Where the Energy Goes

From The Handback · When Help Is a Lien

Every task costs energy. Standing from a chair costs some. So do the stairs, the groceries, the way home, the letter, the name on the tip of the tongue. The body pays in sugar and oxygen. The mind pays from the same account: the brain is a fiftieth of the body’s weight and burns about a fifth of its energy.

Help pays part of the bill. The walker takes some of the weight. The elevator takes the stairs. The daughter takes the groceries. The machine on the counter takes the letter. That is what help is for. Saving energy where it buys nothing leaves more to spend where it does.

So the first question to ask of any help is not whether it is good. Help saves you energy. Where does it go?

Spend it on something harder, and you grow. When I began editing this book by voice, the machine took the typing and handed me more writing than I had done in years. It lowered my friction and gleefully increased my load. Bank the energy instead, and you shrink, a little at a time, too slowly to feel.

Some help does the work. Some help knows the way. Information saves energy otherwise ignorantly spent: the wrong turn, the guess, the fear of a pain that is not harm. Whoever holds the information keeps the savings. The map in my head saves energy every time I drive. The map in my phone saves it only while I have the phone.

We have done this once already. Engines took the muscles’ work. Work got easy, bodies got soft, and we invented exercise: energy spent on purpose that the day no longer asks for. Exercise is demand put back on purpose. Now the machines are taking the mind’s work, and nobody has invented its exercise yet.

My field has kept this ledger for decades and never added it up. Minimal assist meant the patient supplied about three quarters of the effort. We graded the share every morning in the hospital, and stopped grading it the day the patient went home.

Every help moves one of two ways. It gets smaller as you recover, or it gets bigger as you shrink. From the outside the two look the same. So ask it plainly, of the walker, the daughter and the machine:

Is the help getting smaller, or are you?