to experiences that don’t truly require fixing?