AE's Adventures in Accidental FIRE

[DutchGirl]

Congrats, AE, and well done being sooo prepared for this lay-off that it has become a blessing instead.

You've been "retired" now for ten days, so please give yourself some time to figure this thing out. Let the stress flow away, recover from those last busy weeks, and maybe you still need to work on selling the house etc, so no need yet to find the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. Patience and self-compassion, I would prescribe. This is the first time that you're doing this, after all.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Thanks @J+G and @DutchGirl! I agree, I definitely need time to decompress. Most of my time over these past few days has been either decompressing, dealing with moving logistics, or trying to figure out the withdrawal of my nest egg that I've been autopiloting and not really paying attention to. So the rest is yet to come!

I have felt a lot better with my mood over the past week or so though. I was pretty angry about the way in which they laid off for several days, but once I got over that, I started to feel better for the first time in years. I think it's hard to appreciate how much stress you're under until that stress goes away.

There's also now a lack of excuses for everything I have always wanted to do but never got around to doing. It makes me realize just how much the time consuming part of my job combined with all the money was training me to delay all my other goals in life and throw money at problems that are better solved by slowing down and actually doing them the right way. I think stress + money + no time was causing me to be disengaged with my entire life and so it's probably for the best the rich $$$ stressful software job is gone.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Update
- I have finally moved into the new place. Minimalism was a lifesaver here but I am still in the process of unpacking and getting rid of even more junk. I am probably going to have to downsize to a 1 bedroom after my lease ends so I am being mindful that even more junk might need to go.

- Housing is currently my biggest problem. Per the 4% rule, my monthly budget for everything is $3.3k. Unfortunately, my rent is $2.5k plus $200 for utilities really only leaves me $600 for everything else. I am having a little trouble cutting back because I have inflated my budget so much with the "infinite money" I saw myself as having from work. That was clearly an illusion because no job = no infinite money. Still, I think I will be okay. I have lived very frugally before and I can do it again. On the plus side, the sudden lack of "infinite money" is making me realize the benefits of the WOG approach to start getting the things I want in my life into my life without spending money on them.

- Food spending is probably my biggest problem because I eat out all of the time so I will be cutting back on that. I know how to cook decently well, I just hate doing it, so this has always been a struggle and I'm going to make solving this problem, both emotionally and logistically, my first priority.

- My townhouse still has not sold and I was panicking about this because, even though it's paid off, I am still having to throw ~$800/mo at it for HOA/Taxes/Insurance/utilities. However, it got really good traffic with showings this last weekend and I may be getting an offer soon, so I am very much hoping this problem goes away soon.

- I do not miss work whatsoever and only really miss the infinite money. I again note that many FIRE people talk about how hard quitting actually was for them but frankly I will live in joy if I never step foot into a corporate office again in my entire life.

- The housing stress has taken a toll on my creativity and I have found it difficult to keep up the creative writing. I think this is expected because moving and job loss are some of the greatest stressors a person can go through. I am hoping the ability to write comes back to me when I am more settled in.

[DutchGirl]

While you may not want to work in a corporate office again... I could imagine you making say $300-$400 per month as either a freelancer or with a non-corporate job (that will have its own, but probably different, bullshit)? And that kind of cash could help with occasionally eating out of having take-out or prepared meals, for example.

Maybe right now the focus should be on selling the townhouse (and perhaps also on reducing food spending while you have some time for that), but maybe after that consider earning a little bit of side-income?

[AnalyticalEngine]

@DutchGirl - One thing I have considered doing is becoming an adjunct professor and teaching 1-2 classes a semester, either online or at a local college. Teaching college classes is something I did in grad school so I don't think it would be hard to get the position, and a limited amount of classes wouldn't be a ton of work. Unfortunately, the tech market is not doing very hot right now, and I know quite a few developers who also got laid off and are also out of a job.

One thing I am trying to remind myself is that I am going to be fine and it's a bigger mistake to panic over a few hundred dollars a month in my budget that will probably go down on its own as I learn to manage things better. Because one thing I have learned through all of this is that it's hard to appreciate how much stress you are under until you are no longer under that stress, and getting my head cleared and adding things into my life that I want into my life is far more important than being miserable over a couple bucks, especially because I do have quite a lot saved. I am also young and I will earn more money if that's what I decide I really want to do. So I think getting to a better mental state and building up my life with freedom-to things that bring me fulfillment is a lot more important than trying to stay EXACTLY inside $3.3k when my situation is fluid and rapidly changing. Still, it's hard to let go when you've trained yourself to obsess over money.

[Frita]

Congrats on your new place! Lots of change to accommodate…Previously, you’d mentioned getting a roommate. Did you decide that eventually downsizing to a one bedroom would better meet your needs?

[AnalyticalEngine]

@Frita - Thank you! Accommodating to change is definitely consuming most of my time. I think it will all be positive changes in the long
run, but there are a lot of systems and admin and other little things to take care of.

As for the roommate, I am still heavily considering that. I have a year lease on my current place that I just barely moved into, and it's a two bedroom. A roommate would go a long way toward solving most of my financial problems, although the only thing causing me to hesitate is that I very much enjoy living alone so a roommate is a lifestyle downgrade. Still, it's a very tempting idea because it would greatly help with housing costs. Even a one bedroom is going to cost me like $1.8k a month in rent, so a roommate in a $2.5k two bedroom is a better option for finances (and the two bedroom has a lot more living room and backyard space)

[AnalyticalEngine]

Dec Update

Personal Stuff
- I am significantly more burned out than I gave myself credit for and I've been crashing hard and finding it difficult to do anything or enjoy anything. I really think the problem is I've been under more stress than I can cope with given my housing situation and unexpected job loss. There is also the fact the environment at that job had gotten increasingly toxic all year and I am finding this is all crashing down on me all at once now that I am not focused on moving logistics. I'm wondering if I need to give myself more time to decompress until I can feel like an actual person again.

- Been reading more on acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and I think this is a good fit for me. Living with depression is the experience of being stuck inside an asshole brain that continually comes up with excessively negative interpretation of yourself and reality and the fact is, this never really goes away if you have chronic depression. ACT is more about learning to ignore the asshole brain and focus on value-driven actions to build the life you want, which I feel would really help me. I never went to therapy in the past because it was too expensive, but my new ACA plan should cover it, so I might try to find a therapist who specializes in ACT to help me work through some of my issues.

- I have been halfheartedly talking to recruiters and applying for jobs because I was concerned about my housing situation, and my heart really is not in this. I have a job interview tomorrow I am struggling to force myself to prepare for, so this may not really be a solution.

- I think I am just going to get a roommate after all because that solves my housing problem for now. I need to get on top of some moving boxes and junk I haven't put away yet then I will just find one on a Facebook roommate group.

- My condo sale is set to close this week, so that will be a huge relief.

Actual ERE Stuff
- I ignored ERE/skill stuff for most of this year in order to manage work and get my house up for sale/move. Now that this is done, I am discovering my lack of skills in certain areas is a problem. As such, I am attempting to actually built a lifestyle that makes sense instead of playing triage constantly.

- I want to create a vision board/think more about my values and what I want my life to look like, but I am still in the early stages of this and will report back later when my thoughts are more clear.

- Optimizing diet/exercise, however, is ERE 101 and it's fairly straightforward to do this, so I am starting here. I bought a year pass to the Denver Rec Center for $200 this month, and my plan is to bike there everyday to do exercise and yoga classes. The rec center even has watercolor painting classes, so I think this will be a good resource for me.

- Diet will consist of eating every meal at home using scratch ingredients and biking to the grocery store. This is my #1 area of focus right now, so I will report back after this month with how it's going.

[7Wannabe5]

I want to create a vision board/think more about my values and what I want my life to look like, but I am still in the early stages of this and will report back later when my thoughts are more clear.

I've also been attempting this (again) in anticipation of my 60th birthday and while wallowing in the lushness of time once more available to me since completing my grad degree. One thing I've noticed this time around, due in part to making use of AI as a tool, is that the term "lifestyle" is inherently consumerist no matter how thoroughly you deconstruct and update your desires/values/interests/goals/purpose/etc. So, there is something oxymoronic about attempting to construct an "anti-consumerist lifestyle." This is also why FIRE and/or "minimalism" and/or "simple living" etc. can become, as you and Jacob were discussing, no longer "cool." Because I now have decades of personal lifestyle planning behind me, I am holding the perspective that any vision board I create is just a variant on a stapled center-fold photographic spread found in some lifestyle magazine such as "Glamour" that I subscribed to at age 13 or the department store catalogue based wish-list I made for Santa when I was 6, and changing the means by which I might acquire it from "magical wishes" to "money earned/spent" to "skill over time" or even "subjective rather than objective" does not essentially change this paradigm.

My intention in sharing this is absolutely not to discourage your attempts. Just hoping that your intelligence might shed some light from higher level. Maybe this is another juncture where metamodern stance of "sincere irony" becomes useful? Also one possible exit-door I found was asking yourself the question, "What is one thing that I believe to be true that nobody else does?"

[Frita]

Lots of change in various stages of implementation, very cool. Having had roommates before (and technically having them now with my college son plus my basement-dwelling spouse, they are all created equal. What are you looking for? Any dealbreakers?

Wow, the Denver Rec Center is quite affordable. When we lived there, it hadn’t been built yet. If it had, I like to think I would have spent less time at HHs and Pepsi Center/Bluebird concerts. We lived in Cheesman Park and biking could sometimes be as spooky as taking the #10 bus after midnight.

Hm, optimizing eating is ERE 1, but it seems to expand and morph into ERE 2 territory. (I view ERE more holistically as a mechanism to shed internal and external expectations standing in one’s way.) Continuing to eat well and adjust to differing nutritional needs is ongoing. What are your go-to favorite meals to cook for yourself?

[AnalyticalEngine]

@7W5 - Ha! That's a great point and description. I agree with you and I'm suffering from severe "self-help podcast bro" fatigue myself. I physically cannot stand to read one more book or listen to one more Huberman Labs talk or Cal Newport podcast.

My issue with this stuff is that it increasingly feels like an attempt to control the human condition while being overly stuck in the American social control paradigm. Foucault once said that the soul is the prison of the body, and I really think he was on to something with that. America has a fucking problem with trying to control both the body and the mind while pinning responsibility to meet increasingly absurd social expectations on the individual while the social fabric increasingly unravels. You will be thin, you will be productive, and most importantly, you will be happy. Failure is a personal moral failing.

This paradigm becomes glaringly obvious if you study history or go to any country that's not America and where you can just live your goddamned life without all this pressure to make it "remarkable," as if anything less than "remarkable" is a sin.

In fact, one of the things I am working on with ACT is to simply accept my life and mental state for what they are. My life does not need to be remarkable, I do not need to do anything particularly special, and it's actually fine if I feel terrible. What I should focus on is simply being present with how I feel and taking the actions I can toward values I care about.

So for me, lifestyle isn't a podcast bro spectacle so much as the simple actions I take on a daily basis to live my life. For example, I can eat at home or I can eat at a restaurant. Eating at home has better outcomes per my values, so I should take actions that make eating at home possible. If I am feeling lonely, I can go to some new meetup groups rather than ruminate on every negative experience I've ever had. It's simple stuff like that where the only real goal here is to meet my basic human needs. All I want is to live my life while embracing the ups and downs of life and, most critically, giving up on the collective post-war PTSD dream of controlling the human condition and simply embracing whatever my fate will be.

@Frita - I also had the roommate gauntlet experience in college and feel far wiser now in trying to find one that will work. The biggest thing is to just find someone stable and respectful. Someone who will pay the bills, respect the space, and be willing to have reasonable conversations about what is or is not working. Sadly a high bar sometimes with roommate roulette but I suppose that is life.

There is a university near where I live, so I was thinking of trying to target a graduate student. They'll be old enough to avoid the early college roommate pitfalls and hopefully reasonably mature and funded if they are smart enough to go to grad school.

Cheesman Park can have some spooky traffic, so I can see why you were hesitant to bike. I live in Platt Park/Wash Park, and biking in the neighborhoods here isn't so bad if you go at the right time. There's enough congestion that no car is going faster than 10 MPH anyway, which helps. But we'll see. I've never been a huge fan of biking truth be told because it feels dangerous, but the rec center is also a 30 min walk or 5 min drive so I think it'll work out.

As for cooking, I'm currently focusing on getting bang for my buck with the ingredients. For example, I bought a whole chicken, cut it apart, removed the skin to make beans with, used the bones to make chicken stock, then will use the meat/stock/beans to make soup and then turn everything I am discarding (including the skin after using it for the beans, carrots from stock) to make dog food for the dog. All of this for $6 is not a bad deal and it's this sort of creative problem solving that I want to do more of.

My issue is that my eating habits have become a little disregulated lately because anhedonia makes me just not want to eat, so I'm also trying to fix that too. Consistency and physical activity have helped in the past so I'm going to try that.

[OutOfTheBlue]

After being FIREd you said there were no excuses now, and it reminded me that doubling down on radical acceptance is what's called for instead.

Of course you need time for this. And guess what, you have it!

You don't have to do shit to be whole, to live from fullness. There's nothing missing at core. Otherwise, it's possibly scarcity mindset and living from a sense of lack all around.

You don't live in the world of doing any more. Sure, plenty of things will be done. Just, remove any sense of "I need to do shit" from your system. Relax into this.

I'll run counter to the general wisdom here, but whatever I can figure out that I want, that I really really want will only be that of a limited sense of self. Unless I connect with what I really really am, which is not limited in any way. Learning to abide in that, I can relax (out of) the personal will directed toward an imagined future, and all attached striving, which is another subtle form of mind created suffering.

[AxelHeyst]

One thing I've noticed this time around, due in part to making use of AI as a tool, is that the term "lifestyle" is inherently consumerist no matter how thoroughly you deconstruct and update your desires/values/interests/goals/purpose/etc. So, there is something oxymoronic about attempting to construct an "anti-consumerist lifestyle."

eh?

Lifestyle: the way in which a person or group lives.

Consumerism: the idea that the consumption of goods and services is a desirable goal, and that people's happiness and well-being depend on acquiring material possessions.

Anti-consumerism lifestyle = a way of living where the consumption of goods and services is an undesirable goal, and happiness and well-being is understood to not depend on acquiring material possessions.

Seems straightforward - what am I missing?

I'm all for your and AE's critiques of American self-help lifestyle design podcast bro lifestyle design culture, but throwing the entire concept of lifestyle design, as in 'making intentional decisions about how one wants/desires their way of life to function', into the 'inherently consumerist' bucket, seems like an unhelpful dead-end. I'm curious what dots were connected in this process that I'm not seeing.

What I should focus on is simply being present with how I feel and taking the actions I can toward values I care about.

This!

I'm wondering if I need to give myself more time to decompress until I can feel like an actual person again.

Seems wise. It seems to me that you are logistically in a position (or about to be in a position, or one or two easy moves away from a position) to do literally whatever you like for years and years and years, perhaps all of the rest of the years you have left. It seems that you're in a position to never again need to do anything that does in fact compress you, obviating the whole notion of how 'much time to give yourself'. How much time before what? What do you need to go do? Huck yourself back in the meat grinder?

ETA: OOTB beat me to it and of course put it much more poetically than I did.

[Jin+Guice]

@AE: Welcome to retirement, lol. The OGs seemed to somehow not experience existential angst post-retirement, but that puts them in the great minority. If you were a high-achiever and/ or had a particularly stressful job (i.e. most of them), then I think it takes a few years to decompress. Your body and CNS haven't yet learned that if you just do nothing but meet your basic physiological needs, that nothing bad will happen.

The skill building also just takes a long time. If you're used to putting out fires at work or just a general feeling of anxiety, it's easy to stress out about the skills you don't have but:

How much time before what?

America has a fucking problem with trying to control both the body and the mind while pinning responsibility to meet increasingly absurd social expectations on the individual while the social fabric increasingly unravels. You will be thin, you will be productive, and most importantly, you will be happy. Failure is a personal moral failing.

This paradigm becomes glaringly obvious if you study history or go to any country that's not America and where you can just live your goddamned life without all this pressure to make it "remarkable," as if anything less than "remarkable" is a sin.

Such a succinct summary of what sucks about our current culture.




I agree with what @OutOfTheBlue says also, but as usual I recommend doing with a side-effect of being and he recommends being with a side-effect of doing. I suspect either will work.

[7Wannabe5]

You will be thin, you will be productive, and most importantly, you will be happy. Failure is a personal moral failing.

Exactly. Especially if you are happy even though you are fat and unproductive.

I'm curious what dots were connected in this process that I'm not seeing.

It's actually something that rather unexpectedly popped out of the lifestyle design experiment/project I recently attempted. I experienced a good deal of success applying the framework of OODA to completing my Master's project in Data Science, so I decided to attempt to use OODA framework/methodology utilizing AI towards lifestyle design experiment with something akin to Minimum Viable Lifestyle Design popping out of every looping. I spent more than a week completing the first loop, but an extreme over-simplification of what I did would be:

1) Created lists of keywords or phrases associated with ERE, Integral Theory/Spiral Dynamics: Level Yellow/Teal/Turquoise, my MBTI type and related interests, and my current aspirations/affirmations.

2) Randomly combined keywords and phrases from each category and ran them through transformations based on etymology and meaning to produce different words and phases. For example, personal finance = individual money-management or intimate fundage or customized material base.

3) Forced combination of the expanded assortment based on artificial constraints such as "each word must start with same letter of the alphabet." With constraint of "must start with W", personal finance = wherewithal

4) Prompted AI to describe a lifestyle and/or day in the life of a human based on just a 4 or 5 word "clump" generated by 1) thru 3). This prompt was phrased very simply with no further suggestions or elaboration; just "Describe a day in the life of somebody who prefers a lifestyle that would correspond to these 5 words..."

RESULTING DAY IN LIFE DESCRIPTION

A Day in the Life of Anya
Anya woke to the soft glow of sunlight filtering through her bedroom window. She stretched, a smile spreading across her face as she recalled a particularly vivid dream. After a brief meditation, she began her morning routine, which included a gentle yoga practice and a cup of freshly brewed herbal tea.
Once her morning ritual was complete, Anya headed to her studio, a cozy space filled with canvases, paints, and brushes. She spent the next few hours lost in the world of art, her strokes bold and expressive. As she worked, she listened to classical music, allowing the melodies to inspire her creativity.
After a nourishing lunch of homemade soup and a side salad, Anya decided to explore a nearby nature preserve. She packed a small backpack with a book, a thermos of tea, and a notebook for sketching. As she wandered through the trails, she was captivated by the beauty of the forest, the rustling leaves, and the songs of the birds. She stopped to sketch a particularly striking tree, capturing its intricate branches and the dappled sunlight filtering through its leaves.
In the afternoon, Anya attended a local community workshop on sustainable gardening. She was passionate about environmental issues and enjoyed learning new ways to reduce her ecological footprint. The workshop was informative and inspiring, and Anya left with a newfound enthusiasm for growing her own food.
As the sun began to set, Anya returned home and prepared a simple yet delicious dinner of roasted vegetables and quinoa. She enjoyed her meal on her patio, watching the sky turn shades of orange and purple. After dinner, she curled up on her couch with a good book, losing herself in the story until her eyelids grew heavy. As she drifted off to sleep, Anya felt a deep sense of contentment and peace. Her day had been filled with creativity, connection, and a profound appreciation for the natural world.

Do you see what I mean now?

[AxelHeyst]

Do you see what I mean now?

I do not.

I do see a compelling illustration as to why not ask an AI to do my thinking for me when what I'm looking for is to do some serious thinking outside of the strictures of the current cultural paradigm, considering that my understanding is that LLMs are trained on ~*all the information we've put onto the internet* aka a text-based approximate repository of the current cultural paradigm, even if you point them in the direction of countercultural sources like ERE/Wilber/etc.

In other words, do I agree that mainstream consumer culture understands 'lifestyle' as an object of consumption? Of course. It understands *everything* as an object of consumption, even (no, particularly!) anti-consumerist ideology. Do I use this understanding of what the internet thinks I mean when I do a search for "how to design my life"? Yes, definitely, because I must protect myself from thinking other people's thoughts or having other people's visions for my life (such as the vision the LLM produced for you).

But do I surrender the inherent definition of the word "lifestyle" as in "make intentional decisions about my way of life" to the podcast bros? Damn them, I do not!

I shall fight them at my keyboard, I shall fight them on my own shitty podcast (haaaaaahahaha oh the irony it tickles), I shall fight them in obscure message boards...

ETA to expand on my last paragraph, lest anyone think I was merely poking fun: if we are to carve out for ourselves worlds outside of the current paradigm, we’ve got to claim some ground every now and again. We can’t let Them have *all* the words. And it isn’t so much that they get some words and we get the others: it’s like China Mievilles The City and The City, two worlds superimposed upon each other. If you’re in city A, lifestyle means an object of consumption. If you’re in City B, lifestyle means what the dictionary says it does, because we’re sticklers for that sort of thing here. The City A LLM won’t be able to code-switch (well, not at the moment at least. Maybe we need to build our own LLM?)

[ertyu]

I think I get it: in "mainstream culture" lifestyle is an object of consumption so it's quite easy to internalize the mindset even when we aren't "consuming" anything external. a parrallel: how many confuse "self-determination" with replacing the disciplinary effect managers and capitalism with the disciplinary effect of one's own ego. We might be working on our own goals rather than the manager's, but we approach ourselves and our time like a manager would have because that's what our culture has taught us achieving things is.The alienation without becomes alienation within (alienation in the marxist sense). It's similarly possible to "design" one's own life, choose acts and actions by ourselves (rather than doing what huberman told you cause he looks big and has 4 bitches and you want 4 bitches too), and still relate to those tasks and that lifestyle as to a product of consumption simply because that's what we think relating-to-lifestyle is on the meta level

[AxelHeyst]

Right - and good example with self-determination. The challenge is to decouple our souls from the Machine, bearing in mind that The Machine goes a few levels deep So it’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking we’ve escaped it when in reality we’ve just moved on to the next level’s boss.

But there IS an Out.

Otherwise there’s little point to all this.

[Jin+Guice]

Otherwise there’s little point to all this.

I agree with the rest but not this. Each level is its own victory. Getting stuck at WL5 is still better than being stuck at WL0.

[AxelHeyst]

Getting stuck at WL5 is still better than being stuck at WL0.

For the individual, yes.

@AE - sorry, it occurred to me a bit late that the vibes I brought in here wasn't very skillfully timed or brought. I kinda nerd-sniped myself. I'm very excited for your path of finding what works for you now.