Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja
Posted: Fri May 04, 2018 8:50 pm
*highly, highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend. Other than that, no concerns.
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https://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/viewtopic.php?t=5671
What exactly is this not-young age? I hear people in their 20s describe the 40s as a far-off decade of too-late, when they’ll regret things that they haven’t done. But for older people I meet, the 40s are the decade that they would most like to travel back to. “How could I possibly have thought of myself as old at 40?” asks Stanley Brandes, an anthropologist who wrote a book in 1985 about turning 40. “I sort of look back and think: God, how lucky I was. I see it as the beginning of life, not the beginning of the end.”
And age 40 still feels pivotal. “The 40s are when you become who you are,” a British author in his 70s tells me, adding ominously, “And if you don’t know by your 40s, you never will.”
I agree. We’ve actually managed to learn and grow a bit. We see the hidden costs of things. Our parents have stopped trying to change us. We can tell when something is ridiculous. And other minds are finally less opaque. The seminal journey of the 40s is from “everyone hates me” to “they don’t really care.”
And this new age is strangely lacking in milestones. Childhood and adolescence are nothing but milestones: You grow taller, advance to new grades, and get your period, your driver’s license and your diploma. Then in your 20s and 30s you romance potential partners, find jobs and learn to support yourself. There may be promotions, babies and weddings. The pings of adrenaline from all these carry you forward and reassure you that you’re building an adult life.
In the 40s, we might still acquire degrees, jobs, homes and spouses, but these elicit less wonder now. The mentors and parents who used to rejoice in our achievements are preoccupied with their own declines. If we have kids, we’re supposed to marvel at their milestones. A journalist I know lamented that he’d never again be a prodigy at anything. (Someone younger than both of us had just been nominated to the United States Supreme Court.)
What have we aged into? We’re still capable of action, change and 10K races. But there’s a new immediacy to the 40s — and an awareness of death — that didn’t exist before. Our possibilities feel more finite. All choices now plainly exclude others. It’s pointless to keep pretending to be what we’re not. At 40, we’re no longer preparing for an imagined future life. Our real lives are, indisputably, happening right now. We’ve arrived at what Immanuel Kant called the “Ding an sich” — the thing itself.
This was a very interesting article for me. I definitely feel like it has been a challenging transition for me (I turn 40 this year). And I definitely want this to be "the beginning of life" rather than "the beginning of the end". I want to know who I am and I want to embrace it, design my life around it. These are the themes that flow through this journal, that have been omnipresent in my journey for at least the last several years.It’s not an easy transition.
Although there is no fighting the finite thread of life, growing old doesn't actually mean the end of life or new challenges. There are plenty of people who managed to put a lot of life in the autumn/winter of their lives. We don't do anything because we get old, we get old because we don't do anything.suomalainen wrote: ↑Sun May 06, 2018 10:11 pm...I definitely want this to be "the beginning of life" rather than "the beginning of the end". I want to know who I am and I want to embrace it, design my life around it. These are the themes that flow through this journal, that have been omnipresent in my journey for at least the last several years.
http://www.fatcyclist.com/2015/07/06/ho ... nus-hobby/What is life, if not discovering what you enjoy and who you enjoy doing it with? Our time on this earth is short. What’s the better life? Growing old on the couch or fighting through the highs and lows of doing stuff you love with people you love. When I’m old and feeble, I’ll have plenty of time to sit around. While I’m able, I will always choose to hit that fast, swoopy, rock-and-rooted gnar gnar piece of ripping single track and to accept the consequences of that decision.
A similar conversation has taken place at my house. Is your wife ESFJ or ISFJ by any chance?
I find it helpful to make the following distinction. Either 1) money is your biggest problem, or 2) it is not. For those lucky enough to be type 1, personal finance is an appropriate focus (be it frugality, investing, increasing income, etc.). What I think happens is that people tend to misdiagnose themselves as T1 when they are really T2, thinking that life will be better with more money. I made the mistake of thinking that frugality(*) would make me happy (my reasoning: frugality ==> money ==> early retirement ==> free time ==> happiness) when really, frugality only leads to more money in the short term. For those with the privilege of playing the money game on easy-mode, the appropriate course of action is to focus on the larger non-monetary problems now and only expend leftover energy towards being frugal. That's how I see it anyway, after reading the book The Last Safe Investment, where it is argued that one should first fix their problems (find happiness), then increase their spending efficiency aka "happiness exchange rate" (be frugal). IOW, frugality comes second.suomalainen wrote: ↑Tue May 08, 2018 9:04 amWhether you're myopic about buying expensive shit or about buying cheap shit (or not buying shit at all), myopia is the problem - money has become your idol - it's what you spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about. But at some (relatively early) point, money is a solved problem, so there's time to solve these other, more important problems: what do I want out of life?
Being several years younger, I don't think I have a chance of imparting any wisdom on this subject but I'll try anyway. When I've had similar sentiments in the past, I think the "identity crisis" was really caused by being mildly dissatisfied with life and not knowing what to do next. It seems to be a problem that is invented at a time of being directionless and an annoying one to solve because it's so vague and intractable. At this point in time, I believe identity is a choice, which for myself is captured by the simple statement: "I am what I do." This is not particularly rigorous (my lifetime reading on this topic is extremely limited), but it works for me and is fair, i.e. I don't have a double standard where I judge myself by my intentions and others by their actions. It's also very present-focused.suomalainen wrote: ↑Sun May 06, 2018 10:11 pmI want to know who I am and I want to embrace it, design my life around it.
I know some of these people who "did what they wanted to do right now". They acted like children well into their 30s and for them "money was never a solved problem" except those with mid-six incomes, enough to blow any number of holes in their financial ship and still manage not to sink it. High-income = good pumps. Consequentially, their lives began to increasingly resemble a slow train wreck, first to others, then to themselves. I suspect age did have an influence here. There were just some things they could get away with in their 20s like doing stupid shit in public while drunk or excusable ditto like getting bailed out by parents because of a budget failure that didn't work as well in their 30s+.suomalainen wrote: ↑Tue May 08, 2018 9:04 amBut why can't a person just do what they want to do right now?
Darwin wrote: I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music.—Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if it be a pretty woman all the better.
This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not I suppose have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied could thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
"I myself, while writing these lines, try to avoid the tyranny of a precise and explicit plan, drawing from an opaque source inside me that gives surpirises." : Taleb page 63 Antifragile.
Interesting. But do you choose what you like to do? The "finding yourself" is really doing different/new things, to find out which of the doings you enjoy and how much. The prior problem was that I was working myself into a tizzy trying to solve an unsolvable problem (what would be my perfect unicorn life? Discuss.) So, I feel like my journey's been a little bit of learning this: "If you can't live the life you love, love the life you live." Or, put another way, rather than trying to change/perfect my life until I'm satisfied, try changing my attitude so I'm satisfied with what is. Features, not bugs; acceptance, not becoming, etc. Fixing the broken thoughts/expectations/attitudes has to come first, because you filter your entire existence/experience through them and they fuck EVERYTHING up. Now, with some measure of not being a total dumbfuck, I have the freedom (from my own bullshit) to find out who a mentally healthy suomalainen* is.
Hit me right in the feels.suomalainen wrote: ↑Thu May 10, 2018 12:51 pmMaybe I'll try to go 80% time if I can find the balls to deal with the awkward conversation with my boss and all my clients. Maybe that circles back to @jacob's point about being an Adult and defying the workplace expectations and just carving out the life I want. Hmm. Sometimes, you gotta look in your pants and see if you have any balls.
Well said, 2nd Scott.
So...murder my family? Not really my cup of tea...Really and truly, if my wife were on board with something more...creative...we could live an unconventional life. So far, she isn't, and I'm tired of fighting her, so conventional it shall be. As it is, I'm stuck in this awkward spot of NEEDING $100k in income for 10 years just to live even if I don't technically need to save another dime. Once the kids leave, I'm instantly FIRE on just my current savings alone (my wife claims that she'll follow me wherever I want once they're gone). I just don't know that many 6-figure part time jobs.
Spending was pretty level at about $72,000/year for 2010-2015 (less cars, tithing, mortgage and other debt, all of which has since been paid off / ceased payment). The last two years were $90k and $103k, deliberately, I guess, with the extra going to the kids, travel and some home improvement. Even with that, savings rates have been like 60%+ (if you count the principal payments of debt). It's just when you start $400k+ in the hole, it takes a few years to get back to even.
Oy, this sounds terrible. Did I mention that I have a very cushy job as jobs go? Sure, I put up with my fair share of bullshit, but it's WAY less than what I used to put up with. Job hopping sounds horrendous. Cost/benefit.
What's pissing me off? Life, I guess. Kids. Responsibilities. Being a "Parent" (in @jacob's usage) or finding the "Adult" and the "Child" in me for the first time in my life and allowing them free expression for the first time and they're trapped in this "Parent" life.* I have good days and bad days and this really isn't a curated journal; it's just presented as is, which has been a lot of bad days, but I'm working on it. I really truly think it's the zombie processes that I have to weed out. I keep fighting to want something I can't have. So just gotta let it go. To paraphrase @Scott2 from the quote a few posts back, this is no idealized life, but it's the only one I have and I have to make it work. That means I have a better chance of changing me than I do of changing my wife. C'est la vie.
Now you're just teasing me.
That all sounds fantastic! And if I had any balls or skills I would totally do it! But I don't have the entrepreneur in me, both temperamentally and skill-wise. Hanging out a shingle as a lawyer...no thanks. I despise retail, and all the corporate law gigs are not that flexible (or I'm not yet ready to really push the boundaries). Hopefully the industry is changing, but I took a swing 6 months ago and struck out. If that firm wasn't going to be flexible with me, no one would. (They know me well and think very very highly of me, for some strange reason).
If I only knew
Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. That $72,000? That's WITH the wife (and me) being on an allowance! I'd always end the year with a thousand or more dollars of my allowance saved and she'd be a thousand or more in the hole.
See, when you write it, it comes off as reasonable and well-balanced. When I write it, it becomes so infused with my emotional attachments, it comes off as unbalanced and "mad".
And oh my god, the most perfect footnote ever conceived! I can get too focused on the "negative marginal utility" when I'm speaking about my family life that people get the mis-impression that I see it as a net negative for happiness, but this is precisely what I'm trying (and failing) to convey. "I love my kids even if they drive me crazy half the time" is what a normal person would say. I just go with "I hate my kids and you're a fucking idiot if you think having one is a good idea." Tomayto tomahto?