The Accountant Is Making It Up

An AI asked me a question this week and I could not answer it.

What percentage of your time are you budgeting towards being free, alive and joyful, versus making money?

I just sat there.

Not because the answer was embarrassing. Because I did not have one. I have never run that number in my life. The money side of that ledger has never had to justify its allocation. It takes what it wants and nobody asks.

And notice the word. Budgeting. That is accountant language. The question got through because it was speaking his dialect.

I had got there through Marcus Aurelius, which I want to admit I resisted.

Meditations is one of those books I have never really got through. Even translated, the language slides off me. And there is a less respectable reason too, which is that I am a bit wary of successful guys. Not all of them. That would be a stupid rule and unfair to a lot of people. But my working assumption is that most people who climb that high do not have much harmony in them, and harmony is the thing I actually want. So when a Roman emperor starts telling me how to live, some part of me folds its arms.

I read him through my own setup this time. An AI that has been building a picture of me for months, so it was less “here is wisdom” and more “here is a dead guy’s idea, does it survive contact with your actual life.”

Most of it did not. One thing did.

The split between the fact and the verdict.

Something happens. Then you add a judgment to it, instantly, so fast it arrives feeling like part of the event. The fact is neutral. The verdict is yours. And you are allowed to look at whether the verdict is any good.

Fine. Obvious enough. Then I pointed it at money and it got interesting.

Because there is an accountant in my head.

He has been in the building a long time. I did not hire him. There was no interview. He turned up one day with a desk and a calculator and a lot of opinions, and he came with the family, the way furniture does.

He does the runway maths. He knows how many months I have. He has views on pensions. He gets tense in a very particular way when I talk about doing something purely because it would be fun, and he expresses that tension by being extremely reasonable.

And in all these years, he has never once shown me his working.

The bank balance is a fact. That is a real number.

“It is not enough” is a verdict.

“You need this many years of cover” is a verdict with a spreadsheet stapled to it to make it look official.

And fear does something to the arithmetic. Survival maths always rounds up. The more scared you are, the bigger the pile you decide you need, and then you go and build the bigger pile, and you are not less scared when you get there, because the number was never the thing.

So I asked him about the three things he is most confident about.

Retirement first. The logic is: save hard now, in case the body goes wrong later. Which is not stupid. Bodies do go wrong. But when I look at what he is actually selling me, it is insurance, and the premium is paid in the only years I am certain to get. He wants me to spend my forties being careful so that my eighties are covered.

I do not want to live that afraid. If the extreme version happens, if I reach the end with less cash and lose five years I would otherwise have had, that is genuinely bad and I am not going to pretend it is fine. But it is a probability. The fear is a certainty. I will take the odds.

Ask me again at seventy and I might be furious with the man writing this. Fair enough. He can be furious. He will have had a good time.

Then children. This is his most expensive line item, and where he does his best work, because he gets to dress the fear up as love.

When I actually go through it, most of what a child needs is not money. It is a steady nervous system. Two of them ideally. Being met, being held, not having to be the emotional weather report for an anxious adult. That comes out of your being, not your account. It is free, and it is much harder than paying for it.

The base needs are real. Food, shelter, safety. Those are facts, not verdicts, and they cost what they cost.

Then private school, and I cannot honestly claim the environment is not better on average. It probably is. It moves the probabilities. But it moves them inside a much larger system I have no control over. Temperament. Nature. Whoever they happen to sit next to at eleven. The feeds currently rewiring everyone’s attention, mine included. I am one input among many. And what am I going to do, fight nature? Who is actually doing that? Not this one.

And the thing underneath it that he never says out loud: wanting them to be successful is just me duplicating my ego onto a new person.

Although, and this one made me laugh, so is wanting them to be free and alive and joyful. Nicer costume. Same operation.

Last one. The big one. Enough money that you never have to do anything again.

I checked this honestly and I do not want it. I get bored fucking senseless when I am not doing something. Give me a year of nothing and I would be building something by week three, probably badly, probably at midnight. There is always going to be some mental itch pointed at a thing, and it may as well be pointed at something that also pays.

So the retirement fantasy is not even mine. I inherited that too. He has been running his projections against a goal I never confirmed.

Which is roughly when it landed. The accountant is not lying. He is working from figures nobody ever checked, towards an outcome I never agreed to, and he has had the run of the place because he sounds sensible, and everything else in me sounds like a feeling.

The feeling has been fairly consistent about what it wants.

Aliveness. Free, alive, joyful. That is what the whole thing under the neck is screaming for. Not more money. Aliveness.

Screaming, honestly. For years.

And the accountant stands in the corridor with his clipboard, being reasonable.

He does not get fired.

That would be the dramatic ending, and it would be a lie. Money is a real tool. It buys the needs, and wanting the needs met over time is not a neurosis, it is just true. Food is a fact. Shelter is mostly a fact. And I like the game of making it, when it is a game.

So he keeps a desk. Smaller one. He gets consulted, because he is genuinely good at the one thing he is good at.

He just does not get to sign anything anymore.

And I still do not have the percentage. That is the honest bit. I did not come out of this with a number and a new morning routine.

But the money side has to fill in a form now, like everyone else. Say what it is for. Say how long it needs the time for. Wait its turn.

Then I closed the whole thing and went straight back to building the system that does most of my work for me, so I can be as lazy as possible.

Which the accountant fully supports.

For completely different reasons.

Neither of us is looking too closely at that.