akratic's ERE journal

[m741]

Wow, congrats! I can't wait to see what your thoughts are about the cities on your list.

[Ego]

Congratulations!

The trail sounds like it was an incredible experience as did your ski-bum winter.

I always find it interesting how we take things like roots and social connections for granted when we're enmeshed in them and then how we yearn for them once we are away for a while. We've found that choosing a place to live when we return to the US always seems to turn out similar to how you described pairing down your trail gear. At first we think we absolutely must have this or that, and are reluctant to compromise. Or worse, because we could live anywhere we suffer choice-paralysis. But then once we narrow it down to the essentials we realize that we could probably make a good life just about anywhere.

[nestbuilder]

Have been enjoying your journal-thanks for sharing. I wonder if exploring more medium-sized cities/towns would be beneficial? There are decent options where walkability and pub transit are still available but you are not totally smothered in a concrete forest with a crush of people. At least for me, getting to a major airport several times a year, albeit 2 hrs away, is not prohibitive. In fact with bolt bus or shuttles, it is quite cheap.

[FrenchGirl]

Your journey to ER (and everything after) is so inspiring! A dream of mine is to travel an extremely long distance on foot as I imagined it would feel great physically (good for thé heart) and spiritually (the silence, the communion with nature, the performance), now your experience with the AT look like exactly what I dreamt about. I had no idea such a thing existed => yet another reason to spend a few months in the US at some point in my life.
Anyway, congrats on your performance!

[Quadalupe]

@FG,

if you're into hiking, you can get this experience (partly) in Europe with GR routes (Grande Randonnée).

[FrenchGirl]

@Quadalupe Thanks for the link! Not quite as good as the AT but definitely seems to be a good place to start

[jacob]

@akratic - Methinks for such an important as "settling for the duration", spending more than a day in each city would be a good idea. For example, how would spending a day in Chicago reveal the practical implications of the hub-structure of CTA.---That getting to the loop is easy but that in order to get anywhere requires going to the loop along one line and then going out some other L line. (Rhetorical question; I think it wouldn't.) IOW, as for Chicago, this basically means choosing between brown, orange, pink, red, etc. friends as few seem to want to spend 2 hours on the train just to hang out.

PS: Also consider that settling anywhere very much cramps certain opportunities... while of course opening up others.

[jennypenny]

If part of settling down includes having kids and homeschooling them, look very carefully at the homeschooling rules where you plan to settle. Each state has a different process, and some are much better/easier/supportive than others. Big city school districts are notorious for making life difficult for homeschoolers, so keep that in mind when you look at big cities. It might make sense to be just outside of city limits.

[theanimal]

Congratulations!

The transition back to everyday life and "the real world" (as many like to call it) was a very difficult process for me. I yearned for that more simple existence. Wake up, eat, travel, read and socialize. I still haven't found a way to properly transition. Currently, I am only using internet 2 days a week and I'll likely phase that to 1 day a week starting soon. Daily walks help as well but will not completely replicate the same feeling and mindset, at least they haven't in my experience. Let me know if you find something that works!

[akratic]

@ether: thanks, I'll have to add Anna Karenina near the top of my list of books to read

@thrifty++: I push for NZ (and also AUS) sometimes, but my partner won't budge on settling so far from her family

@Ego: taking things for granted seems to be almost the human condition. On the trail you stop taking for granted flush toilets and protection from the rain and lots of other things. For example, you might celebrate a location with cell phone reception or the opportunity to share a small shelter with just one other person.

Anyway, it's not that we're unwilling to compromise or difficult to make happy. We would be happy just about anywhere. We're just cursed with this need to choose the optimal rather than the good enough.

@nestbuilder: the big city thing is more for my partner than for me. I don't mind the city and she has a real preference for them. That said, I do like walkable places, and medium-sized walkable places are pretty hard to find in the US (other than college towns).

@FrenchGirl: thanks, another EU walk to consider is El Camino Santiago. If you want to do a US thru-hike make sure you get at least a six month visa and get started right away to give yourself some breathing room. There were a number of AT thru-hikers on the trail having to make tough decisions because of visa issues.

@jacob: well, we can't figure out everything in a day, but we can figure out some things like "although the median house price in this city as a whole is $180k, the median house price in the neighborhoods where we would actually want to live is $600k, so this city is nowhere near as cheap as it looked"

One unexpected benefit of seeing a bunch of cities in succession is we started noticing patterns across them, such as certain types of neighborhoods seem to pop up in each city, and fortunately we seem to agree on neighborhood preference.

I think our actual plan is something like 1) a three month sublet, followed by 2) a 12-month lease (or month-to-month or another sublet) if we still like it, followed by 3) buying if we still like it. We just need to pick the initial sublet in a city where we might still want to be after the sublet is up.

@jennypenny: we can't plan around homeschooling yet because my partner, the more natural educator of the two of us, isn't sure she wants to do it.

@theanimal: yeah, I'm really struggling to recapture the simplicity. I think I won't even have a chance until we settle somewhere. After that, I have a major disadvantage which is that I want to use a computer/the internet for creative work and to take advantage of my strengths, but having access to a computer and the internet also opens the door to my greatest weakness: wasting time on the internet.

@m741: hmm, I hesitate to trash a bunch of random cities just because they're not quite right for my situation, so I'll just stick to the winner of the road trip: Charlottesville, Virginia. Population: ~$50k. A walkable college town home to UVa, one of the best public universities. 3BR houses in good neighborhoods for around $200k. Six hour drive to New York. Gigabyte internet available from ting. Near mountains and some of the best hiking on the AT. Residents can check books out from both the town library AND all the university libraries. About as good as weather gets on the east coast in my opinion: south enough for mild winters, but north enough for all four seasons and reasonable summers. Culturewise it also seemed southern enough to pick up some things like friendliness, but still has enough northern influence for us to feel comfortable. Lots of smart people around and things to walk to thanks to the university. Small enough that you could walk clear across it, but big enough to have a Costco and things to do.

===

So at the end of our road trip these cities still remain:

places we like but would need to spend a few months in to understand better: Charlottesville, Austin, Denver/Boulder, Portland OR, Seattle, San Francisco, Chapel Hill NC, Philly

places we like and already understand: Boston, Chicago (could jump straight to buying if we chose one of these)

places we know nothing about but want to visit at some point: Longmont CO, Salt Lake City, Baltimore, Charleston (skipped due to flooding)

We started looking for ~1-4 month sublets in Charlottesville after our road trip was over, but were really disappointed with what was available on craigslist. In Chicago without much trouble I was able to chain together ~1-4 month sublets and try out a bunch of different neighborhoods, but in C'ville there's barely any good sublet listings at all. We found ourselves already feeling the pain of a smaller city. This trouble combined with my partner's doubts about whether C'ville was big enough for her to begin with caused us to start looking at craigslist in Austin, where we found much better options.

And so we're moving to Austin, for a few months at least. Unless plans change, we leave Wednesday, and we'll split the 26 hour drive across three days.

Things I like about Austin: college town, warm weather, Google Fiber internet, mexican/BBQ food, should be walkable/bikeable (but we'll see), techie influence, quirky/weird culture leading to things like this, houses under $250k. Weather wise Austin also comboes well with spending summers in New England and especially Maine.

Our biggest fears for Austin include being too far from family (4 hour flight, not driveable) and it being too hot (and yes I understand that global warming will likely exacerbate this).

Let me know if you live in Austin and want to meet up! We'll need to build a new social circle from scratch.

[anomie]

Hi akratic -

re: finding 1-4 months in Charlottesville .. Have you looked on airbnb.com ?

best of luck in your adventures.

[akratic]

@ffj, thanks! With only 20-25% finishing the AT, and only 5-15% of the finishers being purists, only about 1-4% of people finish as purists, so you're right to be skeptical. I was pretty accurate in my own guesses about who would finish, but I was inaccurate about who would cut corners here and there.

@anomie, yeah, my girlfriend always checks airbnb. It's usually pretty lousy for long term stuff, however. For example, the ONE place in Charlottesville available for the entire next month is $2.5k! However, we do have a reasonably priced airbnb for the 3 days after we arrive in Austin while we scour craigslist.

[learning]

Akratic,

I've looked extensively at Austin. You should be aware of the following things:

-Google fiber has a free as in beer option that is = current cable broadband
-the YellowBikeProject is a good place to learn bicycle mechanics, through their open shops and build-a-bike program
-there's a social bike ride on Thursdays, I think
-there's a block party sometimes on SoCo
-6th street, the main party street, is closed to vehicle traffic on Th-Sat nights and so may be worth a walk around even if you're not that in to partying hard
-UT allows public access not only to the libraries but also to the gyms and recreational facilities, which are amazing
-audit UT classes for $20
-the public transportation is pretty good. The Austin-Round Rock metropolitan area is a big north-south rectangle so the 1 lightrail line going N-S makes sense. The bus system is extensive and intended for late nights also in the nightlife parts of the city.
-from Austin, you have easy access to San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston. This may be the best regional access to other cities anywhere in the country oustide of the northeast, possibly even better than the pacific northwest.
-the natural disaster risk in Austin is tornadoes
-aquifer issues
-the supermarkets include a local TX chain, HEB, which is probably the best overall grocery store for cost-efficient shopping, and its HEB Central Market is like a Whole Foods
-Whole Foods delivers for the same price as buying in the store (I think)
-the supermarket co-op is Wheatsville
-Barton Springs pool and the Lady Bird Lake bike and hike trail
-the reference librarian at the central branch of the public library is a trained reference librarian, and the central branch is on a level with that of other, larger cities, although not NYC
-there are parks such as Enchanted Rock not far from city, pretty much in all directions, for daytrips
-there are 3 hostels, each in a different neighborhood each of which you will want to be familiar with, so staying 1-2 nights in each may be a good idea
-there is a huge walkable area that extends from UT-Capitol-downtown, something like 400 square blocks, and that is safe during the day and still quite safe at night, although...
-there is a large homeless population in Austin that presents a lowlevel security risk. An American girl (early 20s) staying in the same hostel dorm as me was randomly punched by a homeless man.
-TX has no state income tax
-health insurance in TX may be cheaper than what you are used to
-there are some 24-hr diners and convenience stores, but the Wal-Mart near SoCo is no longer 24 hours

Hope some of this helps!

learning

[learning]

if you drive down 81, you will be driving past the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, on the list of top national parks

[Tyler9000]

Welcome to Austin! I've been here for a few years and really like it. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

[akratic]

and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
- TS Eliot

We’re settled in Austin now. We found an under-market apartment, furnished it with the few things it didn't come with (like a digital pressure cooker ), joined a gym, got library cards, and found the best coworking space. After so much practice galavanting around the globe, moving to a new US city was relatively easy for us. That is, except for finding friends and building a social network and community, which is going to take some time.

I am in the beginning of an experiment where I don't have internet at home. My hope is I'll waste less time this way. I aspire to read more books, sleep more, go to the gym more, be more focused during "work" hours, and force myself into social gatherings where I might make friends. The technical details of this plan are as follows: none of my devices know the wifi password at home (it's necessary for my girlfriend's business that she has wifi at home). If I want wifi for something productive like entrepreneurship or posting to the ERE forums, I go to the public law library, which is a pleasant 2.4 mile walk. For cell phone, I'm using the flip phone I got for my hike. For netflix, we use my gf's computer. I'm not sure how long this experiment will last, but I do know that "unlimited" internet access at home is behind a lot of my time wasting.

So I'm pretending I have a M-F 9-5 day job where I go to the law library and work on entrepreneurship projects. I've dabbled with entrepreneurship in the past, but it's always been a low priority that I haven't taken too seriously. Now I'm taking it seriously. Already, however, I'm having some doubts. What I'm really looking for is a major project to tackle. From 2010-2013 pursuing FI was my project. From 2013-2015 I was an "adventurer" -- traveler, ski-bum, hiker. I was thiking entrepeneurship could fill the void from 2015-until when I have my first kid.

However, the more I learn about entrepreneurship, the less I like it. The reason I thought entrepreneurship could work is that I like programming, and I like figuring out how to beat the system. But there's so many other necessary aspects to business that I don't like! Sales, marketing, networking, market research, customer support, PR, advertising, paperwork, answering emails, etc. Consider the causal gaming space for example. Does the best programmed game win? Hells no. How about the most creative game? Sometimes, like the guy who invented Minecraft for example. But outside of lottery winner type stories, the winning games are the ones with the most polish, the best marketing, the most optimized monetization scheme, and a bunch of other stuff I'm not interested in. I could partner with the right businessy person, but my personal network has only a handful of them.

Now that we've decided to stay in one place, I think back to my life as a 9-5 software engineer, and I think about how good I had it. I got to focus on just the interesting technical stuff. I had repeated interactions with a bunch of smart people. To get my own entrepreneurship project to the point where I could focus on just the interesting technical work and be surrounded by smart people would be a monumental undertaking. It seems so much easier to just pick the right 9-5 job. Instead of biasing myself towards the best paying 9-5, I could bias myself towards the one with the most interesting coworkers or the best boss or the best mission.

I know a lot of people are pursuing ERE beacuse they hate their jobs, but I never minded my 9-5 that much. Sometimes my 9-5 was incompatible with the life I wanted to lead, such as when I wanted to travel or hike. And sometimes I disliked my boss or didn't like the project I was put on. However, I do think I could make it work, especially if I gave up salary for some more control over what I worked on and who I worked with.

I'm not going to pull the trigger on this 9-5 stuff right away, and I do want to spend the next couple of months getting further on the entrepreneurship projects I've started. I'm just mulling it over more and more. For example, I'm jazzed about the self-driving car thing. Why not just be an engineer on one of those projects? Or work towards it? It just seems better than forcing myself to become a business-man, when I'm clearly ill-suited for that.

Ever since overdosing on adventure, and deciding to settle in one place for a while, I'm running out of ideas for how to spend my time. There are a few adventures I still want to do such as bike across Europe, hike the PCT, and live on a sailboat in the Caribbean, but those can all be done later in life. I feel this kind of pressure to find a use for my time that's at least as good as having a 9-5 software engineer job. For the past few years when I was so excited about traveling and hiking and skiing, I was able to do so, but now I'm not so sure.

[C40]

As I've been getting closer to quitting, two things I've been appreciating lately about working for a big company are

1 - The opportunity to specialize. I've been able to get into a role that is specifically what I like to do. And - since this is something I'm good at - it allows me to be paid for doing my best work full time. If I was trying to run a business myself, there is, of course, some possibility of a huge income for me. But there's also the limitation that I'd be bad at some part of this business, and that would severely limit my income potential.


2 - The opportunity to have a big impact. I'm working for a big company. We have many different factories in the U.S. There are well over 5,000 people working just in manufacturing. Our yearly manufacturing costs are in the billions. I get to work in a world where winning can result in some really cool changes.

I'm still counting the days to when I can stop though

Anyways.. Have you thought about trying to do both? About getting a job, but not doing it full time? That would allow you to still have time free for personal entrepreneurial efforts. It could also leave you time to go be social and meet people and make friends. A good network of people who know you and your skills might provide a link to some cool job/project/etc.

[akratic]

Yeah, frankly I liked specializing professionally in something I was good at and the feelings of competency and mastery that came with doing it.

I’ve done some freelancing and contract work, and I don’t think they’re a particularly good fit for where I’m at right now. Pros (+) and cons (-) of contract work compared to 9-5:
+ more free time (but I'm already struggling to find good uses for the time I have)
+ location independence (but I've decided for other reasons to try to put down roots somewhere)
- lose the social aspect/camaraderie (which I highly value at the moment: it's hard to filter for smart people and then get repeated interactions with them)

Unless you stumble into a good contract from your existing network, I'm not convinced it's worth the trouble selling/networking/pimping yourself to get new contracts. Also I've had an invoice for a completed to spec and published iOS app simply ignored once, but didn't think it was worth chasing them down and fighting to get paid.

[Llama]

If you haven't read it, I'd recommend Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup. It offers an interesting framework for entrepreneurship that cater's more to a developer mindset. The research/marketing/sales strategies are primarily inbound: you create sales websites/blogs/etc that do a lot of the work for you. Answering emails and such can be outsourced as soon as you get tired of them. I have a copy I can loan you electronically if you want. Pm me.

I've had a good amount of experience finding and doing contract/freelancing work as I've been building my company. I've found the tradeoffs to be highly dependent on the size of the project you're taking on.

Smaller projects
+ Get to build things from the ground up.
+ More control over which tools you use (easier to use newer/more fun technologies).
- Client is usually business oriented. Lack of camaraderie

Larger projects
+ Usually you're joining an existing engineering team. Access to smart people.
+ Kind of like a 9-5 but with a simpler working relationship (i.e. less of the baggage that comes with salaried employment)
- Kind of like a 9-5.

I could probably go on for a while about my experiences building a software company. Main takeaway is that working relationships in the contract/freelance world are extremely negotiable. This makes it possible to optimize over a particular set of values fairly easily, which I've found is not always the case with w2 employment. The fact that money isn't really an issue probably makes it even easier.

[akratic]

== frugality ==

Having a mailing address has enabled us to upgrade our frugality game with two long overdue purchases:
- $329 Vitamix this thing probably saves us $2/week in hummus alone, more than paying for the smoothies and almond milk and everything else
- $120 Digital Pressure Cooker I'm not sure why we failed to use our old school pressure cooker often, but we we use this one almost every day. Its best trick is the ability to cook dry beans even if we forgot to soak them overnight.

== personal ==

We're going to be moving from Austin, TX to Boston, MA in early March. Austin is a nice city, especially in the winter, but for the long term it's just not enough better than Boston to be a plane flight away from our friends and family in the Northeast.

I'm looking forward to putting some roots down in Boston with a longer term lease, eventually buying an overpriced* house, and probably even getting a 9-5 for some unconventional reasons like daily social access to smart peers or wanting a little external structure after way too long with too little structure.

* Not that we'll want the house to be overpriced, but most of Boston is pretty expensive, especially the nice parts.

I've been rather directionless recently. I'm just not inspired by the entrepreneurship projects I was trying to get into. Unfortunately I'm kind of committed to two of these projects because I'm doing them with friends who are counting on me. I haven't figured out yet how to extricate myself from these projects without damaging the friendships.

A common pattern throughout my life when I don't have goals that I care about and don't really feel in control of my life is to escape into gaming. Austin has been no different, and my new source of (artificial) feelings of mastery and control is the computer game HearthStone. Last month I hit #171 out of some number of millions of active players in North America. The top 10 or so players in HearthStone make a full-time living between tournament winnings and streaming. Being a professional gamer at some point is a goal for me, but unfortunately when I'm gaming a lot I'm usually also getting fat and failing to make new friends and also neglecting my girlfriend.

Gaming is so addicting to me that I'm not sure I can do it professionally and not simultaneously ruin my life. I'm pretty confused in general about gaming and my own inability to master my impulses towards it. I can't even tell if 1) I start gaming and then 2) things start going badly or 1) things are going badly so then 2) I start gaming.

Anyway, I'm hopeful that moving to Boston will help things. We have been socially isolated for far too long. Ultimately Austin ended up yet another place on the long list of places over the past three years where it wasn't worth the effort to turn acquaintances into real friends, since we were leaving soon anyway.