A 2026 life-cycle study on electric vehicles found something oddly generous toward the manufacturing process: scrapping a working gas car to build an EV in its place lowers total emissions almost immediately — the benefit starts accruing as early as the first day of the old car’s life. That runs against instinct. Surely a car you already paid the planet to build shouldn’t get junked while it still runs fine. But the accounting treats the car as a separable object. Whatever carbon went into building it is already spent, off the table. What’s left to weigh is only the marginal emissions of driving it one more year against building and driving something cleaner. The car’s manufacturing history doesn’t get a vote in that comparison.
Maynard Keenan’s account of enlisting in the Army runs the same arithmetic and reaches the opposite instruction. He describes signing away his own exit — three to six years, no walking away mid-contract the way you can quit a cross-country team — as the entire mechanism that produced whatever discipline came after. Here the sunk time is the whole load-bearing structure, not a spent cost to write off going forward. He can’t discount his own history the way the study discounts the car’s, because there’s no calculating self standing outside the investment to do the discounting. The self that would run that marginal-cost comparison is the very asset under review.
Same decision, opposite instruction, and neither side made an error: a car is a thing you own, but you are the thing that owns.