They printed so many German marks in the 1920s, eventually you needed a wheelbarrow of them to buy a loaf of bread.

You could literally swim in a Scrooge McDuck style pool of money and still be living in poverty. 

That’s what inflation looks like when applied to currencies. 

I think something similar is happening with our personal agency. 

The more tools we accumulate - apps, gadgets, platforms, AI copilots - the richer we feel in capability. But paradoxically, each new layer seems to make us weaker. Like the Weimar baker who preferred being paid in bread rather than paper, I sometimes wonder if I’d rather trade away most of my tools and have the raw skill set back.

This sounds dramatic. Is it really possible that adding conveniences makes us less powerful? But watch how we panic when our phones die, how helpless we feel without Wi-Fi.

Something’s going on here.

The first time you use a new tool, it’s not unlike picking up a magic wand. GPS, for example. Suddenly the entire map of the world collapses into a blue dot and an arrow, and you’re never lost again. A miracle! Until you notice that after a decade of this, you can’t actually remember the directions to your own grocery store. I once asked a friend how to get to a restaurant in his neighborhood. He pulled out his phone. He had lived there for years.

Break your leg, and the crutch helps you heal. Keep using it long after you’re better, and the leg atrophies. The tool - initially leverage - becomes a dependency. When Homer wrote about Odysseus, he gave him tools too: a raft, Athena’s advice, the bag of winds. But Odysseus had to row, to scheme, to improvise. 

Modern tools ask much, much less.

Early Romans were terrifyingly self-sufficient. The farmer who became a soldier who became a magistrate - the kind of man who could dig a ditch, march twenty miles, and then argue a case in court. By the late empire, Rome was drowning in bureaucrats. Specialized offices for grain, for taxation, for river traffic. The system was incredibly capable - on paper. But when barbarian tribes tested the frontiers, the empire discovered it had no actual Romans left who could fight. They had outsourced resilience.

Each app we add feels like one more imperial office. 

Capable in theory, brittle in practice.

If you always rely on spellcheck, you eventually stop trusting yourself to spell. If you always use budgeting software, you doubt your own arithmetic. The problem is not that you can’t relearn these things - you can. It’s that you don’t believe you can.

Hamlet is the literary patron saint of this phenomenon. He is paralyzed by doubt. He has too much input, too many competing tools of interpretation. His tragedy is hesitation. 

Tools that flood us with data - sleep scores, productivity dashboards, endless notifications - risk turning us into a global nation of Hamlets. Surrounded by graphs, haunted by metrics, incapable of deciding without one more refresh.

To push the analogy harder: Imagine your personal agency as a currency backed by the reserve of your own skills and habits. Every new tool is like printing more notes. At first you feel richer. You can do more, faster. But unless the underlying reserve grows alongside - unless you actually strengthen your capacities - those notes get increasingly worthless. Eventually you have agency inflation. On paper, you’re a productivity powerhouse with twelve different systems. In practice, take away the apps and you’re stranded.

To a degree - this is how progress works. Nobody complains that people can’t make their own shoes anymore. Nobody (except me, crotchety to the last) mourns the lost art of memorizing epic poetry. Tools free us up for higher-level pursuits.

And yet. 

There’s a difference between forgetting how to stitch sandals and forgetting how to get home without a glowing rectangle. Shoes are outsourced to specialists, but wayfinding is a continuous, everyday need. The line between harmless outsourcing and dangerous dependence is blurry, but we can sense when we’ve crossed it. The symptoms: the anxiety, the helplessness, the thin edge of panic when the tool is gone. 

Aren’t some tools genuinely empowering // don’t they expand human capacity rather than shrinking it? 

Writing itself was once considered a dangerous crutch that would weaken memory. Socrates warned against it. And maybe he was wrong, because writing unlocked philosophy, history, science. 

But even here, there’s a cost: oral cultures had astonishing feats of memory we no longer possess. 

Maybe it was a fair trade. 

Maybe some trades aren’t.

If we buy the analogy, the cure for inflation is obvious: you need to back the currency with reserves again. Anchor the tools to skills. Use GPS, but also practice remembering routes. Use budgeting software, but balance a checkbook occasionally. Use AI to draft an email, but make sure you can still write without it. These are not technophobic gestures. They’re stress tests. They’re not unlike the Stoic practice of voluntary discomfort: skip a meal, wear rough clothes, rehearse poverty. 

You don’t do it because it’s fun. 

You do it to prove you still can.

The same applies here. Can you still function when the tool is gone? If yes, the tool serves you. If no, you serve it.

What kind of people do we want to become? Citizens, or clients of empire?

Rome’s decline was cushioned by systems that seemed invincible until they weren’t. Our decline, if it comes, will be cushioned by apps.

What happens when the apps stop? What happens when the empire of convenience falters? We may discover that the wealth of tools was a mirage, that we traded too much muscle for too many modals.

I don’t know the exact balance point. Maybe the right number of tools is fewer than we think. Maybe the right posture toward them is suspicion rather than worship. What I do know is that personal agency, like currency, loses value if you keep inflating it without reserves. And if you want sovereignty rather than dependency, you have to defend it.