There's a concept called Marchetti's Constant. Have I already lost half of you? I promise there is a payoff. The short version: humans have always commuted about 30 minutes each way, regardless of how fast their transportation gets. Give someone a faster vehicle and they don't bank the time saved. They use it to live further away. The radius expands. I think of billionaires living in mega-mansions in the middle of nowhere commuting in helicopters, rather than driving 30 minutes. The commute stays exactly the same.
It is odd to me that we don't optimize for more time. We just expanded our map footprint.
I've been thinking about this in the context of money. Because I think we tell ourselves a story about what money buys us that isn't quite true.
The story goes: money buys time. Hire a personal chef and you never have to cook. Get a car service and you never have to park. Outsource the friction and suddenly your life has more room in it.
I haven't been inside a grocery store in years. Curbside or delivery, every time. I know it costs more. I've decided it's worth it. That's a privileged trade-off I get to make. This is giving me the time back. But what am I actually doing with it?
What does that time actually go toward? If I'm honest, it doesn't go toward rest or presence or anything I'd call living. It gets absorbed. The hour opens up and something else rushes in to fill it. I'm not less busy because I don't go inside my HEB.
I call this reducing friction. When you remove all the friction by fully optimizing every moment, what does it do to you as a human? At an extreme level of wealth, the ordinary grind gets swept away. You don't wait in lines. Someone else tracks your passport. You never navigate a crowded airport or fill long hours of a delay. And something about that total removal produces people who are genuinely, visibly disconnected from how the world works for most people in it. What does this disconnectedness do to our humanity…
I'm not saying add the friction back artificially. I'm not saying feel guilty about the grocery delivery or the car service or any of it. But I do think the question is worth asking more honestly than we usually do. What are you actually buying? Is buying convenience creating more life? Is the time you're saving going toward something that matters, or is it just getting folded back into the machine?
I don't have a clean answer. I'm still working out what I want my life to actually look like versus what I've been building toward on autopilot. And I've started asking myself something uncomfortable: do I leverage money to make more life? Or do I just use it to make more money?
I'm not sure those are the same thing. I'm not sure I've been treating them like they're different.
P.S. A while back I went through a phase of making themed playlists. Every song has money in the title or is at least money-adjacent. Felt right to share it here. PLAYLIST
Stay unscripted my loves.
🖤 - EmmyLu