The ultimate trap of modern productivity is believing that buying back your time is always a net positive.
I paid someone to handle every ordinary task in my life and then couldn't figure out why my life stopped feeling like mine.
Four months. Maybe five. I didn't cook a single meal, wash a dish, fold a shirt, or stand in a checkout line. In Bali, a woman down the road made three meals a day for eight dollars. In Mexico, there was a taco spot every forty feet. Now I'm on the coast, and someone brings whatever I want to my door before I finish my first coffee.
I thought I was being smart. Buying back my time. Two hours a day of chores and errands, gone. Replaced with whatever I wanted to do instead. Which turned out to be nothing.
Last week I walked into a grocery store for the first time since maybe January. I needed toothpaste. But I ended up standing in the produce section watching an old man squeeze avocados with both hands and a woman argue with her kid about cereal. It smelled like bread and floor cleaner and something I couldn't name that turned out to be the feeling of ordinary life happening around me.
I almost lost it. In a grocery store. Over fluorescent lighting, a sticky floor, and someone's cart blocking the aisle. Over how goddamn normal it all was.
That's the trap. When you earn enough to pay your way out of every inconvenience, you do. And then you find out the inconveniences were the thing making your days feel like they belonged to a person who actually lives somewhere. Not a guest. Not someone passing through. A person with a fridge that needs filling, a sink with dishes in it, and a shirt that wrinkles if you don't fold it in time.
Millionaire trader who went 13-for-13 on Trump in 2025 now turns his attention to Elon
Dear Reader,
In 2025, Larry Benedict did something almost nobody on Wall Street managed.
He got ahead of President Trump.
When Liberation Day sent the market into freefall, Larry had already positioned his readers.
They closed trades for 29%... 30%... and 59% on QQQ.
Three winning trades in three weeks from just a single policy move.
In just the first quarter of the year, Larry had a perfect 13 for 13.
Not a single losing trade.
By the end of the year, he had delivered a 279% return on cash. The S&P returned 15%.
Now Larry is turning his attention to Elon Musk.
And he says what’s already been set in motion makes everything Trump triggered in 2025 look like a warm-up.
Because now that the SpaceX IPO is over, the “Final Phase of Elon’s Master Plan” has begun.
Which means billions — potentially trillions — of dollars could be forced into a single ticker…
And it could happen at any time.
Larry has been tracking it for months and says the time to get positioned is now.
He’s revealing the name and ticker today, completely free.
When I was running my logistics company, I'd come home wrecked and still have to figure out dinner. Rice, eggs, whatever hot sauce was left in the door of the fridge. I'd stand in my kitchen, too tired to think, stirring something in a pan, half watching whatever was on TV through the doorway. It was nothing. But it was mine. I made it with my own hands in a room that smelled like my actual life.
I never noticed it. Never once thought about it. It was just the thing that needed doing, so I did it.
Now I eat meals that arrive in containers. Good food. Better than anything I ever made. But I eat standing at a counter, scrolling my phone, and the whole thing is over in eight minutes. No prep. No cleanup. No moment standing at the stove waiting for water to boil, with nothing to do but be there.
You know some version of this, even if you haven't taken it as far as I have. Maybe you stopped packing lunch because you could afford to eat out every day. Maybe you hired a cleaner and felt relieved for a week, and then weirdly hollow on the day they came because you didn't know what to do with your hands. Maybe you realized you hadn't washed your own car in over a year, and you used to kind of enjoy it. The hose. The sun on your arms. Twenty minutes in the driveway, not producing or performing, just doing something simple and stupid and real.
We treat that stuff like dead weight. Time lost between the parts of life that count. Every smart person says eliminate it. Buy it back. Free up your hours for the work that matters.
The stuff you keep eliminating is the stuff making your life feel like a life. Carrying groceries up three flights is what makes dinner feel earned. Scrubbing a pan is what makes a kitchen yours instead of a room you walk through. I was trying to get free of the thing that was quietly keeping me tethered to my own days.
I bought groceries last week. Actual groceries. Garlic, tomatoes, pasta, and a bottle of wine that cost four euros. Cooked something that took forty-five minutes and came out average at best. Ate it at a table I had to clear off first. The whole production was objectively worse than calling the delivery place down the street.
Best I'd felt in weeks.
I'm not making a case for doing your own laundry. I'm saying I spent years paying my way out of every mundane thing in my life, and what I actually paid my way out of was the feeling of being a person on a regular night with garlic on my fingers and nothing important happening at all.
Turns out that was the important thing happening.
— Best, Jose
