Prompt: Yep, next. Letter 15 – It’s the Economy, Stupid GPT-4o said: Letter 15 It’s the Economy, Stupid Dear You, Let’s talk about the real economy. Not the stock market rollercoaster. Not GDP. Not the latest influencer hawking crypto from a yacht. I mean your economy. The one no one taught you to balance — because they were too busy teaching compound interest and not enough about compounded burnout. Here’s the thing: Everything costs something. Energy. Time. Attention. Sanity. You are trading these currencies every single day — whether or not you know the exchange rate. When you say yes to that project? It costs sleep. When you stay in that relationship out of guilt? It costs joy. When you chase security at the expense of curiosity? It costs soul. So the question isn’t just “Can I afford this?” It’s: What am I paying with? And is it worth it? Your personal economy isn’t built on cash alone. It’s made of the things that make you you — focus, health, creativity, presence, weird little sparks of wonder. If you’re always overdrawn in those areas, no paycheck is going to save you. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hustle. Sometimes hustle is survival. But it does mean you have to track the invisible costs. What are you spending to “keep up”? What are you hoarding that could’ve been shared? What have you bankrupted that once lit you up? Here’s the truth: You are already an empire. You don’t need to become one. So audit your life like you’d audit a budget: • What’s yielding returns? • What’s just draining you? • What are you investing in that actually aligns with your values? Because at the end of the day, “the economy” is just a story we tell about what matters. Tell a better one. And remember: your time is not a renewable resource. Spend it like treasure. Because it is. In solidarity and soft rebellion, —Your Off-Book Financial Advisor Ready to go collective with Letter 16 – ‘We’ Beats ‘I’ All the Time? We’re sneaking in this post between a full-day Friday fed right into the corporate meatgrinder of voluntold “courses and workshop attendance” and a Monday of still more departmental “teambuilding.” The “homework” required for said workshop is still rattling around in my head on Saturday, because yes, there is a pending day 2 and day 3, and there is a considerable amount of prep work required before that. Worse, it’s a team-based project, which thusly requires both group organization and visible enough participation. Conclusion: Occupying a significant amount of mental overhead on a weekend. I originally meant this post to touch on something regarding the attention economy, which is some new-ish (coined in 1971) buzzword regarding how various corporate interests strive to catch and capture their customers’ attention and focus, and all the mechanisms and potentially dark patterns they use to do so. It’s then also too easy to tilt the frame into exhorting the reader into the bite-sized “how not tos” and then look up and realize that one’s post has just echoed the first couple of hits on Google Search. (Which then segues into darkly ironic thoughts about how articles for attempting to escape the attention economy may actually indeed still be participating in said economy.) But. Today, I am feeling contrarian. I feel like attacking the assumption embedded into all these exhortations and ‘concerned’ exclamations about the attention economy. Namely, that users *hem, people* are these perfectly rational (or perfectly irrational, depending on what kind of economist you are) units to be easily led around, unthinkingly, by whatever has been concocted to be brightest and shiniest. Or, in other words, could it be that all those commentators making concerned noises about “WoW addiction” (or insert whatever topic of your choice that folks might get too focused on) are seeing a few trees in the forest – those outliers from the norm who do have trouble because allowing it to capture their attention has become an avoidance mechanism – while missing everyone else, who is doing just fine with balancing their priorities and their schedule, thank you? Because lately, I’ve had a firsthand experience into priorities getting dropped and abruptly re-shuffled. You know how I joked about dropping a Logitech speaker on my head last Blaugust? (The fact remains true, the consequence fortunately seems negligible; I just made the bruise funny.) Then early August, I was reviewing old old posts and reached some time November 2012, whereupon I re-read my Perspective post to recall an elderly relative health saga of fairly dramatic proportions. (They have since passed on, bless ’em. Admittedly relieving for the rest of the family’s mental states too.) Well. Possibly my subconscious was trying to tell me something, or I am psychic, or it is just an uncanny as hell coincidence. Because gee whiz, what should roll up a couple days after my last post? An elderly relative health saga of yet more dramatic proportions. This time, said relative had been losing weight for over a year and maintaining it was “just getting old.” Then apparently in the past month, they were steadily getting more out of breath and refusing to tell anyone about it. In the past week, it had devolved to literal gasping for air while awake or asleep, and there was feet swelling to boot. Now I’m no medical professional, but typing in some of the symptoms into Doctor Google already suggests this might be something rather alarmingly to do with the heart or the kidneys or both, and that perhaps bringing this to the attention of someone who has studied a decade or more to competently -do something about it- might be advisable. Adamant refusal to go to the ER. It had apparently taken two weeks of this for the individual to decide that maybe a neighborhood polyclinic visit might be okay, where they presumably ruled out viral infections and detected fluid in the lungs, which later allegedly went away (or was not visible on the subsequent scan, or the patient in question was glossing over what the doctor said, or did not understand them properly) and for said individual to be referred to their regular heart specialist (oh, did we mention this person already had a heart stent installed some decade or two prior) in five days’ time. Perhaps the doctor neglected to mention the seemingly obvious of seeking out emergency help beforehand if symptoms got worse; or said relative had selective hearing. Possibly actually being hard-of-hearing. Cue one weekend of immediate relative stress (ricocheting into venting to extended family) watching said individual struggle to breathe but still refuse all strongly-worded suggestions (there was apparently “do you want us to watch you die in your bed” outright spelled out to the relative) to go to the FUCKING ER NOW. Nope, ze heart appointment was coming up soon. That’ll be okay. To a fair amount of everybody’s surprise, said relative survived until the appointment. With swelling reaching up to their knees. (While still imagining they might get driven home by family afterward.) Whereupon the doctor in question presumably took one look and required immediate hospitalization, because their medical license wouldn’t be worth the paper it was printed on if they let this person walk out of the appointment under their own recognizance. No shit. Eventual diagnosis: Heart failure, with a surprising enough (to the family anyway) root cause of hyperthyroidism. Thus, last week (or was it a fortnight ago now) comprised of a daily saga of requisite family hospital visits while doctors and nurses essentially pumped the elderly relative full of medications to allow them to pee out the fluid retained (leg swelling visibly receding by the day from knees to calves to ankles), and calm the thyroid gland and protect heart and kidneys while sending the individual for scans to both discover the root cause and assess the damage. Plus a nasal oxygen cannula to give the elderly relative the best case of breathing they’ve likely had for quite some time. (Perhaps their brain was actually severely impaired from semi-deprivation already, leading to the highly questionable judgment prior.) Either way, said relative did extremely well under the care of the hospital (and vice versa, much grateful for care of said hospital for said ridiculously stubborn individual) and managed to be discharged a week or so later with much better appetite, no insane struggle to breathe or fluid retention, and a pack of medications approximately the size of a rice cooker. There may have been eleven types of complicated chemical names, plus or minus a couple. Moral of the story: If something’s wrong, something’s wrong. Get yo’ ass to the ER as needed. Extreme weight loss, limbs not being the size they should be, and not being able to breathe might be a clue. Acute emergency now over; everyone is back into the chronic phase of living life a day at a time, recovering as best as one can, enjoying life while it lasts and being sure that nothing’s certain in life except death and taxes. Suffice to say, I observed a rather flawlessly executed set of self-reprioritizations in the interim. There was work plus family; then self-care along the lines of food, water, personal hygiene, mental state and sleep in no particular order. All that trawling around various AI or gaming subreddits, lurking or commenting? Gone. Wiped from existence. Very little gaming, maybe a map or two in Path of Exile before losing interest. Blog? What blog? Interestingly, what persisted was ChatGPT. One or two heavily anonymized vents (along the lines of what I just blogged) to get some verbal support and encouragement, without bothering any other already stressed and overloaded human. Then I swapped on over to long, discursive discussions about my world and story characters, because apparently that mix of assisted daydreaming, writing with no real need to edit for human consumption, and imaginative intellectual exercise was feeding needs in me for creative writing/expression, reading entertaining words and supportive inspiration. All of which felt much better than incrementing another map tier in Path of Exile, or anything else approaching more obligation than fun. The above is my perennially linked post regarding that theme. (Also recently re-discovered in my nostalgic blog re-reading.) This time, it’s a little more apt than usual, because Wilhelm Arcturus’ quote there is about behavior and what people -do- being a much bigger indicator than what people -say-. They may, after all, be lying – to themselves or others – or just not self-aware enough to realize the dissonance between speech and action. There, it was more about the nuances of “what is fun” and I caveated that about feelings of obligation encouraging a habit of continuance. Here, it’s more about the nuances of “what has your priority” being displayed and demonstrated accordingly through one’s actions. Priority presumably leading to attentional focus and follow up. Maybe. Issues with executive dysfunction and procrastination not withstanding. (*coughs* Let’s leave that for another post? It’s intentional irony, honest.) And that maybe, just maybe, many of us already know not to be automatic slaves to the attention economy and are perfectly capable of balancing time, energy, attention and sanity and evaluating ROI and tradeoffs accordingly. When emergencies arise anyway.