Living On Autopilot

I used to get frustrated with certain people I know. And when I say frustrated, I mean the kind where you want to grab them by the shoulders, shout directly into their ear, “Wake up — you’re sleepwalking through life!” — and then maybe shake them for good measure.

I’m happy to report I’ve since been cured of that particular affliction. These days I simply shrug, step back, and let them crack on with their endless parade of self-inflicted financial disasters. Not my circus. Not my monkeys.

What follows is an amalgamation of real-world examples, personified by a fictional character I’ll call Mr Penny Foolish. First things first: Mr Foolish is reactive by nature. He doesn’t plan ahead. He is, in every sense, like a bolt of lightning, always taking the path of least resistance.

Take his morning commute. He routinely ignores the oil warning light on his dashboard, far too busy to spare five minutes investigating the problem. That particular habit eventually caught up with him when his engine seized completely, starved of oil and dead on arrival. The repair bill was $9,000. He was furious, naturally. You’d think that would be the end of it. You’d be wrong.

Not long after, he suffered a tyre blowout of the dangerous, high-speed variety, having spent weeks dismissing the low pressure warning for his rear left tyre. That also cost him a pretty penny. Appropriate, given the name.

The cars, it turned out, were merely a preview.

An expensive overdraft is a permanent fixture for our antihero. I once offered to sit down with him and go through his fixed costs. The low-hanging fruit alone was remarkable: a $600 yearly digital newspaper subscription he never reads, a $13.99 monthly premium weather app he never consults, and two separate cloud storage subscriptions doing the same job in parallel. Beyond that, an out-of-contract broadband deal and a rolling phone contract represented another $70 or $80 a month, there for the taking if he could be bothered shopping around.

Mr Penny Foolish things otherwise. When I followed up, he explained that it was all far too much hassle. By way of illustration, he told me that cancelling the newspaper subscription required phoning a number rather than clicking a button, and that was apparently where the whole enterprise fell apart. He also mentioned, with some heat, that his car insurer had just hit him with an 11% renewal increase.

I asked whether this was the same company he’d been with for the past ten years, or whether he’d shopped around as we’d discussed. It was, he confirmed, the same company. He found the increase deeply unfair. I met his gaze, placed both hands on his shoulders, and agreed wholeheartedly that it was all terribly unjust. Not my circus, after all. Not my monkeys.