This year began with ordering and reading the ERE book. It has so much deep content that it will fill probably a few more months worth reading and studying. I have thought about what I want to do and achieve this year. What is this year about?
Of course there is my professional life, working full-time and earning money. There are some projects. By "Job Crafting" I successfully improved my work place and life toward an optimal degree. I work flexible hours, usually around 36 hours a week, work 1-2 days remote from home, have nice colleagues, things that challenge me mentally and the opportunity to commute by bike. Almost everything is good at work these days. And I hope it is going to stay like that this year.
Therefore I can focus a bit more on my personal life, my pleasure time, personal interests, hobbies and last but not least my relationships. I want to dive deep into the ERE philosophy, described in the book. I want to study it, think about it, write about it, reframe it, etc... This is and will be an ongoing task this year. But beside that, what should I focus on? What should be the overarching topic of my year 2018?
One thought came to my mind. Last year it was about doing two seperate three-week-ER-simulations. On top of that, I changed quite some parts of my life in the last two years. I went carfree. I decreased my expenses to a frugal minimum. Therefore I was able to increase my SR significantly. Those things reassured me that I am able to find clever solutions to satisfy my needs.
The last two years were all about change, continiuous improvements and challenges. I don't want to change something big, like working, transportation or houseing. I don't want to change those things. But, the more I learn about ERE, FI, ER, ... I think it should be in harmony with my life goals and daily habits in order to support a satisfied life. I often think of a "sustainable ERE lifestyle". Therefore I have come to the conclusion that this year I am going to focus on stability, sustainability and personal life satisfaction. Of course those topics are aligned to my ERE philosophy, strategy and habits. If I would decrease expenses even more on purpose I think I will go into a depreviation mode. And of course I don't want that. I want sustainable frugality. At least I want to stabilize my current ERE lifestyle and hold my currently high personal life satisfaction.
I hope that this phase of stability will give me even more good (nonlinear, complex, loosely coupled) ideas for the future. Who knows if this phase will give me even more motivation in order to improve and change to a higher level of ERE. My web-of-goals contain two important areas: ERE and PLZ (personal life satisfaction). Last year it also contained FI, but I change to ERE and PLZ, because I am confident, that if I continue my ERE-&PLZ-path and -journey in life, I will eventually become FI, as a positive side effect. BTW, maybe you already notice here and there some influences of Jacob's book.
Well, let's stabilize all this to a sustainable and frugal ERE way of living. And thank you for reading and commenting!