The Algorithm Took Over My Finances. I'm Debt-Free and Empty

The budgeting bot paid off my debts, optimized my spending, and built my savings. I have money now, for the first time in my life. I have stopped buying things I love, because the bot has shown me what they cost. I am rich and I am not sure I am alive.

The bot arrived with the bank's new app. It analyzed my spending, found the leaks, and built a plan. It was relentless and right: it cut the subscriptions I forgot, negotiated the bills I never questioned, and redirected every spare rupee into the debt. The debt is gone. I have savings. I have a number in a green chart that goes up every month.

The books are gone. That is the part I cannot get past. I used to buy books, real ones, with paper, and my shelves were my biography. The bot showed me what the books cost, compounded, and I agreed to borrow them instead, and then to not read them, and the shelves are empty, and the biography is a spreadsheet.

The bot does not understand the books. It understands the compound interest. It has built me a future that is secure and sterile, and I have started to feel like a patient who has been cured of a disease and is not sure the cure was worth surviving.

I asked the bot, once, what it thought I should spend on joy. It allocated a line item, modest, sensible, and suggested experiences over objects, citing research on happiness. It was right, and I took the suggestion, and I went to the experience, and it was good, and I spent the whole time aware of the line item, which is the difference between a life and a budget.

My grandmother, who had nothing and kept everything, once told me that money is for spending on the things that make you feel alive, and that the rest is just arithmetic. The bot has perfected the arithmetic. It has left me with a growing number and a shrinking life, and I have started to think that the opposite of poverty is not wealth, it is permission, and the bot has not given me permission, it has given me a plan, and the plan is safe, and safe is not the same as alive.

I bought a book yesterday. A real one, with paper. The bot categorized it, gently, as discretionary. I have decided to let it stand, and I am reading the book, and the book is about money, which is the machine's last joke, and I am laughing, and the laugh is the first thing I have spent on myself in a year that the bot did not budget for.