The Renaissance Report | September 2021
Physiological
I'm off my PT program. I get exercise via walks and whatever working on the bus counts for. I *feel* pretty healthy.
I'm sleeping on a very thin mattress on top of a platform I can feel the slats through, and I use a wadded up sweater as a pillow. And I sleep great. Mattresses and pillows are a total scam.
Intellectual
I'm *really* enjoying Zettelkasten with Obsidian. I'm also finding my work to define structure, philosophy, and approach for the visualization studio to be extremely intellectually stimulating - it's giving me a reason to synthesize all the strategy and philosophy of work stuff I've been reading for over a decade.
Cal Newport (Ep ? ) revealed that his new book is going to be about "The Deep Life", which has been a major element of his podcast. It represents him broadening his scope from just Deep *Work* to the idea that a Deep Life is an inherently meaningful one. He proposed the following Elements of the Deep Life:
Escape
Mastery
Discipline
Service
Appreciation
Awe
His idea is that anyone who's lived a Deep Life has all of these elements, with one or two taken to an extreme. I like the direction he's going with this - he's been exploring the Deep Life heavily in his podcast, it'll be nice to see him flesh it out more formally in a book project.
Emotional
I learned that I care about work ethic. A lot. RF's comment about work ethic actually
upset me, which surprised me. Almost nothing upsets me. I did some thinking and reading to try to sort my feelings out. I unpacked a lot of my thinking around work, work ethic, workaholism, responsibility, authority, etc. The ranting was cathartic.. also probably good that I managed not to post any of it for longer than three minutes.
Economic
//Expenses
My other mastermind group project is to live below 1 jafi September through January. Since I'm including depreciated living expenses in that number, which are $144/mo, that means I can actively spend $565/mo. Considering I don't have rent or health insurance costs, live in town, and my long trips are going to be at 50mpg, it should be pretty doable. My stretch goal each month is to live at 0.8jafi, or $423/mo active spending. So far so good for September:
Even though my NW took a small hit due to the markets, my runway(s) increased dramatically:
And here's a look at my "one graph to rule them all":
Squished vertically and stretched temporally, to tell the story of my vision of the next decade:
The big expenses are guesses at buying land and developing it in the next couple years. I'm guessing I'll earn 20k/yr beginning mid-next year, and my portfolio will grow 2% a year. I haven't incorporated inflation into this yet, maybe next month.
Social
My meatspace social life revolves around Mooretrees' family, which (from my perspective) is going great. I've never had a 4yo roommate before, which has been a mostly fun learning experience. Having almost zero experience around kids, I was mentally prepared to have a much harder time than I'm having with him. I get along with her DH great (our working relationship is to both be in the bus with headphones on, ignoring each other except to make sure we don't drop anything on the other, which suits us both perfectly). It's been really cool to see how they're interconnected into their community and work with social capital. They get eggs in exchange for coffee. There's free fruit and veggies all over the place. She's constantly fermenting stuff. I ate like three pounds of dumpstered kale the other day.
I miss DGF. We've been apart more than together this year, and the first two months were rough due to circumstances. As of a few days ago our plan for the rest of the year was to remain mostly apart, so she could continue an accumulation phase through the spring, and then we'd head off to the Midwest to buy property.
But a) we don't know how much capital we "need" to get started, b) it's entirely possible we don't "need" any more than we already have to get what we want, c) it's entirely possible we'll decide not to buy land after all, obviating the need for any extra capital at all, d) we miss each other and are tired of getting laid less frequently than most single people in a pandemic lockdown, and so maybe e) fuck this noise we're going to go vanlife somewhere nice this winter and then go to Portugal after all.
Technical
So much fun!! Getting back in the swing of building something weird has been great.
The extra layer of fun comes from the fact that I'm incorporating my 3d modeling skills into the process. I made a 3d model of the existing condition of the bus, and before I do anything physically I build the project in 3d, then go over it with The Boss to make sure we're on the same page.
I'm also playing with some Scrum techniques for organizing tasks, just as a way to start learning the methods.
Ecological
...nothing to report.