Kaitlin Quinn

· public-health

Why shouldn’t we reinvent the wheel?

TL;DR: We are taught not to reinvent the wheel because rebuilding is seen as wasteful. But if the system was designed for a world that no longer exists, taking it apart may be the most responsible thing we can do.

Photo by Christian Buehner / Unsplash

I have heard some version of “we don’t need to reinvent the wheel” for most of my working life. It is usually meant as common sense: learn from what exists, respect institutional knowledge, and do not rebuild something that already works.

I agree with that in theory.

But I have always had one simple question: what if the wheel is the problem?

There is a difference between ignoring history and examining it. Most systems make sense in the conditions that produced them. The more useful question is whether those conditions still exist.

I grew up inside the transition

I am 33. I learned cursive and keyboarding at roughly the same stage of childhood. I remember Thomas Guides, printed MapQuest directions, dial-up internet, encyclopedias, and computer labs. By adulthood, the internet had become infrastructure.

That timing matters.

Millennials were not simply born into a digital world, nor did we encounter it after our worldview was fully formed. We learned how to operate in both systems as the transition unfolded around us. By 2010, Pew was already documenting Millennials as especially active users of wireless internet, social networking, and other emerging digital tools. Pew Research Center

I think that gave many of us a distinct vantage point: we remember how things worked before the digital shift, while also learning to adapt as that shift was happening.

The internet also dramatically expanded the number of perspectives available to us. Once you realize how much sits outside the perspective you were originally given, it becomes much harder to mistake that perspective for the whole picture.

That has changed how I think about almost everything: work, education, money, leadership, professionalism, relationships, productivity, and success.

When something is presented as inevitable, I increasingly want to ask, "Who designed this?" Under what conditions? Who was it designed for? Are those conditions still true?

And if we were beginning today, would we build it this way again?

The instructions and the outcomes stopped matching

Millennials also entered adulthood as some very familiar instructions became less reliable.

Go to school. Work hard. Build a career. Buy a home. Save. Retire.

Many of us took that bargain seriously.

Research on people entering the labor market around the Great Recession found lasting effects from weak early-career conditions, including lower employment and medium-term wage effects for some cohorts. National Bureau of Economic Research

Housing is another part of that story, and I think we often talk about it too narrowly as a financial asset.

I moved out on my own at 18, and I have moved at least once in most years since then, sometimes multiple times in a year. There is a psychological difference between having somewhere to live and having a place you can actually settle into. Painting a wall, fixing something badly and repairing it, slowly accumulating a home, and trusting that the space will still be yours next year are acts of autonomy.

For someone who did not grow up with much physical stability, that matters to me far beyond property ownership. Perpetual housing insecurity changes your sense of what adulthood is supposed to feel like. It is especially disorienting to live without lasting control over your own space while people in positions of authority casually discuss renovations, additions, or second properties as ordinary inconveniences.

There is evidence behind that intuition. Research on renters has found that housing instability is associated with greater psychological distress, while more stable tenure appears protective of mental health. PubMed

That does not mean every Millennial followed the rules and got nothing. The economic picture is more complicated than that. Federal Reserve researchers found that Millennials in their late 30s had higher real median household incomes than the previous generation at the same age, but the rate of intergenerational progress was slower than that experienced by Baby Boomers. Federal Reserve

That nuance matters.

Something does not need to be universally worse for the relationship between effort, stability, and reward to have changed enough to make questioning the system reasonable.

I spent a long time trying harder inside the system

For much of my adult life, when something was not working, my instinct was to become better at operating within it.

More productive. More credentialed. More efficient. More adaptable.

I rocked the corporate whip until the wheels fell off.

Once they did, I became less interested in putting them back on than in asking whether I liked the vehicle.

For the last few years, I have been examining my life that way: relationships, work, schedule, education, money, clothing, physical space, business models, even what I consider productive.

The question underneath all of it has been simple:

If I could see the whole system clearly, would I choose it intentionally?

Sometimes the answer is yes.

Sometimes it is no.

What has surprised me is how often I had been optimizing something I had never consciously chosen.

That is where reinventing the wheel stopped sounding wasteful.

Sometimes rebuilding is how you discover which parts were carrying weight and which parts were simply inherited.

Respecting history does not require preserving it

Questioning inherited systems does not mean assuming everyone who built them was foolish.

Systems usually make sense in the environments that produced them.

Those environments change.

The world available to my grandmother as a young woman was materially different from the one available to me. Major federal protections against sex discrimination in credit did not arrive until the 1970s.

That is not ancient history.

The constraints changed, so the possible designs changed with them.

I think prior generations deserve enormous respect for what they built with the tools and freedoms available to them.

But respect is not preservation.

If previous generations gave us better tools, more knowledge, and more freedom to choose, then using those advantages to do things differently is not disrespecting what they built. It is what progress is supposed to look like.

Millennials have something useful to contribute now

I do think Millennials deserve more influence in this conversation.

Not because we are inherently smarter than the generations before or after us.

It's because we have accumulated a particular kind of institutional knowledge.

A lot of us have spent our careers translating between systems. We understand the old process and the new software. We understand what leadership wants and what employees actually experience. We built the spreadsheets, dashboards, and slide decks explaining the gap between strategy and reality.

Many of us have also spent years saying that perpetual acceleration is not sustainable.

Another transfer. Another restructure. Another platform. Another productivity initiative. Another year of being asked for greater output while the underlying bargain changes.

Eventually people get tired.

That is not necessarily resistance. It may simply be information about the system.

It is time we treated it that way.

Bring the wheel back to the table

I do not want Millennials to replace one generational hierarchy with another.

The worst outcome would be for us to eventually become the people telling younger generations that the systems we built are sacred because we suffered while building them.

I want something more iterative.

Bring the wheel back to the table. Take it apart. Keep what works. Understand why it worked. Identify what was designed for conditions that no longer exist. Ask who benefits, who carries the cost, and what new information is available.

Then rebuild what deserves rebuilding.

And someday, let the next generation take our wheel apart too.

That is not disrespect.

That is stewardship.

I trust my own ideas, and I also trust that other people will notice things I have missed. That is why I question systems publicly, why I am rebuilding so much of my own life, and why I am increasingly comfortable reinventing wheels people assure me are perfectly fine.

The point is not to prove that I can build a better wheel on my own.

The point is to put the wheel on the table and ask whether it is still taking us where we want to go, together.

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