In 2021 I sold my car for $11,000 and put the money in index funds. In 2023 the office called me back two days a week. Everyone assumed I would buy a car. Instead I spent about $800 a month on rideshares — to not drive, and to learn German.
Selling the car was a work-from-home decision: no commute, no reason to own a depreciating machine that sits still 96% of its life. The proceeds went into VTI and VXUS, even though the market at the time also seemed like a bubble. Everything always seems like a bubble. The idea was investment-first, things-less — own the index, not the object.
Then return-to-office arrived: twice a week. Andover to Boston at first, which was honestly manageable. Then Millis to Boston, which was more of a stretch. Eight trips a month, roughly $800. Said out loud, that number gets you looks. I was working — still am — for a publicly traded tech company, and the arithmetic of small comforts was never the hard part. The comparison isn't $800 versus $0 — it's $800 versus insurance, Boston parking, maintenance, depreciation, and above all versus two hours of my attention per trip, spent staring at brake lights. I was confident the appreciation of the index lots would eclipse the rideshare expenses. That is the kind of sentence that gets you uninvited from car conversations, and it turned out to be true. But it wasn't the real return.
The trade I never understood runs the other way: colleagues clearing several multiples of that rideshare bill every month, standing on unreliable transit before morning meetings. The $800 was never the expensive part of a commute. The attention is.
The real return was the time in other people's cars. Paying for it, of course — but sitting in the back with both hands free, an hour each way, over a year of it.
I spent those hours with a laptop balanced on my knees, running an early version of this product on localhost: German audio in my ears, typing what I heard while Route 109 went by. Why German? The reasons were the usual ones — there was a girl in Munich. Languages have been learned for worse reasons, and by people less honest about theirs.
Transcribing in a moving car is dictation on hard mode. Engine noise. The driver's playlist. The suspension finding every pothole in Norfolk County. If you can pull German out of the air over a Camry's road noise, quiet-room German becomes trivial — I didn't have the words for it yet, but that was the dirty-audio thesis, discovered empirically, one commute at a time.
Most language apps sell you "just 10 minutes a day" — a gamified drip designed around your guilt. The commute is the opposite proposition: the time already exists, it is already lost, and it is usually spent on nothing. An hour in a back seat, a train, a waiting room. The question is only whether you have something real to do in it.
Dictation is real work: listen, type, get graded, repeat on a schedule that respects how hearing is actually built. It needs your ears and your hands and nothing else. It is, almost suspiciously, the perfect shape for dead time — which is why I was willing to look like a lunatic balancing a laptop in a Corolla for a year.
I'll be honest about the limits, too. I doubt anyone carries this method to victory without a reason of the same species as mine. Months of sessions are not sustained by New Year's resolve or a streak counter. They are sustained by a person — someone to love, a child answering in the wrong language, a grandmother who won't switch to English, an enemy worth understanding in his own words. The method supplies the practice. It cannot supply the reason. Bring your own.
There is, admittedly, a level above even that — the ascetic one. A monk's level. The influencers call it discipline rather than motivation, and for once they are onto something: motivation is a feeling, and feelings attend or they don't. Discipline is just the repetition of the actions that need repeating. You can do the sessions for no reason at all, the way you keep contributing to a 401(k) every two weeks — seeing no benefit whatsoever, no longer even believing in it, preferring almost to waste the money than to have it at fifty-nine. Practice as ritual, owing nothing to any outcome. You can transcend the need for motivation entirely. It is hard, though.
The laptop was the absurd part, not the practice. What I wanted the whole time was a phone and a headset. That product didn't exist, so it became the thing I built: the same dictation practice, in the browser or the iOS app, with your progress synced across every device you own.
I would buy this if I hadn't built it. That was the bar the whole time.
The commute has since escalated. Millis to Boston became Bucharest to Boston, which is no longer a rideshare problem — it's a flight-segments problem. Outcome to be determined. (How a commute comes to point at Bucharest at all is its own story: Love in the Time of Corona.)
But it's the same problem, no? Unless someone upgrades you to business with the free champagne, you're in a seat you paid for, with hours of dead time ahead and both hands free. You already know what I do with it.