Why we keep patching broken machines

The Human Diagnostic · May 6, 2026 · 20m

I went out to Hennessey in late June to look at a sixteen-year-old system that had been kept alive by a series of repairs over five years. Gary met me in the driveway and told me exactly what he needed: get it through one more summer. He had a folder in the kitchen with every service record and the total he'd spent. He knew the math didn't work. He still couldn't make himself pull the trigger on the replacement. That's not ignorance. It's not even denial. It's a documented feature of how the human brain handles future costs. In 1975, psychologist George Ainslie published research on what he…