I want to confess an economically indefensible preference.

I am, in the year 2026, a manual transmission lover — on purpose, against the advice of every rational metric the automotive industry can produce. The modern automatic shifts faster than I ever will. The dual-clutch is more efficient. The CVT sips fuel while I'm busy rev-matching a downshift like a man performing a ritual his industry has already declared obsolete. Fewer than two in every hundred new cars sold in America now come with a clutch pedal. The spreadsheet has spoken, and the spreadsheet says: let the machine do it.

I keep choosing the third pedal anyway — in conviction if not, at this moment, in my driveway. Because here is the confession inside the confession: my current daily driver is a Honda CR-V with a CVT. A company car, leased by my day-job employer and offered as a perk I gratefully accept every morning. So I am not writing about the automatic experience from some position of aloof purity. I commute inside it. Daily.

And I can tell you exactly why, though it took me years to put language to it. On a good back road, in the right gear, a manual car is not transporting you. You are driving it. Your left foot and right hand are inside the machine's decision-making; you feel the engine load through the lever; the car answers your intention with its behavior. Every shift is a small, deliberate act of participation — rewarded with something no torque-converter can deliver: the sensation of being involved in the outcome.

So let me describe that experience with the authority of a man who lives it. Somewhere on the on-ramp every morning, the CR-V settles into the CVT's signature sound — that droning, disconnected hum, the engine pinned at some algorithmically optimal RPM while the car hunts for efficiency with no interest in my participation whatsoever. Nothing is wrong. The machine is performing beautifully — it is, by every measurable standard, an excellent car doing excellent work. And I feel nothing. I am not driving; I am being ferried. The car is an appliance, and I am cargo with a steering wheel and a coffee.

Hold that hum in your mind. Because I want to talk about your index fund.

I recently wrote about boredom as the quiet failure mode of sensible investing. This week I want to go one layer down, to something I suspect more of you feel than say: the vague dissatisfaction of doing everything right.

You know the position. You read the research. You understood the case for passive indexing — low costs, broad diversification, the humility of not pretending to outsmart the market. You set up the automatic monthly contribution into the broad basket, exactly as the sensible books instructed. And then, somewhere in the months that followed, you noticed a feeling you were embarrassed to say out loud: this doesn't engage me at all. The account updates on a screen. The number drifts. There's nothing to decide, nothing to feel, nothing to hold. And because everything you've read insists this frictionless-ness is the whole point, you filed the dissatisfaction away as a character flaw — evidence that you lack the temperament for proper investing, that you're secretly a gambler looking for an excuse.

I'm writing this essay to tell you the dissatisfaction is not a flaw. It's a diagnosis. You are describing the CVT hum. Optimization without involvement. And the reason it matters is not aesthetic — it's structural. A process you feel nothing about is a process you will eventually stop tending. Not in a crash; crashes at least produce adrenaline. In the flat, uneventful middle years, when the drone has fully faded into background noise and something with a voice is calling from elsewhere. Frictionless systems are easy to start precisely because they are easy to leave.

Let me be careful here, because I mean this: the index fund is a magnificent machine, and for millions of people it is the right machine. This is not an argument against the automatic. It is an argument that the automatic quietly costs some drivers something the spreadsheet doesn't measure — and that those drivers deserve a design that accounts for them.

Aviation figured this out before finance did, and paid tuition in the learning.

In the late 1990s, an American Airlines training captain named Warren Vanderburgh gave a now-famous lecture to his pilots with a haunting title: "Children of the Magenta Line." The magenta line is the automation's path — the route the flight computer draws across the navigation display. Vanderburgh's warning was that a generation of pilots had become so dependent on following that line, so accustomed to managing the autopilot rather than flying the airplane, that their hand-flying instincts were atrophying in the seat. The automation was superb — right up until the moment it wasn't. And when automation disconnects, it hands the airplane back to whoever the pilot has been becoming all those uneventful hours. Regulators eventually said the quiet part in writing: in 2013, the FAA formally encouraged airlines to have pilots practice manual flying, because the skill only exists if it is used.

Nobody involved was a Luddite. Nobody proposed ripping the autopilot out of the cockpit. The insight was narrower and more interesting: some capacities are built only through engagement, and the moment you need them most is the moment the automation gives the controls back.

Markets have such a moment. Every investor eventually meets it — the year the screen turns deep red, the headlines turn apocalyptic, and every automated, frictionless, feel-nothing system on earth suddenly hands its owner one manual decision: do you hold? And here is the uncomfortable truth the passive literature rarely dwells on: that question is answered not by the portfolio you own but by the investor you've become while owning it. The one who spent years being ferried — who never made a deliberate choice, never built conviction about anything specific, never felt the machine — reaches for hand-flying instincts that were never developed. The drift was pleasant. The disconnect is not.

This is what Anchored DCA™ is, translated into the language of this essay: it is the manual gearbox of long-term investing — a deliberate decision to keep the human in the loop of a process that compounds better with attention than without it.

Each month's anchor is a gear change. Deliberate, felt, chosen. You are building meaningful positions one at a time, for specific reasons you can articulate, in specific companies whose role in the AI transformation you actually understand — and month by month, the portfolio takes shape under your hands. There is something to care about, which means there is something that holds you while you hold it. The engagement isn't friction to be engineered away; it's the training. Every deliberate month is an uneventful hour of hand-flying, quietly building the investor who — when the sky eventually turns rough, and it will — already knows what their hands are doing.

I'll admit the preference runs deep with me. The car I'm slowly saving toward, a small British thing with the engine behind the seats, comes two ways: a brilliant, faster, automatic-only version, and a manual. I have no interest whatsoever in the faster one. Not because the numbers favor mine — they don't — but because I'm not buying numbers. I'm buying the drive. And there's a symmetry I've come to appreciate on those humming morning commutes: the appliance is ferrying me to the day job whose paychecks are, month by deliberate month, buying the machine that will ask something of me again.

Some of you have been idling in something efficient, feeling vaguely like cargo, wondering if the restlessness means something is wrong with you. It doesn't. It might just mean you're a driver — and if you'd like to see what investing feels like with a third pedal, AI Wealth Blueprint is here whenever the road invites you.

— Christopher Cinek
Founder, AI Wealth Blueprint

This content is for educational and informational purposes only and reflects personal opinions at the time of writing. Nothing here constitutes financial, investment, tax, or legal advice. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal.