m741's ERE Journal

Where are you and where are you going?
Gilberto de Piento
Posts: 1942
Joined: Tue Nov 12, 2013 10:23 pm

Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by Gilberto de Piento »

* I signed up for and received a Chase MileagePlus Explorer card.
This one worked well for me. I flew to Denver for free and got upgraded to first class on a different flight. It was easy to cancel it later. I didn't spend enough for the card to be worth the $75 per year fee beyond using the free miles you get when you sign up.

Legthorn Brownboat
Posts: 55
Joined: Sun Oct 12, 2014 2:00 pm

Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by Legthorn Brownboat »

Hello m741, I shotgunned your entire journal these last couple days after seeing your posts on spoonman's. Thank you so much for sharing your life and your journey. Something I'm unclear on is why are you so committed to 3 years at your current company? Is this just so that it will look good on a resume if you later decide to work for a small company? I think that 2 would be sufficient if that's your only goal, as you seem like the kind of guy who would savor an extra year of your life.

A few companies (especially one who I will refer to as "G", which is my current guess for you) have a reputation for hiring relatively junior developers and giving them **** jobs (with little legitimate room for advancement). Even for many senior newhire guys, they give them boring work. Their attitude is, "Hey, we're the big G, you have arrived. Working here is the greatest privilege/flattery, no matter how menial the actual work itself is". This also fits their hiring/interview model, as you were likely not hired by a specific team, just the company as a whole. That means you entered some global candidate pool and a team that needed more entry-level grunts picked you up.

I hope this isn't what happened to you. If it is, my only advice is to get out of your role at 2 years. In the meantime seek ways to develop yourself independently, even during work hours. It's actually a bit of a pain for a team to get rid of someone at these big companies, and you seem to be doing adequately with your 60% engagement. Rather than spend your work hours 60% engaged, could you interleave being engaged at required work, and independently developing yourself in other areas?

Maybe write a Python program to automate or assist something you currently do (annoying code reviews perhaps), then let that balloon into a side project for you. You can learn a new language, tools, etc while having tangential justification to do it during work. Who knows, it might be a useful tool for others too! What, your tool is now handling lots of tasks? Sounds like it needs its own tiny little domain-specific language! You now need to write a little parser for your language. Oh, now it'd be nice if it ran really fast, so maybe you should write a little toy compiler for it to low-level code (or assembly). It outputs charts, but what it really should be doing is rendering those charts with webgl to better visualize the data in 3D. You could even be sneaky and list it on your resume after you leave; it's something you did at G, for G, even if it wasn't an official requirement or ask. Places don't tend to contact your old managers during hiring anyways. Not saying you should ever lie, of course, lying is a *really* bad idea, but this can be legitimate work. Sounds better than "I fixed bugs and changed variable names a lot".

G has a large amount of transparency internally, and you can probably seek a transfer after a year or two, if you even want to stick with that company. While the global-candidate pool applies (and sucks for) new hires, internal transfers can be targeted by you for specific teams you like. Form personal connections with anyone you can on interesting teams to facilitate that.

m741
Posts: 1187
Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2011 3:31 am
Location: Seattle, WA

Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by m741 »

@Legthorn: thanks for the reply, I really appreciate the comment. You are right about my general situation, and how I was hired. I'll cover that, before answering your question.

I think your advice is quite reasonable. It's something I've considered myself, though I approached it as "teach myself something interesting while waiting for builds to finish," something that left me feeling guilty since I was devoting myself to personal things on company time. Your approach makes more sense, and I'll have to explore it.

---

I guess the 3-year thing is a little bit strange, so it's a good question and I'll answer at length. It came up a bit at the NYC meetup recently, and I felt then that my explanation probably wasn't clear, and that maybe I wasn't being clear with myself.

The 3-year commitment was originally something I decided before I started at the company; my plan was simply to spend 3 years developing my skills (through work), so that I'd feel comfortable working on involved projects (possibly at scale), on my own (ie, as a one-man niche startup), for a small company, or for a charity. My feeling was that, having languished with a proprietary language for 5 years, a 3-year effort would be enough to get me comfortable and skilled with another language.

Furthermore there were some non-job related factors that went into this decision: establishing a more comfortable SWR (somewhere around 3% or 2.5%), in case I wanted to switch industries; some time to establish a groove and settle down after a stressful time - and to see more of NYC; and because after 3 more years, and 8 years total, it seemed like a reasonable time for me to pick and take time off (ie, I'd be at the right point in my life for me to want to explore the world and then find somewhere to settle down more permanently). Finally, of course, was the resume issue - if I wanted to switch somewhere else, I thought that the two places I worked would establish a great resume.

At least - that's the way I recollect feeling a year ago.

---

Revisiting these concerns now, the SWR one is something that still seems semi-valid. If I invested 100% of my money (something which I don't want to do), and live my current lifestyle, I'd have a SWR of %2.85. Probably sustainable... but looking 15 years into the future, who knows what kind of money I'll make, or what kind of job I'll have, if I need to return to work? As such, quitting when I have such high income seems imprudent. With just two more years, I could be able to drive SWR below 2%, which seems sustainable forever.

Likewise, the question of "where in my life am I," is something where two more years still seems reasonable. I'll be 28 then, midway to 29. I ought to be able to travel without having a family, and at the same time, I'll have put in 8 years working as a programmer, enough to maybe feel like I've accomplished something if I change careers. I'll have spent significant time at two very different large companies, enough to know whether I want to work at another large company (signs point to "no"). A year in, although I've got definite opinions about things, I feel like maybe I don't have a clear picture of things.

On the other hand: my hope of learning something efficiently is rapidly dwindling. What's become clear to me is that the only way I'll really learn something is if I try it myself. I mean, for me to learn in any systematic way where I have some hope of retaining what I've learned. Of course, working in an industry-standard language on a day-to-day basis is fine, but I'm not confronting problems which will expand my knowledge substantially. Mostly, I'm becoming familiar with ugly bugs displayed by various older versions of Android. On the design front, I *may* have an opportunity to learn things and put ideas into practice soon (a few months will prove yes or no). So far, on a day-to-day coding basis, the reliance on code reviews has undercut the way I think about code, and I don't consider myself a better developer these days than when I started a year ago.

I get the impression that I'd learn a lot more rapidly on my own, but it's difficult for me to say because I can't isolate one of the major variables here, which is that I haven't done significant work on my own (in college, some, and high school). I attribute this to exhaustion from my day job, but what if it's simply lack of personal desire? I'd need to take enough time to completely refresh, and then some time to do work. The time to refresh would probably be 1.5-2 months (based on my trip last year). The time to establish whether I'd learn something would be at least 1 month. These are not things I can really discover with a job. Of course, I can attempt to learn on my own, after work, and I've met with limited success here, but I've never had the energy to sustain things.

I have an intuition about this, which is that I'd be a ton more productive on my own. But then, I had an intuition that I'd learn more when leaving my previous employer, which proved wrong at my current employer. So, I'm cautious about this.

Likewise, the resume issue is something that I'm increasingly recognizing is foolish (even more than the hope of learning new things). As someone who's done a little bit of interviewing, and who's talked with several colleagues about it in the past, I recognize that resumes are of the slightest value in interviewing candidates, and that I shouldn't overvalue the difference between 1 and 3 years at a given company.

---

Where does all that leave me? 3 years now feels arbitrary, and I'm not particularly happy with work on a day-to-day basis. On the other hand, there are still some good, objective reasons to work for an additional 2 years. I'll need to think further, but right now the best course of action seems to be: wait 3-4 months for current promised things to resolve, and see how I feel. Then, to explore switching teams (something that's a possibility), or make plans to cut short my employment and start to travel earlier. In the meantime, teach myself in my spare time.

---

I think it's a bit late, and I've done a bit too much navel-gazing tonight. I'd like explore something at similar length when I have time, in a separate post: what I find engaging at work. Like the 3-year thing, it's something that's come up a bit, both when talking with others, and in internal dialogs :), so it's probably worth writing something out.

m741
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Location: Seattle, WA

Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by m741 »

October, 2014

Finance
Doing this a day early, as I'll be busy this weekend. I'll start with finances. As I alluded to earlier this month, it's been pretty productive. Of course, the good returns in the market have helped boost things, too. To summarize, I bought some SDRL, KMB, and GIS (in addition to the normal fund buys). I also bought $2k of SolarCity bonds, got a rewards credit card, finally got around to investing the cash I had sitting in lending club, and moved some more cash out of my checking account.

This month's dividends were anemic (this is my down month in the cycle), measuring $600; I also got $30 from Lending Club. Still, that's up 12% from 3 months ago. I saw some really great increases in averages due to my aggressive purchases. First, purely from dividend increases, I saw my expected monthly dividend rise $16, or 1.4%. Second, from purchases and re-investment, I saw my expected monthly dividend rise by a whopping $97. $43 of that comes from SDRL, which currently sports a ridiculous 17% dividend. I don't intend to invest any more in SDRL, but it's some nice juice to the portfolio. Overall, I saw my expected monthly dividends rise by 10.4%, or $113, compared to September, which is just huge.

Job
As you can tell from recent posts, I've got mixed feelings about the job. I'll see how things change over the next few months, as I get a chance to demonstrate more responsibility. I'm really excited for that, but the timing isn't great with my vacation. Oh well. It'll still be better than haphazardly getting assigned to random projects and bugfixes, which I've suffered through for a while now. Will report back.

Other
The big focus for me this month (maybe the sole focus...) has been my Italian studies. I suffered from a lag and lack of focus in the middle of the month, but finished strong this past week. I've found that two methods of study really stand out: DuoLingo, which gives me some vocabulary and is a great grammar trainer; and iTalki, which allows me to schedule language lessons via Skype with Italians. The cost for this is pretty low: I have 3 teachers, all pretty good (though only one I think really thinks about the teaching in a formal way). The most expensive is $8 an hour, the least expensive (and most professional) is $4 an hour. Those prices are ridiculous. I guess the poor economy in Southern Europe is helping me :). I study with this method for 3 hours per week, mostly talking in Italian or reading and interpreting easy text pieces. It's easily 5x more time-efficient than taking formal classes, and 10x more economical.

Besides that, mostly I've been planning for my trip, going to various movie showings with the gf, lounging around. I don't have much spare time, and there's a lot of projects I want to try! I'll free up in December, as my Italian course will be over and I won't be doing any travel planning.

spoonman
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Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by spoonman »

KMB is a solid company, I'm glad that you're putting money there. I remember the days when it was yielding around 4% and there were serious doubts about the company's ability to compete with the other big dividend dogs. But now Wall Street is going gaga over it...I love it when that happens, it shows that companies such as KMB can recover and keep on trucking.

Legthorn Brownboat
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Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by Legthorn Brownboat »

I have thought way less about this than you have. Please pardon my comments if they seem a bit rude or over-the-top, they're supposed to be friendly and comical. Here's my 2 cents.
m741 wrote: Revisiting these concerns now, the SWR one is something that still seems semi-valid. If I invested 100% of my money (something which I don't want to do), and live my current lifestyle, I'd have a SWR of %2.85. Probably sustainable... but looking 15 years into the future, who knows what kind of money I'll make, or what kind of job I'll have, if I need to return to work? As such, quitting when I have such high income seems imprudent. With just two more years, I could be able to drive SWR below 2%, which seems sustainable forever.
Wait, you're sub-3% SWR and still worried? You're not talking about taking a 60 year vacation, but you seem interested in starting work back up again after a break. Sub-3% seems like it is probably (though not definitely) enough to fund you indefinitely. If you're even entertaining the thought of working again in the future then I would think you're golden.

You mentioned not investing all of your money. Cash is a form of investment, and a hedge against short-term radical changes and deflation. Include it as an aspect of your portfolio, and rebalance to what you truly believe in. That may have substantial cash, sure, but be aware.
m741 wrote: What's become clear to me is that the only way I'll really learn something is if I try it myself.
Definitely, though also understand that you're currently in a semi-toxic environment that's not conducive to an individual learning and excelling on their own. At a good small company, or the right team at a big company, you're expected and propelled into growing.

You seem to be stuck with on the $#!7 team. Every company and division have them: they're the glorified QA engineers who work-around the inevitable mess of legacy issues. Thank God for them, by the way, because without them it would suck. However as important the role may be, I would never want to be in it. Growth is gradual and most work lacks real learning and development.
m741 wrote: I mean, for me to learn in any systematic way where I have some hope of retaining what I've learned. Of course, working in an industry-standard language on a day-to-day basis is fine, but I'm not confronting problems which will expand my knowledge substantially. Mostly, I'm becoming familiar with ugly bugs displayed by various older versions of Android. On the design front, I *may* have an opportunity to learn things and put ideas into practice soon (a few months will prove yes or no). So far, on a day-to-day coding basis, the reliance on code reviews has undercut the way I think about code, and I don't consider myself a better developer these days than when I started a year ago.
I don't mean to take a dump on the role. I've known many to conquer it and rise beyond. It's just a long hard road and I've seen many a disillusioned corpse along it.

When in a toxic environment, I see 4 paths:
1) Give up. Take up drinking and/or drugs to make it through.
2) Rise past it. Focus primarily on staying productive, staying learning, and mostly be selfish about your growth. Screw what peers and management thinks.
3) Change the environment. It happens, but most end up falling into #1
4) Leave

Personally, I'd only do #2 or #4. When I was more junior, I would shy towards #2. In my current role I'm more senior and have a lot of autonomy, so I tend towards #4.
m741 wrote: I get the impression that I'd learn a lot more rapidly on my own, but it's difficult for me to say because I can't isolate one of the major variables here, which is that I haven't done significant work on my own (in college, some, and high school). I attribute this to exhaustion from my day job, but what if it's simply lack of personal desire? I'd need to take enough time to completely refresh, and then some time to do work. The time to refresh would probably be 1.5-2 months (based on my trip last year). The time to establish whether I'd learn something would be at least 1 month. These are not things I can really discover with a job. Of course, I can attempt to learn on my own, after work, and I've met with limited success here, but I've never had the energy to sustain things.
I have no personal experience in this area and I grapple with the same concerns. However, my reading seems to indicate that people who take the red pill end up with way more energy and motivation than they previously imagined.
m741 wrote: Where does all that leave me? 3 years now feels arbitrary, and I'm not particularly happy with work on a day-to-day basis. On the other hand, there are still some good, objective reasons to work for an additional 2 years. I'll need to think further, but right now the best course of action seems to be: wait 3-4 months for current promised things to resolve, and see how I feel. Then, to explore switching teams (something that's a possibility), or make plans to cut short my employment and start to travel earlier. In the meantime, teach myself in my spare time.
I’m going to throw out some advice that I am incapable of following myself. Can you just not give a #@!7? Research the termination policy for your job and state law, but many companies and states require a formal process, including a lengthy process by which you can redeem yourself and try to transfer within the company. If that’s the case, then you have a time horizon you can leave without being terminated, and you’ll /know/. I don’t mean being a total jerk, but you can scale back pretty hard at times. It could be a year or longer before you’d be let-go, which happens to align with your schedule anyways. Also, it's all a pain for management anyways, so many procrastinate the process.

In the mean time, dive into a personal project at work. I had mentioned something vaguely work-related so you’re not being a total jerk, and I still think that’s the way to go. You had mentioned Haskell previously. Why not write a test harness driver in Haskell, you know, for your testing? Sure, it’s impractical, but wave your hands and spout off functional programming propaganda about type safety, verification, etc. It’s all BS, but whatever.

So anyways, you’re writing this driver, and you need to interface with the system. Write a Shell monad for the interaction. A monad is the perfect design pattern here and it’s not hard. Start off by using a monad transformer with the IO and/or State monads (or, IOState monad). Then, realize that you could just drink the koolaide and write IO and State monads yourself. Before long you’re off the deep-end and debating whether applicative functors or arrows represent what you’re trying to do. None of this is actually practical but good mental “stimulation", oh baby! Anyways, at any point in time you can choose to actually accomplish stuff and end up with a decent test harness.

You could be half living the dream all while getting the same pay, which is way more than you’re spending. Now, you won’t please and exceed your management’s desires and visions. You’ll lose external validation as people will think you just kinda suck at things, but you’re building your own internal validation.

m741
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Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by m741 »

@Legthorn - I don't mind your responses. It's useful to get outside feedback, and it's rare to get such feedback for your own life.

I think I may have misrepresented my team. Or represented it in such a way that it could be misconstrued.

I work on a team of ~25 people. Of these, I would say that there are 7-10 who are really, really good programmers. Much better programmers than I am (but maybe not as *employees,* I'm not sure). There are ~10 who are in roughly the same bracket as I am. And there are ~5 who are more junior than I am, or worse programmers. There's only one person who I think is a legitimately poor programmer, which is a shockingly low number.

As you can see, in my estimation the team is very strong. The problem is less one of a weak team, or a team doing ineffective things, and more one where I haven't so far had a great opportunity, and where opportunities may be rare. But, I have an opportunity now (the timing is poor, but it's something). I'm willing to wait things out through the end of the year, see how this new opportunity shapes up, and then re-evaluate.

That said, I do need to really consider how long I want to stay at the company. Outside of the issue of opportunities on the team, if I have some suspicion that I can learn at a much faster rate on my own then that would simply make more sense. It's just too early to decide definitively.

If I have down time (maybe towards the end of December), I'll definitely start looking at doing some work to automate my job in a way where I can learn a lot.

mds
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Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by mds »

Have you considered joining a startup? Opportunities are abound in start-ups. Since you don't exactly have the pressure of starving, you can take your time and find a startup with the technologies that you're interested in. It seems like you're a bit focused on the length of time at the current company as it relates to the programming skills you'll develop. I think that's the wrong way to look at it. You could condense 3 years of programming experience at big co into 3 months at a startup. Also, I wouldn't worry that you don't know X language. You can throw yourself into the deep end and it'll be uncomfortable, but I doubt you'd drown.

Legthorn Brownboat
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Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by Legthorn Brownboat »

By the way, gaps in employment can often be justified with a simple "I got burned out at big G, and decided to try to find myself and start my own businesses." You'll want to tack on life lessons you've learned and how you're now able to properly balance work requirements while taking care of yourself. The story of a high-potential highly motivated individual who find themselves under too much pressure, but later learns to balance and take care of themselves is hardly cliche. 30s is about the right time for that anyways.

Open Space
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Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by Open Space »

m741 - I discovered your journal a few days ago and have read through most of it as many others have. I'm grateful you have taken the time to share your journey as you learn and make progress toward your goals. I'm inspired to consider starting my own journal. I look forward to your future updates.

m741
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Location: Seattle, WA

Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by m741 »

November, 2014

Well, I had a huge update written, but lost it due to a computer restart. So this is briefer than I intended. The big thing for me this month was spending two weeks in Italy with the gf. Spending was comparatively profligate, but finances were basically on auto-pilot and it was a good month - mostly due to a very generous market.

Finances

Here's the highlights:
- Net Worth: +24k (mostly market returns)
- Total dividend income now @ $1278/month
- Dividend increase (organic): $7/month from AFL
- Dividend increase (overall): $80/month
- Major purchases: 2k solar city bonds, 10k CAT, 10k FNJHX (NJ tax-free bonds), regular purchases of total world and dividend growth indices
- $500 allocated to LendingClub
- Lending club income doubled since September due to buying loans with unallocated cash in the account

Other:
- First year's worth of equities at the new job vested
- Equities should vest monthly from this point forward
- Will be allocating 2k/month to eco-friendly companies (such as solar power); 500k/month to Lending Club
- Boosting monthly Kiva donations to $200 (currently getting about $600/month from Kiva repayments)

I won't talk about the job, since I don't want to start thinking about it until tomorrow :)

Other

A few priorities this month:

- Getting back on track with Italian studies (lapsed during travel)
- No sugar except for a few days around the holidays
- Agreed with the gf: no restaurants, all home-made food (or supermarket purchased)
- Would like to do some study of art history, as I'm woefully ignorant of this area
- Trying to come up with a sustainable fitness plan
- Writing out/blogging the Italy trip for future reference and for family

Later this month, I'll go through some more things I learned about travel.

m741
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Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by m741 »

I've been going through some family stuff here. After my grandfather died, there was a very acrimonious situation between my uncle on one side, and myself and my mother on the other. At the time of her passing, she didn't want to talk to my uncle again. After my mother died, I patched things up with my uncle - he was the only living member of that side of my family. I even saw him for a few days.

Recently an innocuous email exchange with him heated up. He got vicious and aggressive. I've cut ties, as of this morning.

Just wondering - has anyone reading this experienced a similar situation? Or have any pointers? I'm having a lot of difficulty processing this.

Tyler9000
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Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by Tyler9000 »

m741 wrote: Just wondering - has anyone reading this experienced a similar situation? Or have any pointers? I'm having a lot of difficulty processing this.
Sorry for the family drama.

Yes, I've dealt with an eerily similar situation. My mom and her sister have always had a hot & cold relationship. When my grandmother passed, a dispute (culminating in a particularly vicious act by my aunt) caused them to stop speaking. Later, a seemingly innocuous email to me quickly escalated into accusations, profanity-laden emails, and threats. The last time I saw her, she made a fool of herself at my brother's wedding (she was not invited to a subsequent family wedding). Nobody really speaks to her anymore. I firmly believe she needs counseling, but of the type family cannot provide.

I don't know what advice to give other than to not feel guilty. Saying your peace and cutting off contact with someone (relative or not) who doesn't deserve it and who makes you unhappy is a perfectly rational and healthy thing to do sometimes. Apologizing in a way that validates their behavior will only make it worse. At the very least, give it space for a while.

(Edited for clarity of the advice)
Last edited by Tyler9000 on Mon Dec 15, 2014 5:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

llorona
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Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by llorona »

I hear you. Your uncle was your only remaining familial connection to your mom. Now that the relationship is over, that's one less piece you have of your mother. It has to be immensely disappointing, especially since you made the effort to repair the relationship with him.

My family's situation wasn't exactly the same as yours, but it involved fallout and cutting ties. Two years ago my father found out that his dad wasn't his biological father. This kind of thing happens all the time when people are young. But this happened when my dad was in his seventies, which is much worse. My dad was so pissed that he cut ties immediately.

Family members were of two different mindsets. Some sided with my step-grandfather, believing that he was noble for adopting my father and claiming him as his own. It didn't result in infighting -- people just silently disowned one another and stopped talking. That was really hard to swallow - I valued my extended family, and it took me a long time to come to terms with the fracture.

With regard to pointers, give yourself time to process and go easy on yourself. It's not going to happen overnight. Talk with people you trust, or write it out. Don't let the logical side of your brain tell you what you should or shouldn't be feeling. You might experience emotions that seem strong in comparison to the length of the relationship with your uncle. They're probably tied in with grieving the loss of your mom and everything she represented. Just let yourself feel and don't fight it. The only way out is through.

George the original one
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Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by George the original one »

Email is not the place to have heated discussions. Too much room for error, so at least phone calls should be used if in-person is not possible.

Not knowing the full situation, it's probably best to go the time-out route. If he initiates another email exchange, call him to either end it or patch it, but make sure it doesn't continue in email.

m741
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Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by m741 »

Thanks, everyone, for the replies.

I agree with email being a poor medium for this. I'm thankful it didn't happen - or escalate on a phone, though. I would have been caught completely off-guard.

If there's some kind of apology forthcoming (which I doubt), then I guess I'll try calling. I agree that having things end with an email is a sad way to go out.

spoonman
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Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by spoonman »

Sorry to hear about the family static. I've had similar experiences with one uncle, but thankfully we weren't as close.

DutchGirl
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Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by DutchGirl »

I've been a witness of this happening with my boyfriend and his sister. In that case I must say that both sides were to blame. My sister-in-law for carrying around very old grudges (25+years old ones) and letting them resurface over a small dispute, and my boyfriend for insulting her when he was mad at her (which I found rather unproductive).

But sometimes people also just don't "match", character-wise. That is the case with my boyfriend and his sister, too. It makes communicating difficult.

Perhaps for you, letting it cool down for a few days might help. Good luck.

m741
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Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by m741 »

December, 2014

I'm going to shake things up for this month's update. I've previously treated this update as mostly a summary of financial information. But that's increasingly irrelevant to me, except in the abstract sense. So I'll instead start by describing what I did, projects, feelings, and then end with a financial summary.

What happened

A few things, this month. Our company had a fancy holiday party, which I attended. I celebrated Christmas with my girlfriend's family in Texas, my first time meeting them. There have been about 3 weeks where I haven't really done any work (and really, neither has anyone else).

There isn't a whole lot else to say about the situation with my uncle, because I've stopped talking to him. For me, now, this was the right move. I have no desire to confront the level of vitriol I saw. If there's a silver lining, it's that the confrontation gave me a lot to think about, both in terms of how I live my life, and in terms of the type of life that's been given me. So I'm grateful for that.

Current State of Mind

For some of the reasons listed above, and much else besides, this has been a pensive month for me. Maybe it's natural to feel this way, with Christmas and the New Year to prompt some reflection. I've felt melancholy this month.

To start with, I haven't been able to focus at work. That's outside the holidays. I've not been able to focus for quite a while, and I've not delivered great work. Good enough, people seem happy with what I'm doing. But nothing I'm proud of. I find I have a diminished capacity for sustained concentration, or an aversion to deep thought. Which leaves me wondering whether it's permanent or temporary. I went through a lot these past two years, and it seems plausible to me that the stress has altered my brain in some way. Or maybe I'm just in a prolonged lackadaisical mood.

Another thing I've realized is that my memory is increasingly worse. I have a very difficult time remembering personal things and facts. Much worse than before, which maybe is just the reality of adulthood. I've made a more concentrated effort to store what I've done in freeform blogs and this journal, in part because I realize I'll quickly forget the details. A question that's been on my mind because of this is: what's the value of learning things if I'll just forget them? I have to discount the value of memory and knowledge, and value how I conduct myself more highly.

2015 Goals
I don't want to go into too many pointless details, or get too elaborate. My New Years Resolutions always seem to fall apart. Probably in part because I have more time through December, so these aggressive goals seem reasonable. So, here's the simple goals:

- Work out. Simple: my body, though not 'fat' is definitely out of shape, and I feel so weak and stiff. In a week or two, when I've established that my legs/feet feel healthy, I will sign up for a half-marathon in May. I'm also planning a 10k in March. These should keep me incentivized. I've been to the gym twice this week and feel pretty good.
- Meditate. My mind is so foggy and cloudy. I'd like to work up to 10 minutes of meditation every day. Obviously, not a lot, but I think it'll make a difference in clarity of mind.
- Establish a sane sleep schedule. Something like: in bed at 11, read until 11:30, wake up at 7:30. My schedule is frankly insane now, and highly irregular.
- Be more adventurous. I want to travel more, visit more museums, join more social groups.

I also have some smaller habits to establish: eat vitamins, drink more tea, do pull-ups, use my standing desk at work, and so forth.

2014 In Review
This was a pretty good year for me, overall. It was far and away the busiest in terms of what I did each week. Whether that was studying Italian after work, going to different restaurants and museums, visiting DC, Boston, Texas, and Italy, skydiving, seeing famous people (Jared Diamond, Chris Pratt, Jason Schwartzmann, Jim Gaffigan, Zoe Saldana, George Takei, Vin Diesel, KISS, Cat Stevens, Joan Jett, and many more).

Financially, it was a good year. I made excellent progress with investment, saving, and net worth. It was also a good year for charity. I donated more this year than I ever have in the past.

I can't say I learned a ton this year. I read a lot, but didn't retain much. I didn't do too much personal work. I didn't learn a ton at work. On the other hand, I learned more about relationships. I wrote a reasonable amount, and began to get a more well-rounded perspective on myself.

I stagnated physically. In large part, I believe this was due to lingering injuries from 2013 and re-injuries in early 2014 that made me cautious and stalled my progress. I did get really good at ping-pong (I was competent before, I consider myself a top-level 'casual' player now).

On the whole, 2014 was a good 'normal' year: a year without huge life events like 2013, without extensive travel, moving apartments, changing jobs, etc. Smooth, lots of small things going on, which is fine with me. It was the fastest year in my life, because I was so busy; I wouldn't mind slowing down a bit.

Finances
I'll keep this short. I only increased expected dividend income by $10 this month. In large part, that's due to a rebalance that moved some investments from EHI (10.5% yield) to mutual funds (2.5% yield). I'm happy to have more sane returns. On the other hand, this was a banner month for dividend income, with an astonishing $2290 in dividends (this is the 'high month' in my dividend cycle). In other words, dividends were pretty close to matching my baseline expenses at this point. I'll track expenses in January to establish a new baseline. My net worth increased modestly (by my current standards). The market declined slightly.

In other news, I put $250 in lending club, $1000 in solar city bonds, and bumped monthly Kiva donations to $250. I also finally bit the bullet that I'd been alluding to in other posts, and donated $2k to Flora & Fauna Intl, a conservation fund that seems result-oriented. With company match, that's $4k.

Financial Goals For January and 2015
I've been pretty good with following my financial goals - largely because they've been low-effort, so I'll be specific here.

For January:
- Track finances
- Fill in paperwork for inherited 401ks
- Increase expected monthly dividends by $100
- Re-evaluate stock holdings, look at portfolio balance
- Increase monthly fund investments by $1000

For 2015:
- Hit expected monthly dividends of $1700
- Continue to allocate to more socially-conscious investment options
- Lump-sum donation of $3k ($1k more than this year)
- Eat out & order takeout less often, and cook at home more (with the gf)

Legthorn Brownboat
Posts: 55
Joined: Sun Oct 12, 2014 2:00 pm

Re: m741's ERE Journal

Post by Legthorn Brownboat »

m741 wrote:December, 2014
I went through a lot these past two years, and it seems plausible to me that the stress has altered my brain in some way
Yup!
m741 wrote:December, 2014
Another thing I've realized is that my memory is increasingly worse. I have a very difficult time remembering personal things and facts. Much worse than before, which maybe is just the reality of adulthood. I've made a more concentrated effort to store what I've done in freeform blogs and this journal, in part because I realize I'll quickly forget the details. A question that's been on my mind because of this is: what's the value of learning things if I'll just forget them? I have to discount the value of memory and knowledge, and value how I conduct myself more highly.
I definitely feel the same here, though I think I’ve always had it to an extent. I’m able to remember specific details that popped out at me to the astonishment of others, but forget entire segments of my life. Recently I’ve been more social, so I’ve had people bring up things I did or said or that happened and I politely nod, but realistically I have absolutely zero recollection of them. It is a little bit frightening.

I think much of it is that I (unconsciously) filter out experiences into those that are relevant and those that are irrelevant. I can remember relevant details, but forget massive amounts of the irrelevant. I suppose everyone does, but I feel I do so to a dramatically larger extent. I think a little of this is healthy and caters to our personalities. The ability to zone in and achieve flow/focus necessarily means blocking out or missing out on other things. I bet the memory behavior is related.

Something else I’ve found is that emotional well-being can effect memory retention (as it affects all things). If you had to prioritize your resolutions, I would put the ones related to your mental/emotional health at the very top of the list. Now is not a good time to procrastinate them (even though they’re sometimes the easiest ones to do so). The financial stuff will work itself out, and honestly if you’re emotionally healthy, details won’t dramatically affect you.

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