The most annoying enemy in PRAGMATA was not a robot.
It was hacking.
Dodging, aiming, shooting, positioning—fine. Those are Hugh’s jobs. He is the guy with the gun.
Then Diana starts electronic warfare, and somehow the game sends the paperwork to my left hand and mouse.
Hugh: “I’ll fight.”
Diana: “I’ll hack.”
Game: “Player, please solve the grid.”
Me: “Why am I in this department?”
So I installed a mod called Unlimited Auto Hack.
The name sounded like victory.
Me: “Diana has received an external brain upgrade.”
The first hack seemed to finish instantly. Then the next one went straight back to manual mode.
External brain: one-use free trial.
Inspecting the Lua made the reason obvious. The mod does not automatically trigger Auto-hacking. It mainly reduces the gauge cost of the game’s existing Auto-hacking function to almost nothing.[1]
What I imagined was:
“Diana does everything.”
What I actually installed was:
“When Diana does it, the operating cost is almost zero.”
Those are very different job descriptions.
1. I did not want free hacking. I wanted an independent Diana
At that point the requirement became clear.
I did not want an infinite gauge.
I wanted Diana to see an enemy and hack it herself.
Hugh and Diana are separate individuals. Hugh runs, dodges and shoots. Diana handles electronic warfare.
If the player has to perform both jobs simultaneously, the organization chart says “division of labor” while one employee is quietly doing everything.
Beautiful corporate structure.
A completely hands-off mainstream mod is hard to find, but mods such as Maverick’s Hacking Matrix streamline the grid and strengthen Auto Hacking.[2] Trainer-style mods go further, offering unlimited Auto Hack, infinite hacking nodes, ammo options, damage multipliers and inventory editing.[3]
PC modding has been around long enough that whenever someone thinks, “Do I really have to do this every single time?”, there is a decent chance a stranger has already removed it.
2. I do not want another playthrough either, so multiply the loot
Once hacking was outsourced, collecting resources became the next target.
Game: “Collect materials to become stronger.”
Me: “I want to finish in one playthrough.”
Game: “Then explore—”
Me: “I will increase the multiplier.”
Lunafilament Multiplier lets players change pickup amounts from 1x to 100x.[4] PRAGMATA Trainer can also edit or multiply Upgrade Components, Pure Lunum, Cabin Coins and other inventory resources.[3]
That is the sweet spot.
Giving myself 999 of everything kills exploration. But finding one item and having it count as five or ten keeps discovery meaningful while deleting the grind.
Keep the joy of finding things. Fire the repeat playthrough.
This is less “cheating” and more “my personal labor agreement.”
3. The real strength of PC gaming is firing only the annoying parts
On a console, you usually have to negotiate directly with the developer’s design.
Developer: “Please enjoy this pacing.”
Me: “This one part is tedious.”
Developer: “That is the design.”
End of meeting.
On PC:
Me: “This is tedious.”
Random stranger on the internet: “I removed it.”
Me: “Thank you for your service.”
The goal is not necessarily to make the game easier.
The goal is to remove low-value friction.
Let Diana handle hacking. Multiply collection rewards. Compress multiple runs into one satisfying run. Keep the art, world, characters, story and the parts of combat that actually feel good.
Developer: “Our concept is controlling two characters at once!”
Me: “We are restructuring the department.”
4. 4:00 p.m.: “Maybe I’ll go to the pool.” → 8:00 p.m.: “Good morning.”
While I was optimizing games, real life performed a much more aggressive optimization.
I slept until noon.
Late afternoon arrived.
4:00 p.m.: “Maybe I’ll go swimming.”
I lay down for a moment.
8:00 p.m.: “…good morning.”
More than three hours vanished.
The pool disappeared. The exercise plan disappeared. Sleep remained undefeated.
On a normal workday, waking up at 8 p.m. is an incident report.
During a long leave with no immediate shift to attend, it becomes:
“Fine. I’ll walk around a shopping mall instead.”
Cardio failed. Cat-mode progressed.
5. Paid leave: the system that gives a cat a payslip
This becomes even more absurd with paid leave.
Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare describes annual paid leave as time intended to help workers recover physically and mentally and enjoy a more relaxed life, while not having their wages reduced for taking it.[5]
So, institutionally speaking:
Sleep.
Wake up.
Still get paid.
Paid leave is finite, of course. It is not a permanent income machine.
But when several days are used together, you suddenly understand how powerful the concept is.
A cat with a human payslip.
Remarkable technology.
6. The stranger change: work stopped running in my head
The important part was not the sleep.
It was the silence.
No background loop of:
“What happened with that task?”
“What do I need to fix tomorrow?”
“What did that comment mean?”
“What problem is waiting for me next?”
That mental process simply stopped occupying space.
And what replaced it?
“Where should I go for fun?”
Occupational psychology calls mentally switching off from work during non-work time “psychological detachment.” Reviews and meta-analyses associate stronger detachment with less exhaustion, greater life satisfaction and well-being, and better sleep.[6][7]
So the sequence is not mysterious:
Work process stops running in the background.
Memory becomes available.
Travel search launches.
The brain has priorities.
7. “Maybe life is better without work” needs one distinction
The obvious thought follows:
“Maybe having no job is simply better.”
But the current situation is not ordinary unemployment.
There is little contact with work, no immediate crisis over basic expenses, a future plan exists, and free time is abundant.
That is closer to temporarily disabling labor while leaving the rest of the system stable.
So the real preference may not be “do absolutely nothing forever.”
It may be:
Do not let work own my life.
Do not let work live rent-free in my head.
Let me decide what my time is for.
The useful question is not just “work or no work?”
It is whether work can be downgraded from a mandatory main quest to an optional side quest.
8. Enter: My Personal ATM
What would make work optional?
The elegant term is “financial independence.”
The emotionally accurate term is:
I WANT MY OWN ATM.
An ATM that pays living costs every month.
It pays while I am not at work.
It pays if I plan to swim and accidentally sleep instead.
It pays while I walk around a mall deciding what discounted food to buy.
If that “ATM” is built from investments, withdrawal rates depend heavily on assumptions. Morningstar’s research published at the end of 2025 estimated a 3.9% starting safe withdrawal rate under a 30-year horizon, 90% probability of funds remaining, and inflation-adjusted steady spending.[8]
That is not a universal guarantee, especially for someone expecting to fund many more than 30 years. Taxes, inflation, asset allocation, market crashes and changing expenses matter.
In other words, a portfolio ATM is not as reliable as the one at a convenience store.
Sometimes the screen says:
“Temporarily unavailable due to market maintenance.”
Still, the real target becomes obvious.
Not the title of “rich person.”
Ownership of one’s time.
9. “Well, everyone wants that.” Correct
After all this analysis, the conclusion is basically:
“It would be nice if money arrived without mandatory work and I could spend my time however I wanted.”
Yes.
Humanity has been working on that feature for a while.
Not everyone wants permanent unemployment. Many people get meaning, belonging, achievement and relationships from work.
But there is a huge difference between:
“I must work or I cannot live,”
and
“I am financially okay, but I choose to work because this is interesting.”
Maybe the real luxury is not “doing nothing.”
It is having the right to decide whether to do it.
So “I want my own ATM” is less a confession of laziness and more a hostile takeover of one’s calendar.
10. The game and real life were using the same strategy
Suddenly everything connects.
In PRAGMATA:
Hacking is tedious. → Outsource it to Diana.
Collecting is repetitive. → Increase the multiplier.
Multiple playthroughs feel unnecessary. → Compress them into one.
In real life:
Work rumination is exhausting. → Detach from work.
Working purely to pay bills feels mandatory. → Outsource the bills to assets, if possible.
It is the same optimization problem.
The enemy is not difficulty.
The enemy is repetition that does not feel valuable.
Remove it, and the freed time immediately asks a better question:
“What do I actually want to do?”
Apparently the answers include travel, walking, gaming, swimming and sleeping.
Swimming still has to defeat sleeping in direct combat.
11. Conclusion: Diana, hack. Assets, pay. I’ll go have fun
The ideal configuration is now simple.
Diana: electronic warfare. Please become autonomous.
Mods: compress the grind.
Assets: if possible, cover living expenses.
Me: play games, walk, travel, maybe go swimming.
And at 4 p.m.:
Sleep.
“I want my own ATM!”
Strip away the financial vocabulary and that is where the idea ends up.
And, yes, a lot of humanity probably understands the feeling.
