[#14] The Distraction Tax
The Distraction Tax
A note before we begin: if you’re reading this well after March 2026, the specific events I’m about to describe may already feel like distant history — or even faintly amusing. Good. That’s rather the point. Read on.
A world on fire
As I write this, the world has been on fire for thirty-three days. Or that’s what the news cycle would have you believe.
From where I sit in Canberra, the events filling the headlines feel simultaneously real and remote — the way global crises often do for Australians. We follow them closely. We discuss them at dinner. We feel the downstream effects in petrol prices and supermarket shelves and the mood of markets. But we are not living inside them the way people in Washington or Tel Aviv or Riyadh are.
The US and Israel struck Iran on the 28th of February. Within a week, the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow channel through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil flows — had effectively closed. Brent crude, sitting quietly around $73 a barrel at the start of March, is today trading above $112. Some analysts are muttering about $200. Fertiliser prices are up 40 percent. Airlines are cancelling routes. A fuel rationing sign outside a Bangkok petrol station was one of last week’s more quietly unsettling images.
When you’re standing too close to the noise, you miss something: at any given moment, there is always a crisis that feels like the one that finally warrants throwing your normal framework out the window. A trade war. A military conflict driving oil prices to levels not seen in years. Markets swinging on a single social media post. The financial media generating an extraordinary volume of urgent, contradictory analysis — almost none of which will matter much to your life in five years.
Right now, in the first weeks of 2026, that crisis happens to involve a US-led conflict that has sent energy prices sharply higher, combined with a tariff regime that has been through more legal frameworks than most people can track. The specifics are genuinely significant. But the pattern — the sense that this time is different, that this particular confluence of events requires a different response — is as old as markets themselves.
It is precisely in moments like this that I want to talk to you about your 60 hours.
The Pull Toward Action — and What It Costs
There is a pull in moments like this that I want to name honestly.
The pull is toward action. Toward doing something. Toward engaging with the crisis, analysing it, responding to it, protecting against it. It feels responsible. It feels diligent. It feels like the opposite of sticking your head in the sand.
And so the spreadsheets multiply. The portfolio gets re-examined. Scenarios get modelled. Articles get read — the one from six hours ago, and the updated one from two hours ago, and the live ticker, and the economist quoted in this morning’s piece who said something interesting about stagflation and whether that changes things.
I am not here to tell you to ignore what is happening in the world, or to pretend it has no implications for your financial situation. It does. The disruption to energy markets is real. The uncertainty in trade policy is genuine. Markets are volatile.
What I want to name is the cost.
Because those hours — the hours you are spending parsing oil prices and recalibrating your assumptions and reading the fourth analysis of the week — those are your 60 hours. The ones we talked about last time.
The Hours That Are Actually Yours
You and I each have 168 hours a week. After you subtract sleep, meals, commuting, the ten thousand administrative tasks that keep a life functioning, you are left with roughly 50 to 70 hours. Call it 60.
Here is a thought experiment that sharpens what is actually at stake.
If someone told you that you had 60 hours left to live, you would not spend them checking the Bloomberg terminal. You would hug the people you love. You would watch the sunrise. You would let a puppy fall asleep in your lap. You would inhabit the things that are genuinely yours.
Of course, we are not talking about 60 hours until death. We are talking about your most precious hours each week — there are 60 of them and they are the hours that determine, more than any other variable, the experienced quality of your life. Not your net worth. Not your portfolio’s performance last quarter. Those 60 hours.
Spend them on things that matter to you — people you love, causes you believe in, work that is genuinely absorbing, experiences that cannot be bought — and that is your life. Spend them elsewhere, and that is also your life.
The question, in a week of loud headlines, is whether the noise is spending your hours for you.
Chris, and the Spreadsheet That Never Stops Updating
Let me bring back Chris, whom you might remember from the last essay.
Chris and his wife Leoni have an investable net worth in the eight figures. He is serious, disciplined, and genuinely intelligent. He maintains elaborate spreadsheets — dozens of tabs, sophisticated formulas, scenario models, briefing packages. In ordinary conditions, those spreadsheets are already consuming more of his 60 hours than he would, if pressed, say he wanted them to.
In a volatile market, the tendency accelerates.
The geopolitical event provides a new and urgent justification for what was already a pre-existing habit: to manage the uncertainty himself, because the alternative — trusting someone else to do it — has always felt slightly untenable. Chris doesn’t do the spreadsheets because he loves them. He does them because he has never quite believed that anyone else will care as much, work as hard, or get it as right.
There is always something new to respond to. The data is always changing. The analysis from last week is out of date. The spreadsheet needs updating. The scenario that seemed unlikely is now less unlikely. Stay on it.
What Chris is spending his 60 hours on, right now, is not protecting his wealth.
He is paying the distraction tax. Every additional hour he invests in managing this crisis from his study is another instalment on a bill that will not appear in any account statement — but that will be paid, quietly, in the quality of the years themselves.
What Actually Helps — and What Doesn’t
You already know, at some level, that there are two kinds of response to a moment like this. Let me name both honestly.
More data doesn’t help. If you’ve read four analyses of the current situation, you are not better positioned than if you’d read two. The uncertainty is real and the headlines are genuinely contradictory. You cannot resolve that uncertainty by consuming more of it.
Tactical tinkering doesn’t help. I have watched, across decades and across many crises, what happens when intelligent, capable people decide that the current situation is finally the one that warrants adjusting the portfolio in response to headlines. The decisions feel rational in the moment. They almost never are, in retrospect. Markets discount information faster than any individual can act on it. The price of oil futures already contains the market’s best guess about the duration of the conflict, the probability of a negotiated resolution, and the likely downstream effects on inflation. You are not in a position to know better.
What actually helps is already having an answer to the question I raised last time: ‘what is the wealth for?’
The person who has done that work — who has clarity about the life they are designing, the 60 hours they want to experience, the purpose that frees their years ahead — does not need to reach for the spreadsheet when the headlines get loud. Not because they are temperamentally calmer. Because they have a reference point that the noise cannot dislodge.
The reference point is this: I know what this wealth is in service of. I know what my plan is built to withstand. I know the questions I need my trusted adviser to answer — and I have someone I can rely on to answer them honestly, someone who has my back rather than an incentive to encourage more activity. Asking your stockbroker whether now is the time to restructure the portfolio is a little like asking the barber whether it’s a good season for a haircut.
Everything beyond that is paying the distraction tax.
Your Plan Was Built for Exactly This
This is what WealthSpan thinking was built for.
WealthSpan — the capacity of your wealth to sustain your life across the full arc of the years ahead — is not calibrated to a single scenario. It is built around the recognition that your financial future contains a distribution of possible outcomes: good markets and bad ones, long lives and shorter ones, inflation shocks and deflationary periods, political turbulence and quiet years.
The current disruption is not an event that falls outside the plan. It is precisely the kind of event the plan exists to navigate. The Full Spectrum Forecast was built to stress-test exactly these sequences. The question was never ‘will there be volatility?’ It has always been ‘is the plan robust enough to navigate it when it arrives?’
And the answer to that question needs to be yes — because if it isn’t, the plan isn’t delivering what you need it to. If you’re genuinely uncertain, that uncertainty deserves a conversation with your trusted adviser, not a deeper dive into the news. The resolution lives in your financial plan. Not in the Bloomberg terminal. Not in another spreadsheet tab.
If the plan is sound, the correct response to this week’s headlines is not to engage with them more intensively. It is to return to the life you are designing and give it your hours.
A Second Life — Not the Winding Down of the First
This is something worth sitting with, especially now: the retirement your parents experienced is not the one you are heading toward. Their mental model was of gradual contraction — a slow narrowing of capacity that made the question of purpose somewhat academic. They could muddle through on golf and grandchildren for a decade and the stakes were manageable.
That forgiveness no longer applies.
For new or aspiring retirees, what lies ahead is not the winding down of the first life. It is a second life — one that may well run 25 to 35 years, in genuine health, with the experience and financial capacity to inhabit it fully. A second life in which the identity question — who am I now, what is this actually for — is not a soft add-on. It is the whole thing.
You are navigating this second life in the most geopolitically and economically turbulent period in decades. And that is not going to change. There will always be something — a trade war, a military conflict, a pandemic, a market correction, a political crisis — that provides a legitimate-seeming reason to divert your 60 hours into the management of financial anxiety.
The question is whether you let it.
The Strait of Hormuz will reopen. Or it won’t, and the world will adjust, as it always has. The tariff regime will settle into some new equilibrium that looks nothing like what anyone predicted. The market will price all of it in, faster than you can act on it.
What will not automatically recover are the hours you spent on it instead of the things that are genuinely yours: the relationships you care most about, the work that only you can do, watching the sun rise, the causes worth giving your energy to, the experiences that no account balance can replace.
Your financial plan accounts for these. The question is whether your life does.
One more thing, if you’re reading this from a distance: if the events I’ve described have already receded into memory, consider what that tells you. The Y2K crisis — a genuine, technically real concern that had serious people making contingency plans and some others stockpiling tinned goods — is now a punchline. The Global Financial Crisis, which felt existential in 2008, became a case study. Every crisis, in retrospect, looks more manageable than it felt from inside it. That is not a reason for complacency. It is a reason to hold your nerve — and to keep your 60 hours for the things that will still matter when the noise has passed.
The WealthSpan Letter is published for anyone who wants to think clearly about the financial dimensions of a long life. If you found this useful, consider forwarding it to someone who is finding it hard to look past the headlines — and back toward the life they are designing.