I'm trying to understand what technology gives us, and what it removes.

I've spent a lot of my career making useful things easier to reach.

For years, that meant product and marketing work at companies like Intuit, Adobe, Precision Nutrition, and startups: fewer fields, clearer pages, shorter paths, less waiting around.

Most of the time, that work was right. Bad friction wastes time. It blocks access. It turns simple needs into endurance tests.

Now I work at Toyo.ai building production AI systems, agents, marketing workflows, and infrastructure for small businesses. The tools are different, but the promise is familiar: more capability, less waiting, more help on demand.

A lot of that abundance is genuinely good.

But the longer I've worked around products, growth, customer behavior, and AI, the more I've started to notice the harder part.

Technology creates abundance by removing friction. Sometimes that friction was only blocking people. Sometimes it was quietly helping them choose, pay attention, practice, commit, remember, or think for themselves.

That's the question behind The Abundance Trap.

I'm writing for people whose job is to make digital products easier to use, and for parents and teachers deciding what children should still learn to do for themselves. More broadly, it's for anyone wondering what we should protect as technology gets better at doing things for us.

The book isn't an anti-technology argument. I don't want worse tools, slower systems, or fewer opportunities.

I'm interested in when technology solves a problem, and when it quietly takes away a skill, habit, or bit of judgment we still need.

Before we make the next part of life easier, faster, or automatic, I think we need to ask:

What was this friction doing for us?