Picture yourself at 68, standing in a checkout line. Your eyes lock on the total. Your hand hesitates near your wallet.

That quiet panic? That's not failure talking. That's the compound cost of avoidance.

Here's what keeps me up: I'm not afraid of losing. I'm terrified of that moment—when I'm supposed to enjoy the fruits of decades of work, and instead I'm doing math on groceries.

Why? Because somewhere in my 30s, I told myself "I'll learn about money later." Investing felt complicated. Personal finance seemed boring. Twenty hours felt like too much time to figure out.

Spoiler: it wasn't.

That twenty hours? It would've taught me how compound interest actually works. How to think about assets instead of just paychecks. How inflation silently erodes everything you don't put to work.

The cruel part isn't the mistake—it's that you don't feel it happening. Today's financial illiteracy doesn't punish today. It punishes tomorrow's you.

Your future self doesn't get to renegotiate. They're stuck living with choices you make now.

So maybe it's time to stop deferring the uncomfortable lesson. Twenty hours now feels like nothing compared to twenty years of financial stress later.