Opinion: Is AI the answer to mums’ mental overload?

But what if I’d had an AI assistant to keep track of the chaos — or offloaded the car research to ChatGPT? Maybe my brain would have been clearer and capable of better decisions. Maybe my bank account would look a little healthier now. — Photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash

Earlier this year, I made a dumb financial decision. I bought a car that was beyond our budget. We had just been through an eight-week stretch of demanding work schedules, kitchen renovations and checking-account fraud. Our daughter’s day-care centre closed three times, for a Covid outbreak, a bout of norovirus and a water leak. Not exactly tragedies, but when our old car died, my fried brain had no bandwidth for comparison shopping. I walked into a dealership and said I’d look at whatever they had on the lot. I left with a car — and a car loan.

How did I become the kind of person who buys a car on impulse? Cognitive overload. It can have real financial costs. In my case, they were steep — and came with 6.9% interest.