Worries

Inheritance Costs
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Inheritance Costs

Wow, I have written and rewritten the intro to this post five separate times and I cannot get the words to come out right! Partly, it’s because too many people reading this have lost someone dear, and I worry a topic that touches on losing loved ones might be triggering. If that sounds like you, please be gentle to yourself and feel free to check back in another day.

Partly, it’s because the topic of “inheritance” is so emotionally loaded. Right up front, you have a loss. So there are going to be all sorts of complicated feelings about an inheritance based on your relationship to the deceased. Maybe especially when that inheritance is not oodles of cash, but a baby grand piano, or a speedboat, or a timeshare in Argentina, or a collection of Meissen clowns, or a living, breathing lives-up-to-150-years tortoise.

(Perhaps the more logical minded among us have less of an issue with this than I do, but I am SO SENTIMENTAL. I cannot even THINK about inheriting anything without getting all teary and upset. I am pretty much banned from talking to my mother-in-law about things she wants to give away, because I will 100% take them, if only because they belonged to Great Aunt Hoosit. No thought to whether we need a six-feet-tall marble phonograph or a set of John Travolta-themed dishware. I get all wrapped up in the story behind the thing and can no longer see the thing itself.)

Once you get past the whole “someone I love has died” aspect of inheritance, you have the equally complicated issue of trying to fit someone else’s [heirloom] into your life. A life which may not have room for said [heirloom] for a wide range of reasons.

Finally, there’s the additional complexity of trying to navigate the inheritance of something precious to YOU when it may not be quite so precious to the person you share a life with. (I am not even going to get into the wildly complicated aspects of sharing an inheritance with a sibling, parent, step-sibling/parent, or other relative. That’s a different topic entirely.)

“What to do when your spouse inherits something you don’t care about” is what I most want to discuss today, although I 100% want to hear of any weird or unusual or particularly precious heirlooms in your own family lore.

Edited to add: Whoops! I forgot to mention that the below scenario is 100% FAKE. The watch is a stand-in for any heirloom. As you read, see if your calculus would change if [watch] were replaced by [sailboat], [lake house], [parrot], [pipe organ], or any other heirloom that would definitely incur costs. Would your response change if it were YOUR [heirloom] and not your spouse’s?

SCENARIO

Upon his death, a beloved grandfather bequeaths a very valuable antique watch to your spouse. The watch has both sentimental value (your spouse recalls seeing it on Grandfather’s wrist for the duration of his life; your spouse has fond memories of trying on the watch; your spouse can recite word for word the story of how Grandfather came to own this high-end timepiece) and financial value (the watch is nearly 60 years old and in perfect shape; it has an insurance value of $20,000).

When your spouse first takes possession of this watch, there are some initial costs. The watch requires insurance, which costs about $300 a year. To keep the watch safe from pets and children, your spouse purchases a watch box for about $100.

Your spouse wears the watch as often as possible. After all, the grandfather enjoyed the watch; so should your spouse.

Then you learn that the watch will require some routine maintenance. Maybe it needs a professional cleaning for around $50. Maybe it needs an annual water-resistance inspection for $50.

Okay, the annual costs are adding up a bit. But it’s not a ton of money. And surely there are costs that you incur that you don’t even think about.

Plus, the watch clearly brings your spouse joy. The grandfather’s memory proudly circles your spouse’s wrist. The feeling of closeness your spouse feels to the grandfather – well, that’s priceless.

Except… Now the watch needs a mainspring replacement for $150, which isn’t nothing, but… okay, fine. And then the winding mechanism fails and requires a $400 repair. And then one of the links becomes damaged, and now the watch repair people are quoting you $500 to repair the bracelet.

Suddenly, your spouse’s precious heirloom is costing some real money.

ASSUMPTIONS

Let’s assume, before you decide how you will respond, that:

  • you and your spouse share a primary bank account, but also have separate “personal expenses” accounts
  • you have ample money in your shared account to cover these costs with no problem, but the costs are more than your spouse’s “personal expenses” account could pay for without significant hardship (i.e., your spouse would not be able to buy you a birthday gift, or afford a NYT Games subscription, or whatever would constitute a “significant hardship” in this lack-of-actual-hardship situation)
  • you are not a “watch person” and do not care about watches beyond their ability to tell time
  • you love your spouse
  • you loved your spouse’s grandfather, even though you weren’t as close to him as your spouse was

YOUR RESPONSE

So what do you DO? I think we need another poll.

I’m pretty sure that most of the people in this little blogging community are Of The Age to have either dealt with this subject already, or who will likely be dealing with it in the not-too-distant future. Maybe it will cost us money or maybe it will cost us sleep. Maybe we will love the inheritance as much as our spouse does or maybe there will be a vast imbalance. Maybe – and this is my sincere, heartfelt, and impossible wish – we will all live forever with those we hold most dear.

I don’t know if we can necessarily predict our reaction to any sort of bequest until it happens. But I would love your thoughts anyway.

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This Went in an Unexpected Direction

Yesterday I spoke to an AI agent on the phone. At least, I think it was an AI. It did not announce itself as such; it called itself “Dane.” But maybe it wasn’t an AI? It was so humanoid that I wasn’t sure, so I spoke to it as though it could be a human, albeit one who was extremely adept at mixing conversational speech with call center script. Aside from a general AI vibe I got from Dane, it did some specific things that made me think it wasn’t human. I thought about listing them here, but I don’t want to. And now I’m realizing, perhaps for the first time, that everything I post here is already being digested and catalogued by non-humans.

Which of course I already knew. Surely there have been web crawlers as long as there have been search engines, identifying keywords and indexing my blog alongside every other thing posted to the internet.

If you have a blog: have you ever learned that someone unexpected reads your posts? Once, years ago, I learned that a colleague or maybe a classmate of my husband had stumbled across my blog. Obviously, that has always been possible; my posts are public. I write because I want to be read. I do try to remember that my words are public, and I do self-edit my posts in some ways. It’s not as though this person did anything nefarious, or even (as far as I know) commented on my posts or kept reading for any length of time. (If you’re still reading, hi!) It still felt odd, though, as if someone were reading over my shoulder. (Why it doesn’t feel that way all the time, I don’t know. You’re reading it, aren’t you? And that not only doesn’t bother me, it makes me happy!) Looking “being read” right in the face makes me squirmy. The same feeling applies when I think about an AI scouring the web for ideas about how to be more human, and landing on this post, and tucking my thoughts away for future instruction.

I started out thinking this would be a Five for Friday post, but apparently I want to talk about AI some more. It’s a topic I think about many times a day. It’s a subject I don’t know a whole lot about. It’s something that terrifies and fascinates me.

Let’s start here: The environmental implications of AI are massive and horrifying. Full stop.

A while back, I had a friend who seemed obsessed with LLMs. She used them all the time, and our conversations often included her saying things like, “I asked ChatGPT and it said…” or “I just put all my thoughts about X into Claude and it suggested…” She seemed to derive real insight from her interactions with AI. Sometimes, when we exchanged everyday gripes or concerns, she suggested that I turn to one of the LLMs for answers or clarity.

I occasionally use Chat GPT, and I do so with tremendous trepidation. I do not like what it learns about me when I ask it for things. I do not like the humanoid quality of its responses. I do not like that it makes assumptions and intuitive leaps. I do not like the image, in my head, of all the resources it’s depleting just to give me a list of books that meet a series of very specific requirements.

At a work event for my husband’s practice, some of his colleagues were discussing AI and its various applications in the medical field. Providers ask AI to summarize patient visits, which can optimize their time doing paperwork and allow them to interact with patient instead of focusing on their computers. Surgeons operate robotic tools remotely. AI can help spot pre-cancerous polyps in endoscopy videos.   

Requests for my freelance work have declined in recent years. Occasionally, I decide that I want to earn more money and I look for jobs. Usually, my searches are for remote positions because I dislike wearing real clothes any more than absolutely necessary. My entire career has been in writing adjacent fields: editing, copywriting, content creation. Editing and writing are what I love to do; they are my primary skills. The job search engines turned up posting after posting after posting for various methods of training AI to edit and write.

(I use Google and Gmail every day. I click on words in my Kindle and in online content to see their definitions. I employ spellcheck in Word.)  

Two men at my neighbor’s barbecue chatted about their use of AI at work. One uses it to generate marketing copy. The other uses it to write emails to customers. They agreed that AI is so much cheaper and easier and more efficient than hiring an expert to do those tasks. They noted that the output isn’t quite as good. They each shrugged.

I disabled the predictive text function on my phone. I disabled Gemini in my Gmail accounts. I refuse to look at the AI Overview in my Google search results. I feel principled and righteous. I feel irritated because I have to do so much scrolling to find a reputable source for my inquiries and I misspell so many words when I text and I overlook emails from my mom because my inbox is so clotted with advertisements.

One of my writing friends recently told me that she was quitting ChatGPT cold turkey. She had been using it to help her brainstorm ideas, refine sentences, identify plot holes… but she’d been horrified by the number of articles she’d been reading about AI use in the publishing industry. She also felt her brain wasn’t working as quickly or as deftly as it had before she’d started using AI.

(Apple Maps tells me how to get to the airport and friends’ houses and medical offices. Siri tells me what to expect from the day’s weather. Presumably nearly every airplane I’ve ever been on utilizes autopilot.)

I worry about: My lack of marketable skills. The various ways AI might impact my child’s future: her career prospects, her critical thinking skills, her mental health. The longterm effects of the systematic mutilation of our environment. Doctors relying on AI to the point of missing symptoms or eroding their own skills. Deepfakes and AI scams and chatbot-fueled psychosis.

A professor friend of mine laments the increase of AI-generated work among her students. She uses AI to pinpoint whether an assignment has been completed using AI.

Sometimes I think that it’s shortsighted and stubborn to resist a technology that could offer real improvements in efficiency and scope of knowledge. Sometimes I feel like a side character in a dystopian story, being propelled inexorably toward the collapse of humanity.  

(Netflix recommends shows I might like. Google Lens helps me identify plants, and Merlin Bird ID recognizes the birds I’m listening to. Shazam tells me which song is playing on my Apple playlist of “summer songs.” My phone’s Clean Up tool removes blemishes from my photos. A robot vacuums my floors and another robot cleans my pool.)

Elevator operators, lamplighters, crossing sweepers, linotype operators, travel agents, video store clerks. I’m not the first person whose career prospects have dwindled or disappeared due to technological innovation. I won’t be the last.

There’s nothing new I can add to the conversation. There’s SO MUCH about AI I don’t know and haven’t considered. But it’s something I think about all the time and it’s something that has insinuated itself into all of our lives.

I don’t know if I can be against AI when I use it so frequently in everyday life. But I certainly don’t feel good about AI. Outsourcing our critical thinking to AI can lead to faulty conclusions (“cognitive surrender”) and stunt our capacity for analytical reasoning (“cognitive offloading”). Generative AI models and the data centers used to power them have clear, measurable environmental consequences (one estimate I read says the same query on ChatGPT uses five times the energy than a web search). There are the slippery moral, ethical, and philosophical issues of AI consciousness (or not). But AI can also increase efficiency, automate daily routines, facilitate learning, summarize and analyze vast amounts of data, and and and and.

I don’t want to contribute to the depletion of our water sources, the impairment of our ability to think, the decline of civilization. I don’t want to be left behind.

(My phone labels unknown numbers as potential spam. Canva’s AI tool alters graphics to my specifications. Google AI Mode generates a list of articles about AI.)

Some AI use may be “better” than others. But where’s the line?

I would be so very interested to hear about your thoughts regarding and experiences with AI. Do you use it at work? In your personal life? What worries you or excites you the most? This is a judgment-free zone; I feel like we are all grappling with how and when and why and at what cost.

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Dinners This Week, Semi-Annual Breakfast Fret

Well hello there, we have apparently reached the time of year when I have small freak-out about breakfast. Join me, won’t you?

The issue, in a nutshell, is that I continue to need quick weekday breakfast options for my child. Ideally, they would be portable and at least semi-nutritious. This is Quite Challenging, because a lot of breakfast foods do not appeal to my kid. I am and have always been a Very Picky Eater, so I get it; it’s not always a matter of “just eat it because it’s good for you.” Sometimes the preferable option to a food you don’t like is simply not eating. As a Very Picky Eater, I understand. As a Tends-Toward-Fretful Mother, I want my child to fuel her body before school.

The bacon and egg sandwiches I mentioned here are fine, but they are not an everyday desire. The French toast muffins I mentioned in the same post were fine, but I think Carla got sick of them. However, muffins do seem to be a well-received mechanism for delivering calories and (modest) nourishment to my child, so I think I’m going to make some apple cinnamon muffins and some pumpkin cream cheese muffins in the hopes that they do the trick.

Speaking of calories and nourishment, I haven’t done a great job of planning meals this year. I am, however, less great at winging it. So let’s get back to meal planning, at least for today.

Dinners for the Week of March 2-8

  • Slow Cooker Korean BBQ Chicken: I am in need of some slow cooker meals this week, and this sounds yummy. I’m using breasts instead of drumsticks, and I’ll shred the chicken and use it to make some rice bowls.
  • Lemony Garlic Butter Shrimp Orzo: My husband and daughter got me a new cookbook for my birthday, and I love it. It has many, many recipes I would love to make and eat, including this one. My husband doesn’t normally care that much for shrimp, but he said he’d be happy to try any recipe from the book and I’m taking him at his word.
  • Ramen: My daughter is into ramen lately, and I like ramen well enough. My favorite way to make it is with shrimp and edamame, but my husband would prefer chicken. Hopefully we’ll have leftover Korean BBQ chicken he can add to it.
  • Chicken Paprikas: This meal doesn’t necessarily scream “spring is on the way,” but it’s tasty, simple to make, and usually produces enough leftovers for another meal.

What are you making for dinner this week?