You Can’t Live in a Hot Tub

Some days, the storm outside is the easy part.

You know the feeling: hands steady, eyes forward, doing what you need to do to get home safe—slowing down because arriving matters more than proving you can push through.

Hello, my friends on Standing on the Ledge. If you’re new here, welcome aboard. If you’ve been walking with me for a while, and you haven’t yet, I’d strongly recommend the Reader’s Guide and the Tools & Protocols page. Use what helps. Leave what doesn’t. But don’t try to white-knuckle this alone.

I’m dictating this hands-free while driving home in the middle of a snowstorm—moving slower than the limit on purpose. Today, my new job had me around a lot of paramedics and first responders, and I learned a lot more about how you operate: the dispatch systems, the moving parts, the decisions that have to be made fast and clean.

To my paramedic friends out there—Basil, Gary, if you ever see this—my hat’s off to you.

Now for the part that hits close to home: money, priorities, and the quiet ways “nice to have” can turn into “can’t afford.”

There was more discussion with the tenants about the hot tub. When I bought this place, it wasn’t included in the purchase—it was an extra. And with my heart issues right now, it’s not something I can use anyway. Heart meds and hot tubs aren’t a good mix.

But the real conversation was about hydro and what it costs to treat a luxury like a necessity.

I explained it plainly: every time the temperature gets cranked up and maintained, it can add roughly $105 a month to the hydro bill. They didn’t realize it. Energy consciousness was never something they had to practice.

And that right there is a pattern I’ve seen over and over: when the pressure is low, we don’t notice the leaks. When the pressure rises, those leaks start sinking the whole ship.

From a socio-psych angle, this is where a few things collide:

• Present bias: the brain overvalues comfort right now and undervalues the bill later.
• Hedonic adaptation: yesterday’s luxury quietly becomes today’s baseline.
• Scarcity stress: when resources tighten, small “optional” choices hit harder than people expect—and denial becomes a coping strategy.

So here’s the hard truth, delivered with care: you can’t live in a hot tub.

Every dollar spent on luxuries is a dollar taken from what keeps the wheels turning: the roof, the heat, the food, the stability. Surviving a crisis—personal, financial, medical, any of it—means looking at your expenses without flinching and deciding what actually protects your future.

If you’re reading this and you’re in your own version of that storm, here’s your moment:

You don’t need perfect discipline—you need honest math. Pick one expense that’s quietly bleeding you. Name it. Price it out monthly. Then decide if it’s buying you comfort… or costing you safety.

If you need a place to start, go hit the Tools & Protocols page and choose one tool you can use today. Small corrections, repeated, are how you regain territory.

That’s it for today. Godspeed.