A few years ago, PG wrote about something called schlep blindness. A lot of tasks in business are schleps (data entry, documentation, meetings), but people become so accustomed to the tedium that they can't see it anymore, and therefore have a hard time buying software solutions that might eliminate those tasks.
He's right about schlep blindness, but there's an even stronger case to be made.
In many cases, people aren't blind to the hard stuff -- they actually derive some part of their identity, worth and even market value from it. Think of anyone you know who has mastered a hard or unwieldy tool, or knows how to navigate a complex interface. They put in the time and gained the rare skills. Their team members may depend on this individual precisely because no one else is willing or able to master the unwieldy tool, or get to know the messy data. My tools, myself.
But this goes deeper than tools. Some forms of pain seep into your identity. And people find ways to put a meaningful spin on them. That can be positive and voluntary, like the communities that emerge around doing hard things like exercise. Or it can be involuntary: Having a "cross to bear", as many of my grandmother's friends seemed to do, elevated them in her eyes. Bearing up under suffering lent them dignity, and ushered them into a community of people who also bore up. They found a way to choose what was given to them. Pain -> community -> identity. (The good form of this is finding dignity and agency within constraints; the bad form is a kind of morbid narcissism where the sufferer constantly ruminates on their pain and limitations.)
Indeed, globe-spanning cultures like whaling and sailing depended on a kind of techno-social homeostasis that saw innovations like propeller-driven frigates … and shrugged. This story is told well in Men, Machines and Modern Times. All the hardships that sailors underwent and the dangers they faced (the kind that gave rise to great works of literature like Moby Dick) — those hardships and dangers defined who they were. The physical challenges gave them something to do on a long voyage. And when the propeller finally won, that sailors’ culture was wiped out. To change technologies is sometimes to change identities; it is a fundamental conversion that many people will fight. That’s why early adopters are so rare, and why their voices can ring out in the wilderness for years. In other words, technological change is social change, and most social change happens over decades.
On an individual level, people suffering from depression often think that their pessimism is a form of realism; likewise, many who feel anxiety would say that their worries are justified. Or take the elderly -- many of them don't want to hear about "reversing aging." They're not living some personal version of "Cocoon." They're committed (or at least resigned) to a glide path that ends in death, and they're part of a cohort and community that is often on the same path. (Now think about how you feel when you hear the words “aging is a problem that can be solved” — that skepticism or disbelief is the point of this post, and it is the reception most new technology should expect.)
Allowing one's identity to shift in response to pain might be adaptive! Accepting chronic pains is probably easier than fighting and regretting them every day. On the flip side, you'll hear habit evangelists like James Clear talking about how our identity is based on what we do (and feel) every day.
But that also makes certain pains to "solve," because even considering a "pain point" as "something to be solved" pushes it out of the realm of identity. It requires a fundamental reframing, a letting go and a leap of faith. To make a change, people have to believe that something else is possible.
That's why startups trying to find product-market fit first have to find a group of people who recognize that they have a problem. Outsiders pointing at them and saying "that's a problem" is not enough. The supposed “problem havers” have to be looking for a fix, building alternatives, adopting crappy workarounds. (These are all symptoms of incipient change that Steve Blank uses to qualify a prospect.) If you're solving "problems" that people have adopted as their identity, you've got your work cut out for you. It's only a problem when the user says it is!
Barring that, the founder is living in delusion, pretending to solve a chimera. “False problems”, the kinds of problems that tech-first companies purport to solve, are the number one form of denial in startups without PMF. Breaking past that false consciousness and entering into the world of “problem havers” is the only exit route from that trough of despair.