Sometimes I find it hard to know when to automate some process. Sometimes, I find legitimate automation ideas too hard for me to implement. Sometimes, like with this blog, I enjoy the process of doing the task and all it’s warty sub-tasks.

For some things, like banking, I don’t want some tool clumsily accessing my bank’s byzantine API just so that I don’t have to manually enter transactions into my ledger file. Sure, there are easy tools like aqbanking that make the process easier, but I’m kind of paranoid about money. Something about automating this process seems wrong or at the very least, fraught with danger.

There are times where automation just doesn’t make sense. I don’t need a ‘smart’ scale to automatically report to my phone/cloud/whatever to track my weight. I can just enter it. It’s not hard. The same goes with a lot of home automation. I don’t need lights automatically turning on and off, or coffee systems to brew before I wake up. The things I want automated are the drudgery stuff: vacuuming floors, doing laundry and cleaning dishes. I have one of those already, and it’s great. Best Christmas gift we’ve bought ourselves 4 years running.

I guess there was a time in which I watched Star Trek and thought “Wow! Wouldn’t it be great if all my needs were just taken care of for me? I didn’t have to do anything?”. Then I got older, and I saw how technology works, and how it doesn’t work, and how it sometimes is out to do more nefarious things without your knowledge. I also know that some of this stuff is just trash. Trash that sells you a thing that beaks or is bricked or obsoleted soon after you buy it because you know: shareholder value. I guess that now that I’m older, and a bit more world weary, I find that not all automation is needed. Sometimes getting up, making my coffee, taking my pills, making breakfast, taking a shower and getting dressed are not wasted time. They’re living. I don’t want my life automated away from me.