The Tools That Fit

Technology Didn’t Cure Me. It Just Improved the Math.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from driving when you have Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Not the physical act of turning the wheel or pressing the pedal. Those are small things. The exhaustion comes from the vigilance. The constant monitoring of every variable around you, the cars changing lanes, the merge that comes sooner than you expected, the light that went from yellow to red while you were watching the truck to your left. It is cognitive labor, and cognitive labor costs the same currency that physical labor does. It draws from the same account.

Before I understood my illness well enough to name what was happening, I assumed driving was free. It felt passive compared to working a retail floor or managing a team through a holiday rush. I was sitting down. I was just watching.

I was wrong. I was paying a toll I could not see, and I was paying it every mile.

I want to write about technology in this essay. Specifically, I want to write about two tools that have changed the math of my daily life in ways I did not fully anticipate when I acquired them.

I should say something first, because I think it matters for honesty.

I believe what I believe, and one of them is that debate and compromise are not weaknesses in a democracy. They are the mechanism. Ideas get tested against other ideas, the better ones survive the argument, and what gets implemented reflects something closer to collective wisdom than any single person’s certainty. And I believe that new information, better arguments, and honest debate can change my mind. That is not weakness. That is the point. I believe we are worse off when that process breaks down, when the goal shifts from persuasion to domination, and when listening becomes something only losers do.

I also believe that public figures who use their platforms to degrade democratic institutions, amplify conspiracy theories, and treat cruelty as a personality trait deserve to be called out for it, regardless of what else they have built. Elon Musk has made choices over the past several years that I find genuinely troubling. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But I can also see what he has built. He has gathered talented, driven people around hard problems and pushed them to produce things that did not exist before. Electric vehicles at scale. Reusable rockets. And Starlink, which has provided satellite internet access to people who had none, in war zones, in disaster areas, in places the rest of the infrastructure forgot. That is not a small thing. Dismissing it entirely because I disagree with his politics would be the same kind of lazy thinking I am arguing against.

Two things can be true at the same time. He has done genuine harm with his platform and genuine good with his companies. I can hold both of those without needing one to cancel the other. That is actually what I am asking for when I argue for debate and honest engagement. You follow the evidence where it leads, even when it’s complicated.

I own a Tesla, and it has changed my life.

The engineers who designed Full Self-Driving did not ask me to endorse the CEO. They built a technology, and the technology works, and for someone with my illness, it works in ways that go far beyond the marketing.

What FSD Actually Does for a Person with ME

Full Self-Driving (FSD) handles the vigilance.

That is the simple version. Here is the longer one.

When I use FSD on the highway, or through a complex urban intersection, or on the stretch of Route 13 between my house and anywhere else I need to be, the car is doing the continuous environmental scanning that would otherwise fall to me. It is watching the merge. It is tracking the truck. It is calculating the gap between my vehicle and the one ahead. None of that cognitive load is landing on my nervous system.

What I do while FSD is running is monitor the system. That is a different cognitive task, and a significantly lighter one. It is the difference between actively solving a problem and watching to see whether a problem develops. The first is expensive. The second is cheap by comparison.

I am not saying FSD is perfect. It is not. It requires supervision. There are moments where I take the wheel because the system has misread something and I need to correct it. I am not absent. But I am not spending down my cognitive energy budget at the rate I would be if I were driving manually. And that difference, over a 90-minute round trip commute I was making twice a week before medical leave forced me off the floor entirely, is no small thing. There were shifts where I slept in the car afterward. Not because I wanted to. Because I had to. Eight hours on the retail floor, then 45 minutes of highway vigilance, and there was nothing left. I could not drive home yet. So I waited. FSD would not have given me back the energy the shift cost me. But it might have meant I could get home without the car becoming a recovery room first.

That hour is not gone from my life now. I get to use it differently. That is what access looks like. Not a cure. Not a dramatic rescue. Just a reallocation of a resource that was previously being consumed by a task that did not need to consume it.

I have written before about the capacity gap, about the distance between what I can do and what a healthy person takes for granted. FSD does not close that gap. Nothing closes that gap. But it is one of the few technologies I have encountered that was designed for one purpose and turns out to address a different, more invisible one. The engineers built it for convenience. For me, it functions as something closer to an accommodation.

The Visible Band and the Problem of Not Knowing

The second tool is smaller and less dramatic.

The Visible Band 2.0 was built specifically for people with energy-limiting conditions, developed in partnership with Polar. It tracks heart rate, heart rate variability, stress score, and energy expenditure in real time, and it builds a rolling picture of whether my body is in recovery or under strain.

The reason this matters requires some explanation of how post-exertional malaise (PEM) works, and why the absence of this kind of feedback has historically been so costly.

PEM does not announce itself in real time. That is the cruelest part of it. You feel okay, or okay enough, while you are doing the thing that is going to wreck you two days from now. The payment is deferred. By the time the crash arrives, you have already spent the money and there is no getting it back. The lag between exertion and consequence means that normal human feedback systems, which are designed to respond to immediate discomfort, fail completely.

I spent the first couple of years of this illness making decisions based on how I felt in the moment. That is the intuitive approach. It is also wrong. “How I feel right now” is not a reliable indicator of “what this is going to cost me by Thursday.” The data I needed was not experiential. It was physiological.

The Visible band gives me physiological data.

When I look at my energy score mid-afternoon and it is in a range that signals I am already taxed, I have something I did not have before: an objective reason to stop. Not a feeling. Not a judgment call I have to make while already impaired. A number. A trend line. A clear signal from my body that I can read without relying on the subjective experience that my illness has made unreliable.

This sounds simple. It is not. People with energy-limiting illnesses, like ME, are constantly second-guessing themselves. The stakes of getting it wrong are too high to leave to instinct. A miscalculation does not just cost you an afternoon. It can cost you a week. The band takes some of the guesswork out of the math.

The band has given me something to point to. Not just for other people, but for myself. The number is not my perception. The number is the data. They are not always the same thing, and the data is more trustworthy than the perception right now.

Over time, I have started to recognize patterns that I could not see before. The band has helped me understand which activities are more expensive than they appear. Conversations that run long. Tasks that require sustained concentration. The retail shift that seemed manageable but drove my heart rate into a range that predicts a rough two days ahead. I would not have been able to identify those patterns without the data. I only thought I understood my limits. The band has shown me where they actually are.

What Tools Cannot Do

I want to be careful here, because this kind of writing can slide toward something I have worked to avoid in all of these essays. The redemption arc. The technology that fixed things. The story where the sick person finds the right tools and gets their life back.

That is not this story.

FSD does not give me back the energy that driving cost me. It reduces the cost. The Visible band does not give me more capacity. It helps me not waste the capacity I have. These are meaningful improvements to my daily accounting. They do not change the fundamental budget problem.

The budget is still small. The new floor is still lower than where I was before the crash. I still have to make the same hard calculations that I have been writing about in this series, the ones about what I can afford to do and what I cannot, and what happens when I miscalculate.

What the tools have done is reduce the error rate on those calculations. Before them, I was guessing with imperfect information and paying for the guesses. Now I am guessing with better information. I still guess wrong sometimes. The consequences are still real.

But I will take better information over worse information. Given what I have to work with, that is not a small thing.

I did not buy the Tesla because I thought it would solve my illness. I bought it because I needed a car, and I needed a car that would make the driving I still have to do less expensive. The FSD capability was a factor in that calculus. As an accessibility tool, not as a luxury.

I did not start wearing the Visible band because I thought data would cure me. I started wearing it because I was tired of being surprised by my own body. Because the lag between exertion and consequence had wrecked me too many times and I needed something external to help me see what I could not see from the inside.

Neither of these is a fix. But both of them fit. And in a life where most tools were not designed with me in mind, and most accommodations require a fight to obtain, and most of the things that were supposed to help did not, finding something that fits is worth naming.

Not celebrating. Just naming.

This is what working within the constraints of Long COVID and ME/CFS actually looks like. Not inspiration. Just better calibrated survival.

If you found your way here from this essay, welcome. I’m Fred Rossi, and I write The Economics of Survival, a series that uses the language of budgets, debt, and scarcity to make sense of life with energy-limiting chronic illness, specifically Long COVID and ME/CFS.

This piece on the tools that fit is one entry in a larger project. Other essays cover the crash that reshaped my baseline and the debt that came due when I pushed past my limits, what stability actually costs when capacity is finite, the gap between what I can do and what a healthy person takes for granted, and the slower work of rebuilding an identity around new constraints. I don’t write inspiration. I write the math.

I also write about the things I love when they have something to teach me. In “Size Matters Not,” I looked at what Yoda and the swamp on Dagobah taught me about pacing, failure, and working within the energy I actually have instead of the energy I wish I had. Star Wars, comics, hockey, and technology turn up here when they illuminate something worth saying.

If any of that resonates, subscribe and stick around. There’s more where this came from.

May the Force be with you.