A graphic designer told me recently that they don't want AI doing their designs. It's not because they hate AI or think it's going to steal their job, she genuinely enjoys graphic design. She wants AI and robots doing her dishes and laundry so she can spend more time on the creative work she loves.
That stuck with me in an unexpected way. I might trade in my two year old car for one that drives itself.
I hate driving.
Not the open-road, windows-down kind. I hate sitting in stop-and-go traffic, watching minutes disappear. I commute to work, drive between clinic locations, and sit in construction backups in a city that's been "improving" the same interchange for thirty years. It's the most unproductive part of my life and it happens twice per day.
I test drove a car with Full Self-Driving last week and it blew me away. Highway traffic, lane changes, stop-and-go, traffic lights, stop signs. The exact kind of driving I hate most. All of it. It's not perfect. But let's be honest, none of us is great.
That's the whole pitch. Not the acceleration, not the tech dashboard, not the environmental angle. I want to get 45 minutes of my day back.
The numbers don't make sense.
My 4Runner is financed at 7%. I'm two years into payments with three years left. The remaining interest on the loan is about $1,500 and I've already paid $5,000. My monthly payment is $692 and the thing gets 17 miles per gallon. At $3 a gallon and 10,000 miles a year, that's roughly $150 a month in gas. Total monthly cost: about $840.
The dealer is offering 0.99% APR. If I trade in the 4Runner and finance a new electric car for 72 months, the payment drops to $478. Electricity runs maybe $30 a month. Even adding $99/month for Full Self-Driving, my total monthly cost is around $607.
I still spent a solid hour building a spreadsheet comparing loan terms. The additional interest between 36 months and 72 months at 0.99%? $527 total. That's less than $8 a month. Classic CPA move, agonizing over half a month of Netflix while losing 45 minutes a day to traffic.
I've spent weeks trying to wrap my head around how I got this wrong. I found a super-reliable used car, negotiated the purchase price, and paid ahead on the loan. All the advice you get from personal finance experts. How is a new car with a longer loan a better decision? It makes my brain hurt. But somehow, at 0.99% APR, the "responsible" short loan actually costs me more than the "irresponsible" long loan due to time value of money.
We optimize the wrong things.
At work, this is a decision I wouldn't think twice about: get back 15 hours a month of unproductive time and save $230 doing it. I'd sign that deal before lunch. But because it's my personal finances, my brain stops working and I waste a Sunday morning building a spreadsheet to save $8 a month.
We keep pointing technology at the things we enjoy and doing the miserable stuff ourselves. That's backwards. The whole point of automation, AI, robots, whatever you want to call it is to eliminate the things you hate so you can spend more time with the people you love and on the things you actually enjoy.
Arnold Bennett wrote in 1908: "If you have time, you can obtain money. You cannot buy more time." He was talking about office workers wasting their evenings and commutes to newspapers and procrastination. Substitute email and doomscrolling and we face the same problems, 118 years later.
⚡ ONE MORE THING
The book is How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. It's 70 pages, written in 1908, and I'm shocked by how much it applies today. Influencers have been repackaging Arnold Bennett's ideas for 100+ years. Go to the original source, free on Kindle or with Spotify Premium.
— Matt
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