There is a quiet pattern running through modern public life—across transportation rules, bank products, pharmaceutical advertising, insurance disclosures, and even safety messaging. It is not moral failure. It is not regulatory capture. It is not even what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification,” although some of the symptoms overlap.
What we face is something simpler and more unnerving: an expanding universe of rules and responsibilities that are literally impossible for ordinary people to meet, even with good intentions and careful effort. We are building systems that expect superhuman attention, perfect reaction times, post-graduate comprehension, and then we bill, fine, penalize, or blame people when their human limits collide with those expectations.
We can name this for what it is: the Impossibility Gap—the distance between what rules assume people can do, and what people can actually do in the real world.
Once you see it, you start seeing it everywhere. It increases inequality and although it impacts all of us, it especially affects people living with disabilities and those living in poverty. It also deceptively validates the most destructive features of the ‘meritocracy’ that is responsible for increasing societal complexity.
The impossibility of reading, reacting, or understanding
Take the modern vehicle commercial. It flashes financing terms across the bottom of the screen in a font the size of an aspirin label. The text appears for three or four seconds, often less.
No human being can read it in time—not even a fluent speed reader—yet the disclosure is treated as if it created informed consent.
The law requires the disclosure, the advertiser provides it, and the viewer is deemed to have been “informed,” even though the entire exercise is physically impossible to execute.
Credit card agreements, reverse mortgage disclosures, and non-medical insurance contracts offer another form of impossibility. The information is technically there, in seven-page tables and nested footnotes.
But its structure exceeds the cognitive bandwidth of any person who is busy, stressed, tired, or simply normal. Even well-educated consumers frequently fail basic comprehension tests for these products.
This is not evidence of human failure; it is evidence that complexity has outrun general human cognitive capacity.
Pharmaceutical advertising has perfected the form: soothing music, attractive people, lush scenery—and then a tornado of sometimes lethal side effects, read at high speed by a voice actor while the screen fills with competing imagery.
The law is satisfied; the viewer is not informed. The entire performance is a ritual of disclosure that no one can actually absorb.
These are not minor irritants. They are systemic indicators of a deeper problem: we increasingly govern by impossibility.
The structure of the impossibility gap
In sector after sector, three forms of impossibility recur.
1. Temporal impossibility
The rule requires an action faster than people can physically or perceptually perform.
- Reading tiny print in seconds
- Absorbing a flood of risk disclosures while competing stimuli distract attention
The rule assumes superhuman speed; the human falls short.
2. Cognitive impossibility
The information is too complex to realistically comprehend under normal conditions.
- Multi-layered credit card interest rules
- No-medical life insurance exclusions and conditional triggers
- Reverse mortgage terms with compounding obligations
- Drug warnings listing dozens of possible adverse interactions
The rule assumes superhuman comprehension; the human falls short.
3. Situational or physical impossibility
The environment is designed such that safe or compliant behaviour cannot reliably occur.
- Administrative rules that assume high executive function from people who are stressed, overburdened, ill, or just normal
- Benefit systems that assume unlimited bandwidth from people living with scarcity
The rule assumes a world different from the one we all inhabit.
Why impossibility has become a feature, not a bug
Impossible expectations do not arise from malice. They arise from two converging incentives.
First, disclosure is cheaper than redesign.
It is easier to flash micro-print than to write simpler financing terms. Easier to warn patients than to design safer drugs. Easier to list exclusions than to make insurance usable. Disclosure satisfies the duty without changing the underlying product.
Second, shifting responsibility downward is administratively easy. The patient “should have read the leaflet,” or the borrower “should have understood the compound interest,” the system bears no fault even when the expectations are unmeetable. Impossibility becomes a shield against accountability.
This creates a structural fiction: the fiction that information has been delivered, comprehension has occurred, and risk has been fairly allocated, even when none of that is true.
The cost of impossibility is human fragility
When systems demand the impossible, two things happen.
First, people fail—and blame themselves.
The borrower believes they were irresponsible. The patient believes they didn’t pay attention. It becomes a personal failing rather than a structural one.
Second, the system becomes fragile.
When the rules require superhuman effort, any normal deviation—a late payment, a missed form, a moment of inattention—can trigger disproportionate consequences.
This is the same dynamic seen in administrative poverty: income-support rules that presume a level of paperwork capacity, internet access, stability, and continuous vigilance that poor households simply do not have.
The impossibility becomes the trap.
Don’t require what people cannot do
A more honest and effective approach begins with a basic premise:
No rule, disclosure, or standard of care should demand more than a normal person can realistically do under typical conditions.
This is not a moral argument; it is a design argument.
It suggests modest, targeted reforms:
- Feasibility standards for disclosures: if people cannot read or understand them in practice, rewrite or redesign them.
- Simplified, standardized core terms for consumer finance and insurance products: three to five variables that matter most.
- Administrative realism in public benefits: rules calibrated to the actual bandwidth and stability people possess.
None of this requires new ideology. It requires humility about human limits and honesty about system design.
We talk often about trust in institutions, the complexity of modern life, and the rising sense of being overwhelmed. Much of that can be traced to this widening Impossibility Gap. When systems expect the impossible, people lose faith—not in themselves, but in the institutions that pretend impossible tasks constitute meaningful choice or informed consent.
A general theory of impossibility clarifies the stakes. It tells us that the problem is not poor decision-making, or lack of responsibility, or moral decline. It is that our systems increasingly treat impossibility as if it were choice—and then allocate blame accordingly.
Naming the pattern makes it visible.
Making it visible makes it fixable.
This is not about demanding perfection from regulators or corporations. It is about returning to a simple baseline: design rules and products for humans—not superhumans.
When we do that, we reduce fragility, improve fairness, and build systems that ordinary people can use without fear, confusion, or impossible expectations.
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