37/M/Australia. I've always been a frugal greenie. Low income, grow veg, eat veg, have cheap hobbies, save and mend. The classics.
I live in a caravan with my partner and my dog in gorgeous bushland surrounded by conservation land and national parks. My interests are mostly environmental in nature: birdwatching, ecology, biology, bushwalking, etc. I read a lot, and like to learn languages. My partner works two days a week at a job he loves, and spends the rest of his time doing martial arts and tinkering. Current project: building a forge, so he can smith swords. We're a very brain-skills/hand-skills couple, ha.
Essentially, I've always been doing FIRE things, but was never able to sustain interest in or engage with FIRE materials. What I was seeing always revolved so very much around ways to spend less and generate more, and not about what life looks like when you're not yoked to a single income and high expenses. There is only so many times one can read about the current state of a blogger's index funds, or how to save money on international flights, or how to buy slightly discounted beef.
Then I read the ERE book a few years back, and had that "oh, finally!" moment. I was already pretty tuned into my finances, but really thinking about yields and flows &c has helped me identify aspects of my life that could grow in mutually-reinforcing ways. My current two projects are getting into woodcarving (moving out of brain and into hands), and forcing my antisocial ass out to social events to build up community. One of these has been more painful than the other, and it's not the one with the edged tools.
What made me actually sign up here was an event recently. A huge storm came through my area, knocked over trees, and plunged everyone into a week-long power outage. Suddenly, the area was revealed to be made up of two kinds of people.
Some people got out the chainsaws and started very kindly cleaning the roads-- well, that was just a side-effect of them getting free lumber and firewood.
Gangs of blokes were roaming the streets trying to get to the best wood before anyone else, haha. People fired up their BBQs, invited others over, and everyone ate down their chest freezers while socialising and having a great time. The other group of people drove out of the area every single day to go to restaurants because they didn't want to cook at home, and whinged relentlessly about the power network people being useless because they hadn't magically snapped their fingers and teleported several hundred trees off of downed power lines.
After chaffeuring neighbours to fast food joints multiple times because half an hour was waaay too far to walk and the idea of having sandwiches at home was, quote: "too boring", I started to feel-- and I believe this is the proper technical term-- fucking insane. I need to interact with other people who understand why, even online.
Anyway, that's me. I'm loving reading through everyones' journals and seeing all the cool things that people do, especially the threads that are a decade long! What treasure troves, to see how people change over so much time. It's really very refreshing to see an older-style forum with such a deep archive of thoughtful information and conversations, instead of more disposable sites full of "WHERE DO I START" posts and slapfights.
