Post FIRE Life: Notes to self for a meaningful life in 2022
Almost a month late in posting this New Year Resolution, but better late than never. TC: 0 (Financially Independent / Retired Early) My FIRE post: https://www.teamblind.com/post/sqhzju14 Context: I've begun trying out early retirement and have been on a break for nearly an year now. Although I've been reasonably productive with my free time, there still are areas that could use work. Below are some contemplative notes to myself to identify areas in my life where I could use improvements. I'd like to refer back to these notes regularly to remind myself not to turn into a Netflix-bingeing, Instagram-scrolling, Beer-guzzling, Blind-shitposting degenerate. I'd also like to use this as a manual to try to cultivate a deeper, more mindful and fulfilling existence as I grow older. Here goes... ... Notes to self: You turn 37 this year. If you're destined to be one of the unlucky ones that depart in their 40s or 50s, then you're getting ever closer to the finish line with each passing year. In the fortunate case that you've been handed a long life, you still have to realize that your youthful, energetic years are running out. You don't want to get to 65 and look back and wonder what you did with all that time, with nothing to show for it. Building a large body of work, experiences and memories to look back upon are the only means of dodging regret over lost time. To build this body of work, experiences and memories, you need to optimize for utilizing your time everyday in the best possible way. It means shunning bad habits and distractions. It means developing a deep sense of self-awareness and clarity on how best to approach every day. It means going through a writing exercise to identify ingrained habits and behaviors that constantly drain away your one valuable non-renewable resource - TIME. Here is an acid test to evaluate any activity or pursuit you indulge in - Does this activity buildup, or accumulate to something significant that you'll proudly be able to look back upon down the line? If not, you're wasting your time. With that in mind, below is an exercise in listing out some of your less-than-ideal habits that are extremely fleeting and only offer a momentary respite from boredom while building up to nothing over time. **Instagram** Problem: While you aren't exactly addicted to IG and don't follow any of those insufferable social media influencers, you do use the platform to express your own creative side (photography/animation/music/short-movies). Although this activity contributes toward building up your own body of creative work over the long term, you find yourself spending significant time occasionally putting together your creative content. And once you've posted, the compulsive behavior begins where you obsessively check how your post is being received. Solution: If you have a creative project to put out, post only on the 15th or the 30th of the month. For the editing work, start it about a week before the post date. Be disciplined about not spending more than one (two at max) hours of editing work a day. Also, stop checking Instagram status/story updates altogether. Any update that has no lasting value and disappears forever within a day isn't worth paying attention to. Mute your Insta connections that post stories. **Reddit/Quora** Problem: Like every other human that isn't a saint, you harbor plenty of biases, prejudices, intolerance and hatred toward stuff you don't agree with. Whenever overcome by these negative thoughts, you tend to turn to Reddit and Quora searching for an echo chamber for confirmation/validation. This is a classic example of an activity that doesn't accumulate to anything over time. Solution: Get rid of negative thoughts by indulging in meditation or do some pushups and go for a walk. Physical activity always helps clear your head of toxicity. And as a general rule, discontinue consuming comment threads and content generated by people that say or type things that occurred to them at that very minute. Remind yourself that there is well thought-out, well-researched, deep content out there such as books that is high-effort even to consume, but which leaves you with a full-bodied, deep-in-your-bones viscereal and cerebral fulfillment on digesting. Always favor long form text instead of comment threads and bite-sized content targeted toward attention-span challenged mass consumers. **Whatsapp** Problem: Giving away a big chunk of your time and attention toward pointless shit on Whatsapp. This activity doesn't accumulate. Solution: Adhere to a strict no-forwards and no-sharing policy on Whatsapp. Your limited resources of time and energy aren't worth spending on consuming and sharing junk entertainment on Whatsapp. That means you don't acknowledge random shit someone else sent you and you never ever share random content with others. Sending junk is worse than receiving because once you share something with others, you then spend your valuable cognitive cycles expecting/waiting for acknowledgement and validation. Only use whatsapp for 1:1 communication and not entertainment. Unless it's incredibly rude to do so, drop out of Whatsapp groups. Group talk is where you're talking to everybody in general but to nobody in particular. Group talk doesn't strengthen relationships. If someone is wishing everyone on the group during special occasions, know without doubt that you don't mean much to that person. Only maintain 1:1 relationships with people that you actually talk to on the phone or in real life. All your other text-based group connections are fake. Either transform such relationships to real 1:1, or cut them out of your life to free up your time and energy for more meaningful pursuits. Superficial connections need regular weeding. **Stock Market** Problem: Checking the market the first thing on waking up and then intermittently throughout the day. Accumulates to absolutely nothing. Solution: Exercise discipline and will-power to limit your checks to 5 PM everyday. Since you aren't an active trader and more of a buy-and-holder, you're accomplishing nothing by obsessively checking charts that you don't control. Whenever overcome by the urge to check, do some pushups and remind yourself of all the books you want to read that remain unread. Constantly strive to abandon such quick-check habits in exchange for deeper accumulative pursuits. **Blind** Problem: Surfing Blind way too much and occasional shitposting and trolling. With Blind, you've reached the point of diminishing returns. Solution: If there's one thing you'd want to let go that you actually like, it has to be Blind. You've gotten enough value out of it. The signal to noise ratio is quite low. Most times, you're just scrolling through pointless flex posts, random chatter about the stock market and unending crypto or housing arguments. Other times, you get sucked into toxic threads with people just shaming and trolling one another. Or you run into idiotic FIRE posts with folks claiming you need 10M or 20M to FIRE. And this coming from people that will continue working (for money) and will never ever drop off the rat race. You'll never hear from folks that have truly made the leap. So this again is a waste of your time. Only use Blind when you have to make concrete, quantifiable decisions and are looking for specific inputs or actionable advice from knowledgeable people. Or, use it to create posts like these and to provide your FIRE updates that help a ton of like-minded people. Otherwise, do not login. Practice a non-negotiable ethic of never shitposting or trolling. **Sleep/Wake-up Routine** Problem: Submitting to the omnipotent power of recommendation algorithms and getting sucked into watching shit content on streaming platforms late into the night and then waking up at 10 or 11 AM or some such disgustingly late hour. Solution: Replace random video content consumption with targeted high-quality entertainment such as acclaimed movies. Preferably, avoid shows with long drawn seasons so in case you stop enjoying your show in the middle, you don't continue watching till the end just to suffer the sunk-cost fallacy (happened with House of Cards). Better yet, if you don't have the energy left to read books late at night, watch videos on furthering your hobbies: Guitar, Ukulele, Gardening, etc. Have an upper time bound of one hour for video consumption. And then if still not sleepy, then read yourself to sleep. Wake up naturally, no alarm. On waking up, read a page or two of the book you're currently reading while still in bed to rid yourself of grogginess. After 15 minutes or so, get out of bed and make yourself some coffee. Then get down to your work table and bang out two hours of uninterruped study on a cognitively demanding task. If you keep at it, it'll accumulate to something huge over time. ... Conclusion: As I enter my late 30s and get ever closer to the 40th mark (Jesus! Truly hits me that I'm not young anymore.), it's important that I become extremely selective over what I choose to spend my non-renewable resources of time and energy on. As I stand at the doorstep of a new year, this is also a good time to begin on a journey that is more contemplative and mindful, while shunning passive, non-accumulative activities. Growing older is something I can't help. Growing wiser is within my hands. #mentalhealth #retirement #health #fire
Blind
Good posts. One thing I want to mention is to incorporate exercise and good nutrition. Hitting 60’s is fine and all but you want to be reasonably healthy and fit at that point to enjoy your sunset years.
OP - how much do you spend per month these days? I assume you bought a house / car before you went back to India right??
Also, thank you for the post. I’ve read them all and DMd you. How do u spend you’re time these days?
Interested to know same
great post, huge fan of your posts. please keep writing!
Great posts with great lessons, advice and sharing of experiences, Good luck to you for rest of your journey.
How are you doing now that we are in the middle of a stock market crash? Has it put any pressure on FIRE?
+1 I too had exact same thought while I was reading this post just now.
Hi there! I posted this response to a similar question on one of my other fire posts. Pasting it down here: NW is currently slightly under 1.1M. Considering our living expenses, we should still be fine even if the markets continue to drop and my net worth gets down to 800K. Assuming 800K and a withdrawal rate of 3% every year, that's $24000 I can safely draw down each year. That's like having 18 lac rupees to spend every year, or 1.5 lac rupees every month. We are currently averaging a living expense of Rs. 50,000 at max every month. So I like to think that our safety net is very wide.
Great series of FIRE posts. Thank you so much. Just wanted to ask one thing- do you have any ancestral property/family business as a back-up?
This is a great post and resonates with my own personal observations. Few years back I've caught myself mindlessly scrolling on Facebook/Reddit/whatsapp. It was very unfulfilling. I didn't want to be a saint but wanted to get reasonanle control back on life. Deleted Facebook. I think the best thing I did was to disable notifications of Whatsapp and almost all apps on my phone. If something is urgent, I know the person would call. Texts can wait. I also had an app which would ask me why I was unlocking the phone every time you try to unlock the phone. It helps in catching me involuntarily unlocking the phone and opening some app to feed my dopamine craving brain. Took me couple of years for this detoxing but slowly worked. I eventually logged in back to my Facebook account because I had some logins tied to it but I no longer spend time on it in an unproductive way. I don't do mindless newsfeed scroll anymore other than post or look for something on buy/sell groups now and then. I have zero social media acitivity. Recently turned back Whatsapp notifications as well as I've regained control on it and don't check statuses anymore. Previously I've uninstalled and reinstalled reddit countless times and was never able to quit it. My frustration with it was similar and feeling exhausted after mindlessly surfing and soaking in polarizing views. I found my ideology already. Reddit hosts both sides of the pendulum and centre as well and one thing I've realized is people don't change. There is no point in reading or fighting the extreme views on either side and being frustrated. It's good to get confirmation of your views once in while but I'm no longer a impressionable teen. I can stay behind and observe. Thankfully Reddit is organic and customisable unlike other pretentious social media where I can't control what I'm seeing. I unsubbed from all political and news subs. Only subbed to interesting, non-political, sports, niche smaller subs, memes and joke subs and it's much more enjoyable experience. I found two books very helpful in this journey - The Shallows by Nicholas Kar and Deep work by Cal Newport. Credit to /r/nosurf community for recommending these. The books talk a lot about how books encourage linear thought and deep thinking whereas internet encourages short attention spans and shallow thinking. I couldn't get into reading books as much I desired but I do listen to audiobooks a lot. It was tough at first listening to something without mind wandering or wanting to do something which gives immediate feedback to feed the brain like fidgeting on the phone etc but I've forced myself to listen for 30mins at least everyday. Getting the brain to focus on single task is basically like training any other muscle. Recently I've noticed myself spending more time on Blind. Although I'm not using it obsessively, I did notice the dopamine rush when there is a new msg or reply etc. Probably time to uninstall. :) I do post on places like reddit or LinkedIn once in a while but the difference is I don't care about how many replies, like or reactions I get which I used to crave for back in the day. I haven't read the book "Not giving a fuck" or whatever it is called as I felt it might be full cringe advice but I do like the phrase.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Juniper! Resonates on many levels. App notifications have no place in my life. I don't have a single app on my phone that has notifications enabled. I only allow phone calls and non-Internet text messages to interrupt me whenever they come in. Everything else needs to wait until my daily scheduled 5 PM check. I avoid installing apps on my phone where I can and only access their web versions through a laptop browser. This adds a level of inconvenience that brings down the amount of time I give them. Also includes financial apps like Fidelity, Robinhood and Personal Capital. If you aren't guarded, these gamified fintech apps will in no time consume you just like social media. Glad to see you mention Cal Newport. I've been reading his blog for the last ten years and have read all his books. He's been a huge influence. It's a constant battle that you'll no doubt lose occasionally, but you've got to keep fighting and eventually these attempts turn into solid habits.