Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

[7Wannabe5]

I agree with your take on process/practice vs. product/goal focus. However, one issue I have frequently had with process/practice focus is that (for me, as an eNTP), it can often degrade into dull routine of my own making. It's also the case that there are far too many good habits/practices/processes available to fit into any given human's entirely self-constructed schedule, so there's no avoiding periodical values clarification or re-clarification.

I find Jacob's take that "the results you get are what you deserve", and also the notion that "whatever you do is your practice" rather amusing. Especially if verbalized along the lines of "It is my practice to leave the dishes unwashed in the sink until I run out of bowls for my Frosted Flakes." Intentionality is key at the level that we maintain or make use of belief in personal agency.

[Henry]

Don't worry. As soon as you get close enough to a goal that you realize it will not bring the fulfillment that you were hoping it would deliver, you'll have plenty of options to self-sabotage before reaching the goal, thereby maintaining the utility of basing your happiness on reaching said goal.

[suomalainen]

Continuing on the theme, I was watching what DW calls my boyfriend Martijn (j/k) having a conversation with two fellow youtubers about Martijn's recent life, which has consisted of two years-long bike rides (amsterdam to singapore and vancouver to tierra del fuego) and living in the Italian Dolomites outside Turin renovating an old stone cottage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HZNYCkDtK4&t=1437s

Dinner with Nathaniel and Lucas

Nathaniel: Yeah, I don't know. I think I have a kind of love hate relationship with exciting things because I keep... I guess I'm attracted to new adventures. I kind of can't help myself. But there are moments where I'm like, what am I doing? I don't know, I have a lot of moments like that. What am I doing? I have no idea what I'm doing, you know? And, uh, I don't know if that's ever going to fully go away. I just keep finding myself in situations... But maybe it's also the age. I don't know, maybe it's just...

Martijn: So that's... This is about purpose. That's why I like... the long kind of like... character of such a project because, I mean, this is a project of years. You know, five, six years. I'm thinking about. Bike journeys were also like, Amsterdam to Asia. I didn't I didn't know at the beginning, but Singapore in the end. That's also just... All right. You've chosen to do that. You can tell a story about it. It's very personal. You just know what you want to do. That's what you want to do. And if you want to do something else, you have to give it up. But then it's failed project. So you want to finish it. And in between, as many times you think like, why? I mean, you go to many beautiful places and the adventures are there, but it's also just a lot of boring highways, and boring back country.

Nathaniel: When you were biking?

Martijn: Yeah, yeah, it's like a lot of boring days. Yeah. And here too, there’s projects that drag along, that take forever. You know, the for you just have to keep going at some point the job is finished you do something else. Yeah. If it gets too much, you, get a short distraction, like a cup of coffee or a bigger distraction. Do a little trip or something, but, you slice it up. I guess that's ... But, yeah, purpose is, you don't have to do anything in life, right? You just need to eat and stay alive. That's the purpose.

Nathaniel: No, of course!

Martijn: but you need to find something.

Nathaniel: But there's something else going on, right? That propels us to do these wacky things. Like, yeah, you didn't have to go on your bike trips. You didn't have to create a life here, of all places. But there's still something. There's like a curiosity almost. Right? Like, I don't know. I guess the idea of what I wanted to do started to just worm into the back of my brain, and then it's like, it's just a matter of time. Then it's like, I can't let it go. I want to get to the bottom of it. Why else am I alive? I don't know, it's ...

Martijn: So yeah. So it a curiosity and that's I think that's two things like is it do you do it for yourself or do you want it to show... Do you want to tell people a story. For me there's always these two, both these two things. Because one thing I like to do is documenting these stories, so the YouTube channel is like what I do seven days a week, basically. But it's also nice to live here. If it was not... if I wouldn't make videos, it would still be a good thing. But, they help each other, I think. In fact, the YouTube channel kind of like pushes me to keep going and to make things look nice, you know? So they work well together. And for the bike journeys, it was the same, it kind of gives you motivation like, all right, if you stop now now you're that guy that almost cycled to patagonia which is not a story, right? So it gives motivation.

Lucas: Okay. So basically through that, the purpose that you... with this now, you came here five six year project, that gives purpose that also pushes like those weeks where... how does it work if you're filming every week and like making a video every week, as it happens in times where you feel like, okay, actually I really don't feel like it, I'm not going to do anything this week. Or is that kind of erased? Because that purpose that you came into this project with at the very beginning is so strong that it actually helps you push forward the video making and all that.

Martijn: Yeah, because there's only a negative road. If you start there, Ah, I don't want to... You have to go... People go to work, and if you don't go to work, you lose your job.

Nathaniel: It's almost like you don't let yourself think about it, right?

Martijn: Yeah, just ignore it. If you really need a holiday, just plan that in, where you live towards it, or a weekend could be that you know, so but there's a lot of times we don't want to do the things we need to do, but it's better.

Putting aside whether being a youtuber is a "job", what struck me about this is the idea of these clearly freedom-to people choosing to do a long-term project and sometimes feeling "stuck" with it. A lot of times, the project can feel like a grind or feel boring. During those times, you have two choices - abandon the project or keep going (perhaps with a break).

Parenting, for me, is that long-term project that I chose to do, that gives my life purpose, that pushes me through the boring times, through the grinding times. It's a project I simply cannot abandon.

I like this framing, as it "feels like" I've had freedom-to all along. I'm not going to suddenly get freedom-to when I don't have to work any more or when I don't have to raise children any more. I've always had it. We all do. We all have to chop wood and carry water every day of our lives, even when our chosen projects are so long-term that we sometimes lose sight of the fact that they were and are and always will be freely chosen. Sometimes, we can adjust the externalities; oftentimes, all we can adjust are the internalities.

[Ego]

I like this framing, as it "feels like" I've had freedom-to all along.

Brings to mind Bezos's type 1 (revolving door) and type 2 (one-way door) decisions. At minimum, when I execute a T2, it eliminates my freedom-to change my mind.

[suomalainen]

I'm not familiar with the Bezos construction, so not sure of the nuances there, so would wonder about whether the "one-way" is psychological only or externally real. For example, a prison door is one-way in that you have armed guards who will eliminate much of your freedom-to. But a religious or cultural taboo or a personal more or something like that isn't *really* one-way. One could change one's mind and make a different decision*, but the psychological cost would be high. In this way, I know I have the freedom-to abandon my children in external reality, but the psychological cost would be too high for me**.

The other place I think we sometimes get hung up is in the sense of time. It's never too late to change your mind and go to college and get a degree. But you can't time travel and decide at 50 to go to college when you're 20, so sometimes we get stuck thinking that these big life decisions are one-way, when they're not really. A choice for door #1 for now eliminates all of the opportunity behind door #2 and vice versa, but for many things, after trying one door, it seems we can try the other door. Reminds me of the silicon-valley-ism of "fail often and fail early" or something like that.

* Assuming free will for sake of argument.
** This would presumably be the argument against free will. If these insurmountably high costs aren't really chosen by us, are we free to choose to want to not pay them?

Edit: Also, just got an email that there will be a special assessment for roof replacement at my condo. Yay.

[jacob]

If you really want to overthink this, you can distinguish between both internal and external freedom-from and freedom-to while adding in switching costs. A one-way door simply has switching costs that are high enough to close some external freedom-to doors ... e.g. a finite amount of money can only be spent once.

Another way to contemplate this would be to determine where the particular freedom in question is located in the AQAL diagram.

Usually, when talking about freedom-to/from, the focus is on the external (liberty) or what "other people/society" allows you to do or prevents you from doing. However, the internal freedom is also worth considering. For example, I have external freedom-to to become a chess master, but I likely don't have internal freedom-from my lack of talents in that department.

Changing core beliefs can also have really high switching costs ... but strangely, they can also be very low. For example, some people will grief for years and years and practically make it a part of their identity. Others get over their previous mental wiring pretty quickly. This is largely determined by whether "you have your belief(s) or whether your belief(s) have you". Something something tortured water fish metaphor.

[suomalainen]

Yeah, there are lots of ways to think about this, and overthinking is always an option! For me, it's germane on a practical level as my therapist once pointed out to me, "You keep talking about your life as if you're a prisoner of it rather than its architect. You keep talking about these missed opportunities in the past as if your life would have been so much better had you made different choices, but you also could have ended up much, much worse. You should give your past self some credit. You live a pretty good life. "

So, you know, my psychoses. Everyone else's mileage may differ when navelgazing this topic. What's healthy/helpful for me is to constantly remind myself of my (once and) continuing (and future) agency (ha*) in all of this.

* Or at the very least, acceptance that my biology couldn't have done any differently given the same initial conditions.

[Henry]

Anyone with average intelligence giving a hot take on reality knows somewhere that mere knowing and willing is often not enough. Probably the majority of the time. Yet some things they did set out to do based upon mere knowing and willing came to fruition. But even a cursory analysis of the things that came to fruition reveals an extraordinary confluence of externalities that fell into place around that intentionality. Too much blame for failure to much reward for success. The answer is obviously that free agency vs. determinism is a false dichotomy. They connect somewhere. To me it's mysteriousness. To others it's luck. Either way it's fucked up.

[suomalainen]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq-8yHgjqv0&t=1334s

Putting this here as a reminder to myself on those days when I sit down at my desk and think, "I don't want to do this any more." This guy is a woodworker who sells tables for $10k+. He was cutting strips of insulation on his table saw for packaging a table for shipping and the sawstop kicked in (not because of his fingers). It's a pain to reset those and fix the blade, etc., and so he says:

I had some plumbing problems [in a foreclosure I bought]. I had two different plumbers show up to look at a job and both of them just looked at it and said "Nope, I'm not doing it, not for any amount of money." And finally I got a third plumber and he just looked at it and just goes "Yeah, no problem", and I was surprised and I said "Isn't this a big pain?" and he goes "Yeah, everything I do is a pain." and I really like that. And that's the attitude I try to model myself after, which is easier said than done, but if you can just accept that: this is the job, we're gonna have things that go wrong, yes it's 90 bucks [to replace the sawstop cartridge], yes it's a blade [that has to get repaired/replaced], yes it slowed me down, this happened on a weekend [and] I couldn't get a new cartridge until Monday, but everything we do is a pain - it will make you feel so much better. You won't feel bad for yourself, and you can just concentrate on the work.

Even when you're "doing what you love", there will be pain points, boring points. You just accept those features (i.e., they ain't bugs) and get on with it.

edit: also, I've been sober for two months now. I drank a lot one night and had a wicked hangover. I had one drink a few days later and had a headache and I just ... couldn't do it any more. I think I replaced it with a ton of diet soda, but I ran out a few days ago and couldn't make it to the store and got a headache from that too. So now maybe I'm off soda too. We'll see how this all goes, but I'm just tired of doing things that make me feel crappy.

[suomalainen]

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2024/05 ... ife-coach/

I was reminded of this idea recently when I came across this post after looking up something else on the MMM website. Life has been good recently. I've gotten into a good rhythm of sleeping, working on projects (in my case, mostly paid-employment and parenting*), going to the gym / exercising, eating, relaxing and playing, sometimes socially and sometimes not. It's not hard. You fuckin' know what to do.

* Re-framing parenting as a "project" has been tremendously helpful for me.

[Hristo Botev]

Life has been good recently. I've gotten into a good rhythm of sleeping, working on projects (in my case, mostly paid-employment and parenting*), going to the gym / exercising, eating, relaxing and playing, sometimes socially and sometimes not. It's not hard. You fuckin' know what to do.

This is great; glad to hear it. I really appreciated this post and your prior one; not a bad Dad-life philosophy right there: "Everything I do is a pain" and "You f'ing know what to do." Amen.

[suomalainen]

I dropped a kid off at the airport for a study abroad semester to Finland and off he went. A few observations:

I didn't have many emotions leading up to this. A bit of nervousness as the train pulled into the EWR station, but that was about it.

I am very proud of my son for taking this risk and taking on this challenge. As I recall, the way this came up is that he mentioned a year or so ago about wanting to live in Finland, and I was like "Yeah, well, you should maybe try it out before making that decision." Several months and conversations later, he submits an application for a semester study abroad and ends up getting rejected because he wrote some weird shit in his application. He really wanted to go so we had a few conversations with the AFS people and he explained his weird answers and a few weeks later he was accepted. In addition to surmounting this obstacle, I had also had several conversations with him about how hard it would be to live with strangers in a land where he doesn't speak the language, etc., but he was determined to try it. He showed resilience and determination, something to warm any (old school) father's heart.

We've exchanged a few emails with the host family and they seem very nice, and after his first day there, it seems like it will work out well. I guess five months is different than one day, but I'm hopeful.

His first texts from Finland about apple picking at the neighbors and going to the farmers market and going to sauna brought up some feels for me. I missed several opportunities when I was young to do "scary" things that I felt good about, that I wanted to do (or to avoid things that I didn't feel good about), but I opted instead for a "safer", more culturally-accepted path, and I've regretted those missed opportunities ever since. Not necessarily because life would have been so different, but because *I* would have been different. I would have been more true to myself, would have challenged myself more in ways that were congruent and affirming for me, rather than following familiar paths at the behest of others.

At the same time, these regrets have reminded me of the changes I've made in my life over the last five years that were scary and challenging and definitely off the beaten path (divorce, dating/marrying a woman two thousand miles away, changing jobs to a fully remote gig). I'm proud of myself for taking those leaps of faith. For trusting myself to figure it out as I went along even though I had no fucking clue what I was doing as I took the initial steps.

Meanwhile, I got home and my youngest came over for our dad weekend, and as he walked in I said, "So it is down to you and it is down to me. Let's talk about our feelings." "Oh no", he says. But I ask him how he wants these next three years to go (he's a rising sophomore) and whether he sees enough, too much or too little of me and his mom. He gets really uncomfortable. "Look, you're not gonna offend me to say that you don't wanna hang around with your parents, so just say it and let's figure out what this looks like." And so he sorta half-smiles and says that he wants more alone time in his room ("to jerk off, I know, you don't have to say it" I say) and with his friends. And then he says that he wants the flexibility to not come over to my place as often because he just wants to be in his room sometimes (I have a two-bedroom and the three kids shared one room for two years and then two kids shared the room for the last two years; at their mom's they each have their own (small) rooms) and I said, "what if we pushed the second bed up against the wall and put the spare desk in there and you can have your own little cave?" So we did that, and he had this huge grin on his face as we finished up. And he just left to do/watch a "milk mile" (4x chug a glass of milk, run a 1/4 mile) with his friends at the high school track. Nerds.

Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

* Whether I or the ex is Nurse Ratched is left to the reader's imagination.

[Vaikeasti]

Ooh!

Hope Finland treats your son kindly!
How are things going?

[7Wannabe5]

Whether I or the ex is Nurse Ratched is left to the reader's imagination.

Well, since you are an INTJ and based on your description your ex-wife is more S and also towards J, the ISTJ persona of Nurse Rathed might represent the dysfunctional compromise between your personalities inherent in your marital relationship prior to differentiation. Since I totally just made this up on the fly, let me see if I can apply it to my own first marriage? Definitely P because "messy and err on side of neglect", towards I because my tiny e was not enough to overcome his intense I, probably N because although he was more towards an S hipster, my N is 98%, T/F harder to call, so maybe our dysfunctional compromise had the personae of a dysfunctional inxP, that sounds about right, a good deal of parallel/distant play, the occasional hot-wet mopey encounter, and nobody super focused on getting things done.

[Henry]

And so he sorta half-smiles and says that he wants more alone time in his room ("to jerk off, I know, you don't have to say it" I say)

I found myself singing this line to Cats and The Cradle, and I got to tell you, it was hard keeping it together.

[Vaikeasti]

Hope Finland is treating your kid well!
All the best wishes to you all!

[suomalainen]

Thanks all for the well wishes. He seems to be doing ok. Is learning some Finnish even if he still doesn't understand shit at school. I think he's also a bit lonely living in a small village in the sticks (between Turku and Tampere), but it seems like it'll be a good experience for him nonetheless. Has been to Stockholm, Turku and Tallinn already and will go to Inari for a few days in a few weeks. Back home in a little over 3 weeks.

[suomalainen]

You live in a world; you participate in an economy; you live a life, in each case having been inserted into such circumstance with initial conditions that included none of your input. Whether you can change those initial conditions or escape them or replace them can be a source of endless entertainment or angst. I generally lack the interest or inclination to ponder any unicorn worlds or economies where the initial conditions could be different. I'm busy enough just managing the existing initial conditions of this world and this economy.

But in my life, I've found myself wondering how I would have done or what I would have done had the initial condition of a particular life stage been different and how a life branch would have shot out of that difference. This generally boils down to spin-the-wheel to when the time machine stops. Before high school? High school graduation? College graduation? Some other point in time? The time you tend to think about is perhaps the time your life branched in a way that has caused some angst in the time since. I used to spend A LOT of time ruminating about this, when I was down about several major circumstances in my life and found little joyous sunshine breaking through the dumpty clouds. I used to want to swing from peak to peak and skip all the valleys, so many valleys. My therapist first broke me out of this by saying something like "You keep talking about how your life could have been so much better if only you'd made different choices. But you also could have ended up dead. You did pretty well."

I've still struggled with the idea ever since, although the intensity has lessened. As I get older, or perhaps as a result of the constant struggle to remain mindful, it's gotten better. I've recently realized, not just intellectually but experientially - I don't just think it; I'm starting to FEEL it - that (i) time travel is not possible, (ii) if time travel were possible, it's very difficult to pinpoint exactly when I would stop, and (iii) it doesn't matter. In any case, there will always be initial conditions. You will like some of them and you will dislike some of them. The initial conditions don't matter; it's what you do from then on. And then the "a ha" realization: Today-Me starts every day with initial conditions that Today-Me had no input into.

How has this translated into my life the last year? I quit alcohol in June; I quit(-ish) caffeine in August. Also in June, I made (again) exercise / movement a central focus of my daily life as it's such a core value. In September, I went for a bike ride early in the morning before getting on a morning flight. I texted Gravy: "It is crazy how much better I've been feeling after getting out for a ride in the morning. Is this what normies feel like?"

I think, after all these years, I finally came to it*, not just intellectually, but experientially: Life just is. There's no Point. There's no Meaning. There's no Goal. Why are we here? No why; just here. So all the stress about those Things is just (culturally created and conveyed) bullshit. When I do what I value, I feel good (or at least better). When I do what I don't value or don't do what I value, I feel bad (or at least worse). There's not really any magic to it, (cultural) salesmen of all stripes be damned. After that, it seems to just be about stress management. As Lin Yutang said (paraphrasing), the balance to find is when life is fairly carefree and yet not altogether carefree.

* In no small part due to following many people's retirements and seeing that their life isn't actually that much different from mine. They wake up; they eat; they go for a walk; they [do some stuff]; they eat; they watch tv; they go to bed. Rinse. Repeat.

This is the one benefit of retirement that I can see is "different in kind" from the (work at home) life I currently enjoy - the stress of answering to someone else. But not having to go into an office has been a huge improvement in work/life satisfaction since covid spring and the remaining downsides of work are fairly minimal. Perhaps if I had a passion from which work was cock-blocking me, I might feel differently, but given my little-bit-of-interest-in-a-lot-of-things personality, I'm pretty content with how things are arranged now.

Speaking of stressors, a few particular ones to mention that have the largest impact (in no particular order):

1) Politics - I don't want to get into it (because no one cares what anyone else thinks anyway and no one's going to convince anyone else of anything they don't want to believe anyway), but what I'll say is that I generally find politics stressful because what it boils down to is people trying to control other people, and that generally bothers me, regardless of which direction on which issue. I'd rather other people just left me (and everyone else) the fuck alone. My solution to this is to stay mildly apprised of what's going on in the world, but to realize that it's all out of my circle of control. What I can do, if needed, although I don't suspect I'm in any immediate danger of any description (physical, financial, etc), is position myself to be able to leave and find a pocket of safety in the geographies available to me (as a dual US/EU citizen, I have many options for local conditions). I don't think there's any real solution to this. Humans are always gonna human, and politicians have always been, are, and will always be, the shittiest of humans. Power corrupts and all that. I'm tempted to go George Carlin on this and never vote / pay attention again. In the meantime, the rich and powerful will battle it out among themselves with very little changing on the ground.

2) Kids - I stress when my kids are facing stressful things. I think this is largely an outgrowth of the fact that as a parent you are actually responsible for their lives from the moment of their birth and that responsibility only slowly wanes over time as they gain the knowledge and skills to bear greater responsibility for their own lives. At their current ages of 15, 18 and 20, my responsibility for (and authority over!) my biological kids is practically quite low, but the emotional reaction of wanting to protect, etc. them continues. This is a process of continual improvement. As to my stepkids, I don't actually find them all that stressful, when they let me sleep through the night. Bigger kids; bigger problems. For now, the 5 and 7 year olds can scream and laugh and run around like maniacs, and I can just go to another room and shut the door if need be. When a(n older) child is suicidal, you can't do that.

3) Work - I switched jobs 21 months ago. 20 months ago they announced a layoff exercise. 9 months ago they made their final official layoff announcements, although shadow layoffs have continued. This has been a low-level constant stressor. However, during this year's performance reviews last month, I was given many assurances and much feedback that I am highly valued and liked (akin to favored-son status), so that constant stressor has finally evaporated. I finally feel comfortable that I'll have this job for the foreseeable future (~5 years) which is all I really need to be "certain" I can take care of myself and launch my kids into their adulthoods (such a step for the stepkids is too far off to contemplate and they have so much involved family, their resource availability is likely to be far in excess of need). Now, I know safety is an illusion and all that, but the point is that so was the stress! And between illusions, safety is much less demanding on the body.

So, yeah. This year, aside from managing stress, I pretty much wake up, do some stuff (always including some walking/biking/something), eat and sleep every day of the year. The days I'm able to do this with @gravy are some of the best days, bar none. While trying to maintain my differentiation, it is getting increasingly harder to imagine my life continuing without her. I'm sure either of us would carry on if the other died, but, yeah, life would feel really fucking empty after experiencing This (gesturing - she does double pistols [shudders]; I do a modified shrug). Thoughts again to @edith who recently experienced this type of loss (twice ffs!) and will be grappling with it for a long time to come.

***
Prior years (2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 (or perhaps this), 2021, 2022, and 2023).

[suomalainen]

@gravy and I had her kids for Christmas this year, from Tuesday morning to Saturday (this) morning. I had to work all week, and working from home while the kids are off of school generally tends to raise blood pressures a bit. This does not apply when your work setup is in the front room:

For now, the 5 and 7 year olds can scream and laugh and run around like maniacs, and I can just go to another room and shut the door if need be.

Occasionally, the kids find themselves fascinated by their ability to create sounds with their voiceboxes. The louder and shriller, the better. Generally, this isn't a big deal, but when it's been a long day and/or you're trying to get stuff done at work and/or you have your own internal shit going on, nerves start to get frayed. Needless to say, while I don't normally notice this, I laid in bed this morning and then sat on the couch doing my year-end numbers and doing some reading, and I could *feel* the silence. It feels a luxury.

I also happened upon a journal that I hadn't read before wherein the author posted a photo of a room in their house dedicated to what I'll call "peaceful things". I'm not sure what all goes on in there, but two things I noticed: 1) it ain't baby-proofed and 2) such a clean and peaceful set-up would never survive in a child-infested house.

Combine the two thoughts and I am looking forward to all five of my little birds fledging the nest. It has been the experience of a lifetime to be a parent to five completely different human beings. But I'm ready to reclaim some more time for myself*. In the meantime, I shall work on my mindfulness to enjoy the simple pleasure of being able to hear the outside traffic noise and the fridge compressor cycling on and off. Ah, bliss.

* This particular thought lines up with many of my thoughts over the years, which can be summarized as a fixation on "freedom-from" the stress of work and kids. As I've worked from home the last five years, I've realized that that pretty much gave me all that I was lacking and needed. I needed a little bit of extra time, and working from home has given me that. Re-marrying a woman with younger kids has re-introduced some of the younger-kids-stress, but that too will be mitigated as time goes on and also by the fact that my older kids need less and less so that when I am with them, it's really turning into time alone with occasional interaction. My older kids are not nearly as demanding on my time as they had been when younger - the stress there is in navigating these big young-adult decision points. In other words, the stuff I talked about earlier in this journal has largely been solved, so I'm no longer looking for big, dramatic changes to my life. I just want a little bit more peace and quiet, and I can see it slowly creeping its way to me. When it gets here, I'm sure I won't know what the fuck to do with it. It also really helps that I'm now with a partner who is so much better for me (and I for her) so that the relationship is more a place to recharge than a place to be discharged.

As to money, I spent about the same this year as last, with the exception of the moneys for my second child's study-abroad to Finland and the roof replacement assessment at my condo. Sold some stocks, wrote some checks, and moved on. Some ratios which may or may not have any meaning, but I'll use this as a way to think out loud:

- All-in, my expenses for the year would have resulted in about a 26% withdrawal rate.
- Delete out the expenses related to the divorce and travel (so what 2028 should be), and assuming no asset growth between now and then, my withdrawal rate at the end of 2028 would be about 7.3%.
- My net worth increased 15% this year between contributions and modest returns on my conservative portfolio (about 1/3 private bonds, 1/3 public bonds, 1/5 stocks and 1/10 cash). Assuming 10% growth (combination of contributions and returns) and no decrease in expenses, my withdrawal rate in 2028 is projected to be 5%.
- Work until I'm 55 (and eligible for early retirement which means not leaving unvested stock with my employer) and my withdrawal rate in the final year before retirement would be 3%.
- This leaves me plenty of buffer to freely assist the five kids in their lives while not having to think twice about the (financial) impact on me.
- This also leaves out @gravy's assets and plans. For now, she has sufficient available assets to continue not working for the foreseeable future while her tax-advantaged assets continue to grow.

This "plan" feels pretty good. While this likely means that we will end up with far more assets and income sources than we will need, I'm not really concerned with over-saving. I feel like in my current life there's a runway for me to have sufficient space for myself outside of my role as "dad" or "employee", while also giving me space to continue doing those things on my terms and getting the benefits therefrom. While there may be some benefits to having the space to be creative and figure out a life of my own outside of the typical social constructs of family (and once in this one, there's no opting out) and career, for now, such potential marginal benefit** is outweighed by the optionality the extra money gives for the seven people I'm focused on.

For now, everyone's healthy and happy and that's a fantastic place to be. With any luck, I'll be able to say those same words at the end of next year.

** If someone can point me to a story of someone who truly lived what amounts to an alien life, I would be very interested in reading. So far, "non-traditional" lives all look pretty traditionally-human to me in broad strokes, even if the details are a little different.

[7Wannabe5]

If someone can point me to a story of someone who truly lived what amounts to an alien life

My first note would be that a lifestyle entirely alien to the human experience across all space and time thus far is kind of a high bar. My second note would be that it's more the eventually acquired subjective sense that "normal" life now seems "alien" to you. However, "normal" life always remains adjacent and available until it isn't. For example, up to a certain juncture in time, you could live your "semi-alien" lifestyle without a smart phone and maintain the option to function in the "normal" world. However, as technology changes and changes culture along with it, eventually your access to the "normal" lifestyle may shut down fairly thoroughly absent re-investment.

I recently read "Generations" in which the data-research-intensive author argues that trends in technology have promoted two primary sub-trends of increased individualism and stretching out the lifestyle narrative to fit longer, more affluent lifetime. I pulled out a collection of letters sent through the mail with stamps that were written to me by a variety of humans in my social circle in the archaic era of the mid-1980s. Yup, we have become "alien" to ourselves over the last 40 years. Even the relatively brief period since Jacob first posted on his blog represents an entire generation in technological/cultural terms. For example, does a precocious 11 year old Alpha gen member reading along feel any affinity for the Depression era frugal lifestyle of her -great-great-great-grandmother? Even as the phases of life are being stretched out, (50% of Silent Generation women (b.1925-1945) were married by the time they were 20), the pace of technological change is shortening the duration of the cultural shifts that define a generation to now approximate a 15 year cycle. So, a woman who has her first child in her early 40s may now be close to 3 technological/cultural generations removed from that child.

My point here being that if a kid on this forum is learning Depression era skills, this might actually seem more "normal" to somebody of Gen X nearing 50 or 60 who maybe had a grandparent born in 1920 than what actually currently constitutes "normal" behavior for somebody born on the cusp of Gen Z/Gen Alpha, especially if the member of Gen X took a minute to re-inhabit their own milieu circa 40 years ago. One particularly weird thing about Gen X due to the massive gravitational pull of the Boomers is that we had the shortest childhood of any of the 6 generations currently living, followed by an adolescence extended to approximately the expected elongated length. In simple human terms, Gen X females averaged around 10 years between age of first sexual encounter (15)and age when gave birth to first child (25), and this was completely unprecedented and also contributory to why we are often mystified by "alien" sexual (relatively asexual) behavior of today's youth. Why it seems simultaneously very old-fashioned but also somewhat edgy to read paper letters from 1984 in which an 18 year old female friend addresses me as her "Fellow Studette" and bemoans the lack of casual sex opportunities at her small liberal arts college and requests blow-by-blow report on any interactions with any "Marlboro Men" I might have had, or my 15 year old sister writes about drinking 9 beers, smoking a joint, and doing two lines of cocaine, and then going skiing, gloating "I was FUCKED up!!" How did the extremely unsupervised cast of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" become the grandparents or parents of the much more supervised and also most depressed and mentally troubled Gen Z ? The answer is likely "Follow the technology." (Note: Data studies indicate that most of them are not very concerned/depressed about climate change and similar. More likely that they would benefit in terms of improved mood/outlook by torching the smart-phone, dumping the company of their "engaged" parents , getting fucked up, going skiing, and getting laid. All of which could easily be obtained on frugal budget if maybe tobogganing on dumpster found plastic shapes down any convenient icy slope is subbed in for skiing. Coasting accelerating bike no-hands, no-helmet down slope into lake as alternate warm weather option. If totally broke, hitchhiking until whoever picks you up offers you a hit off their joint and then finding your way back totally stoned and still totally broke to your own neighborhood from wherever they dropped you off also might provide uniquely challenging flow experience. etc etc)