The Excuses Used to Be True

There was a script on my machine that broke every Tuesday. Not badly. Just enough that I had a little ritual for it, a delete-this-restart-that dance I could do half asleep, and I did it for months. Every Tuesday a voice in my head said “you should really fix that,” and every Tuesday a second voice said “later,” and later never had an opening. Then one afternoon, mostly out of irritation, I asked Claude about it. Twenty minutes. Fixed. Not patched, fixed, with an explanation of why it kept breaking that made me feel dumb for about a minute and then just fine.

The interesting part isn’t the twenty minutes. It’s the months. The fix cost twenty minutes and the living-with cost two seasons, and I’d like to know what that gap was made of, because I don’t think it was laziness.

The gap was made of excuses, and I mean that with respect, because I know mine by name. “It’s not worth the time.” “I don’t want to break it worse.” Other people run different models. “I’m not technical.” “I’ll wait for IT.” “That’s my nephew’s department.” Most people carry a set, and the sets work because they end the conversation. Nobody argues with “I’m not technical.” It sounds like self-knowledge.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe about those excuses: they used to be true. All of them. Fixing anything used to require expertise you didn’t have, and acquiring the expertise cost more than the problem did. The printer meant an afternoon in forums written by angry strangers. The script meant a semester of tutorials for a twenty-minute repair. The math said live with it, and the math was right. The excuses weren’t character flaws. They were accurate pricing. Acceptance was the rational stance for decades, so we built a reflex out of it, and the reflex became invisible, the way anything true for long enough does.

Then the cost side collapsed, and almost nobody’s reflex got the memo. Expertise went on demand. Not general expertise, which was always out there if you wanted to go earn a degree. Your-situation expertise: your machine, your error message, your weird constraint, your level of understanding, at whatever hour the problem decided to matter. The problems didn’t get smaller. The price of attacking them did. And a reflex built for the old prices keeps quietly paying them.

Take the way we learned to fix anything for the last twenty years: “there’s a YouTube video for that.” It was miraculous, and it was also a lecture. The general case. Someone else’s setup. Fourteen minutes of intro music and sponsor reads for the forty seconds you needed, and then the real work started, which was translating their situation into yours. The translation was always the hard part. That’s the exact part that just got automated. The tutorial now starts from your screen, your error, your version, and it answers follow-up questions, which no video ever did. You’re no longer adapting yourself to the lesson. The lesson adapts to you.

Watch what the new stance looks like across three rooms. A developer clones a repository that’s eighty percent right and wrong in the one way that matters to her, and the old options were live with it or abandon it, because someone else’s software was take-it-or-leave-it. Now she points Claude Code at it, and it becomes a starting point. (If that sentence sounds like a door opening, it is, and there’s a whole track on the other site about walking through it.) A guy whose printer has entered its weekly rebellion takes a photo of the blinking lights and troubleshoots with an expert who has infinite patience and zero judgment about what he doesn’t know. And someone with no code anywhere in her life pastes in an appliance error code, a baffling insurance form, a lease clause written in lawyer, and gets the plain version plus the three questions worth asking. Same stance, three rooms. Ask first. Accept later.

The most respectable excuse deserves its own funeral. “I don’t want to break it” was the good one, the careful one, the one that sounded like wisdom. And it quietly died, because the fear itself became askable. “Is this safe to try?” “What’s the undo?” “What’s the worst case if I get this wrong?” Those questions used to require the exact expertise you didn’t have, which is why the fear always won. Now they get answered before you touch anything. Caution used to mean stopping. Now it means asking first.

“I’m not technical” turns out to be the same story. It was never really a fact about you. It was a fact about the price of becoming technical for one afternoon, and that price is gone. What’s left is closer to renting: you borrow the mechanic for an hour, he explains what he’s doing in words you choose, and you stay the decision-maker the whole time. Nobody is asking you to become a different person. The stance is available to exactly who you already are, today, with the phone you already own.

Now the honest part, because a stance without limits is just a mood. Some acceptance is still correct. Real electrical work, gas, anything with a safety rating: no. Repairs that void a warranty worth keeping: probably no. Problems where being wrong is expensive and you can’t verify the fix yourself: careful, and notice that “can I verify this?” is now an askable question too. And the genuinely not-worth-it, because some broken drawers cost less than any afternoon ever will. The point was never fix everything. The point is that “no” becomes a decision instead of a default. You run the math now. The math stopped running you.

That’s the actual change underneath all the examples, and it’s a change in reflex order. Encounter the broken, the confusing, the almost-right, and the old sequence was accept first, maybe ask someday. The new sequence is ask first, accept later. It compounds, because every fixed script teaches you the shape of the next fix, and the stance gets cheaper each time you use it. Somewhere in there you cross a line worth noticing once and not belaboring: the line between being a consumer of your circumstances and a participant in them.

Right now, “hold on, let me ask Claude about this” still marks you as slightly unusual. A little intense, maybe. That’s the fringe stage talking, and it’s temporary, because most people’s reflexes are still priced for 2019, and windows like this one don’t stay open. There’s a sentence coming for offices and family group chats, the way “did you google it” once came: did you ask?

And there’s a feeling on the other side of the stance that I want on the record, because it’s the real argument. The first time you fix something you’d been living with, the printer, the script, the clause, there’s a disproportionate little thrill, way out of scale with the twenty minutes it took. The thrill is accurate. It’s the feeling of the world turning back into something you can do something about.

The New Typing continues — the series lives at drjeffwurfel.com/writing.