Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

[Henry]

Congratulations. May you find peace and happiness in your cocoon within the clusterfuck.

[Smashter]

Beautifully written. Congratulations!

[AxelHeyst]

Hah! Wonderful. Congrats.

[ertyu]

Hahahaha page 34 great work

Wishing you guys all the best together

[Biscuits and Gravy]

Will you marry me?

god yes

[rube]

Woohoo

[suomalainen]

Thanks everyone for your well-wishes. We really enjoy one another's company and are looking forward to this next step in our connection. Part of that is looking to the future and making some loose plans. We have jobs and kids and money to think about, as all working parents do, and it's given me a chance to combine a few things:

1) the practical reality that we both still need to work for a certain number of years to provide for our children.
2) catching up on more journals here (even if I haven't replied in many).
3) remembering the sweet stoicisms whispered in my ear and my reading on meaning and present intention and attention, etc.

Wherever you go, there you are. As I read journals of people who have retired, I kept getting struck that these people kept needing to figure out what the hell to do with their time all day. It reminded me of a BRUTEism that I recall from years ago, something like: "brute discovered complete freedom of time and location can be very boring." FFJ summed it up best:

...while I continue to improve my small patch of land on this Earth, and as satisfying as the results are to my eye, I've become a bit stagnant. I've become too immersed in my projects around the farm and I am a bit myopic at the moment truth be told. When this happens, I become a bit one-dimensional, as my thinking process is consumed with what needs to happen next in my work progress. While this produces results, it also makes my days somewhat muted.

This sounds so familiar when I use this lens to look at my full-time job and at my parenting. Once again, this has reiterated to me how important TODAY is - how I need to figure out how best to spend my day today, because that is exactly the same problem I will have when I no longer have full-time employment or full-time parenting to structure my day. And I am TERRIBLE at utilizing my unstructured time well. I am usually pretty good about spending an hour or two outside running or biking or paddle-boarding or skiing. But that only accounts for a small portion of a day. I'm too old to do more than that hour or two regularly. So I end up spending too much time "vegging" (vedging?) on the couch in front of the TV just wasting time. It doesn't do anything for me other than burn the clock. This is particularly frustrating when I have unexpected free time during a slow work day or work week. I find it very hard to walk away from the computer to stop monitoring email and to go do something. So I fire up my personal laptop and watch youtube at my desk waiting for the odd email to roll in so I can respond to it in minutes rather than hours. As if that slightly quicker turnaround time makes any difference at all. Given that this time management issue will never go away, I need to spend more time thinking about how to get better at that today and less time daydreaming about the day when I no longer have so much structure around my day. If I can get better at that skill today, not only will I be more prepared for the onslaught of free time upon retirement, but I'll also be more content today.

[suomalainen]

Since I had to do some calculations to adjust my taxes for our upcoming nuptials, I thought some might be interested in some numbers:

Weight: 235

Average plant species per week: 54
Most common species: (at least 25 of 29 weeks): almonds, avocado, bell peppers, blackberries, blueberries, cabbage, carrots, cashews, cucumbers, garlic, ginger, grapes, green onion, spring greens, olives, onion, raspberries, strawberries, tea/kombucha, tomato.
The only species to make it every week: tomato, raspberry, onion, spring greens, grapes, ginger, garlic, cabbage, blueberries, blackberries, almonds
Species to only make it once: fava beans, lima beans, bean sprouts, capers, farro, fiddleleaf, mint, papaya, plaintains, poblano peppers, spelt, spaghetti squash, tangelo

Net worth (me):
- 4.7x 2022 expenses
- 8.6x, exclusive of alimony/cs
- 16x, exclusive of travel and other expenses related to supporting my kids
- 21.5x, exclusive of my second home (where my kids are)
- end of 2027 (projected), 34.7x
Net worth (gravy):
- 3x 2022 expenses
- end of 2027 (projected), 8.5x

Child care expenses will reduce dramatically this year for @gravy, allowing her to increase saving with the reduced expenses. In four years, my expenses will drop dramatically, allowing me to increase saving with the reduced expenses. Some life circumstances may change right around that four year mark, so we'll be faced with some inflection points in that next phase where we may have the opportunity to make some changes, big and/or small. I'll likely keep working for a few more years allowing @gravy to play some catch up and to have liquidity for my kids in their "young adult" phase. But it's exciting to be so close to that FU-money point where the approach to work can be one of optionality rather than of necessity.

[suomalainen]

@gravy and I eloped a week or so ago. Total wedding cost was less than $200.

My friend has been retired for many years. Total FATfire with an 8 figure investment kitty, no doubt. In any event, a few days before his twin girls were to start their senior year of high school, his wife had a stroke. She's been in the ICU for 4 weeks. There is no time like today.

I've had a major depressive episode, I think. Perhaps starting in February. My ex's brother committed suicide. @gravy and I moved. I changed jobs. The summer hit (major schedule disruption vis-a-vis kids). The summer has been fucking hot as fucking fuck. It's been a rough 6 months. I've really come to appreciate that sometimes you just gotta do (healthy) things even when you don't feel like it. There's no thinking your way out of depression - you gotta distract your way out of it.

I watched a youtube thing. Four ways to live an asymmetric life or something like that. 1 was Do Hard Things. 2 was Do Your Thing. 3 was Do It For a Long Time. and I forget what 4 was. In any event, it reminded me of why I changed jobs - I leaned into a change because I felt myself stagnating. Change is inevitable, and so when you start to feel like you are being institutionalized by the twin institutions of work and family (kids), it's time to seek out change instead of being afraid of it. This probably relates back somehow to ERE principles. I started thinking about how changing jobs to a lower-paying job would be stupid if your point was to earn money, but if you change your orientation to it as "I want to do this new thing in order to [gain skills / do a new thing / whatever], then that's different than just working to earn money.

[Veronica]

I really appreciate your thoughts on depression not being an issue that can be intellectualized away; it requires action to remedy some of the contributing factors and insecurities that cause it to manifest.

I also changed jobs, roughly a year ago. I make significantly less money than before, but I felt NO CHALLENGE in my previous position. I did about 2 hours of legitimate work over a 6 month period. And I just couldn't find any meaning in it at all.

Now I work way harder, for way less. But I really feel like I have a tangible impact on the people I interact with.

[Kipling]

Congratulations on the nuptials.

As someone who took the plunge for the first time at 49, I was surprised afterwards at how different it felt to ‘just’ being in a committed relationship. It was like there was a new broader base of stability to push off.

[I mentioned this to one of my long-married friends, as being an amazing new discovery, and he looked at me funnily and said ‘of course’. But here I had been on this planet 49 years and no man had explained this to me…]

[mathiverse]

Congratulations!

[suomalainen]

Let me tell all you working stiffs eager to escape the rat race a story.

So back in the day, I was trying to figure out what my problem was, and @Fish came up with this quote, "Money is a solved problem." Catchy, isn't it? I can't remember where I read it, but I think I also read somewhere a line that "Either money is your biggest problem or it isn't." For a little while the topic got some traction and we talked about how money is a solved problem insofar as money wasn't your biggest problem - whether that meant you were working and saving or just working to pay the current bills or just living off of your financial (or other) capital. I had means (i.e., a job or transferable skills, if you prefer) of acquiring needed money for the foreseeable future; hence, money was a solved problem, even if said solution required years of execution.

Change of gears. A number of years ago, we found out that my youngest had a fear of spiders. So much so that he would glance into every corner of a room before entering it to see if there were spiders there. If there was a spider on a wall, he wouldn't enter the room. In my infinite empathy, I decided that exposure therapy was the ticket for him. We started off talking about how spiders were not an existential problem, unlike, say, tigers. Meet a tiger in the woods, you're fucked. Meet a spider in the woods, you step over (or onto) it. So, we began with saying hello to "friendly" spiders from across the room when we'd see them. We'd practice controlling our breathing and relaxing our muscles. We added some pictures of cartoon spiders, etc. and he eventually got to the point where he wouldn't freak out when he saw a spider or felt a thing crawling on him. A few months ago, we were paddle boarding and he had a leech sucking on his foot, and he didn't freak out. Exposure therapy for the win.

Fast forward to a few years ago, I went snowboarding with my kids at the end of the season. My youngest child had been skittish all winter long and I decided, "Fuck it, I'm going to beat it out of him this trip." So, I sat with him on the lift and we talked about why he was so nervous and anxiety-ridden. It turns out that he had caught an edge and fallen while getting off the lift on the first day of the season four months earlier. He hadn't gotten hurt, but it had gotten into his head and he had allowed this one little slip to impact his enjoyment of an entire season's worth of snowboarding. Part of that conversation was drawing a distinction about his fears. He hadn't gotten hurt. Was he facing a tiger problem or a spider problem? So, we talked it out and I encouraged him to take some confident turns and to let each turn build his confidence. By the end of the trip, he was zipping along in full confidence.

That framing - "is this a spider problem or a tiger problem" has served me well in the years since. I've been feeling down about my new job for a while now. There are a number of things about it that serve as stressors. And as a result, I've been fantasizing about all sorts of solutions to this problem - most of which entail me and @gravy faking our deaths and running away to Belize. I realized this morning after an angsty Sunday, "Well, are we talking about a tiger problem or a spider problem?" None of the things I get stressed about are tiger problems in the least. And if things go sideways and I lose this job, that's not a tiger problem either. I have the skills to land another job if needed, and I have assets to bridge the gap if needed (or I could fake my death...). These spider problems were not deserving of the tiger anxiety and the tiger solutions I have been focusing on. Spider problems deserve spider attention and spider solutions.

So maybe it's not that "money is a solved problem", it's that "money isn't my biggest problem" or that "money isn't a tiger problem" for me any more. Money morphs from a tiger problem to a spider problem at some point along the pathway to FI. And once you reach that point, the faster you can re-frame your problem to the appropriate size, the faster you'll solve both your practical problem as well as the attendant emotional problem.

[anticonsumerist]

These spider problems were not deserving of the tiger anxiety and the tiger solutions I have been focusing on. Spider problems deserve spider attention and spider solutions.

I do this a lot too. it is "overreacting" in my lingo, and the best solution I could find is to tell my friends about the problem. The solutions they come up with are invariably more "normal", which shows me I am exaggerating the situation and seeing their reactions eases the emotional intensity I feel towards the problem.

I found out through this process that I actually overreact to most things / catastrophize, which makes me not trust my brain more and more. It is an interesting feeling when you think of it, for a human being to not be able to fully trust their own brain. But I am finding it is better than the alternative (of trusting it)

[7Wannabe5]

I think a lot of this has to do with extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation. After decades of slacker self-employment and only-intermittent-at-my-choosing employment by others, I have recently found myself back in grad school program and in a part-time job with set hours/colleagues. It's clear to me that I've gone feral, because, for instance, I feel angry rather than gratified if/when I get an A on a paper that IMO was half-crap because written with a deadline. And I have noticed that my colleagues are somewhat concerned when I seem oblivious to the administrative trivia that comes down the pike. For instance, I actually wasn't assigned an organizational e-mail address for 6 months, and I didn't make it a priority to fix the problem. The funny thing is that my colleagues assign my lack of desire to get caught up in the "drama" to the fact that within the context of an elementary school, I am a "math person."

The marshmallow test is only a valid social construct to the extent you respect the authority currently holding the bag.

[ertyu]

The marshmallow test is only a valid social construct to the extent you respect the authority currently holding the bag.

Yes, they did find that. Basically, poor kids aren't worse at delayed gratification, they just don't see promises made by adults as reliable bc the adults in their lives haven't been reliable. So, basically, when you're poor, you get wired to optimize for a precarious world and for getting the thing NOW bc there might not be a chance later. Delayed gratification only makes sense if you can baseline-trust that the future carrot is actually coming.

[7Wannabe5]

@ertyu:

Right, and it also doesn't work if you imagine the authority holding the marshmallow bag as a 40 year old kid in front of an audience of women old enough to be his mother-in-law

[suomalainen]

I've had a major depressive episode, I think.

Things are much improved. I had an experience at work where I raised a question that I thought was a good question and I got shot down. I asked for the explanation and wasn't really given one. I let it go. Another related question came in and my boss kinda pressured me into going along with one answer. A few months go by, and the same question comes in, but now my boss wanted me to go along with a different answer. In the grand scheme of things, not a big deal either way, but the sort of casual relationship with truth or whatever was kind of a turn off and I just ... let go. It REALLY helped me see that work is definitely a spider problem and not a tiger problem.

The other thing that has improved is this attempt at focusing on the present. But, what to focus on? I wrote a thing earlier about the lifelong need for time management skills that triggered some defensiveness from Dear Leader which prompted me to write:

Haha. I will point out that, as the "outsider" looking in, I did not say that anyone's life was boring. Yes, my very next sentence was a memory of @BRUTE describing his own gap years or whatever he would call them as "very boring". But the very next sentence after that was quoting @ffj describing how he is on the far end of the spectrum - so deeply involved in an activity that he felt "stagnant", "myopic" and "muted". It's not an observation that people needed to find something to do, it's an observation that people had to make decisions every day what to do that day.

To me, that's the most interesting thing - that you can have such wide variety of emotional reactions to the set of opportunities presented by a string of 24-hour days, and it matters not whether that string of time is occupied by a big chunk of external responsibility such as a job, a chunk of nothingness with no agenda, or chunks of freely-chosen tasks. In the end, in the middle of that opportunity set is you - and you're going to behave similarly in this time and place as you did in that time and place, regardless of how different those times and places are. So if I'm having a hard time finding (or doing) meaningful activities now in my working years (i.e., I'm "bored"), I'm going to have a hard time finding (or doing) meaningful activities in my non-working years. It's a matter of focus - the journal reading reminded me that it's better for me to focus on my behavior now than it is to focus on my time and place then.

So, I've been thinking about that. Partially regarding a future (retired) state, but also on a today state. I had sort of settled into trying to work on projects without the type of pressure that I would put on myself in my earlier years:

A series of examples from my anxiety*:

1) I started purchasing season ski tickets so the kids and I would have something fun to do outside. Great, right? Except, now I HAVE to go skiing every Saturday. It becomes no longer something I want to do, it's something I should do.
2) I feel like going for a bike ride or playing disc golf or going to a concert or some such thing. I go do that thing and I enjoy it. Later, I feel bad that I haven't done it again in too long and I feel like I should go do that thing again. But I don't want to. And yet the should gnaws at me.
3) I want to shorten my working time and be freer to enjoy life. I analyze my budget and my income trying to minimize and maximize, respectively. I run up against practical, immovable obstacles keeping me from my vision. Rather than accepting what is, I feel like I should be doing the thing that I can't practically do.

The ideas no longer bring me pleasure but jiujitsu their way into having me serve, and perpetuate, them regardless of their now-negative impact on me.

This want -> do -> should transition still happens to me and I experience it as quite distressing, but now that I'm more aware of this happening, I've been working hard to consciously let it go when the feeling arises.

Somewhat relatedly to

There's no thinking your way out of depression - you gotta distract your way out of it.

I came across a short commencement address that had some useful related pieces of advice:

1. You Don’t Have To Have A Dream.
Americans on talent shows always talk about their dreams. Fine, if you have something that you’ve always dreamed of, like, in your heart, go for it! After all, it’s something to do with your time… chasing a dream. And if it’s a big enough one, it’ll take you most of your life to achieve, so by the time you get to it and are staring into the abyss of the meaninglessness of your achievement, you’ll be almost dead so it won’t matter.

I never really had one of these big dreams. And so I advocate passionate dedication to the pursuit of short-term goals. Be micro-ambitious. Put your head down and work with pride on whatever is in front of you… you never know where you might end up. Just be aware that the next worthy pursuit will probably appear in your periphery. Which is why you should be careful of long-term dreams. If you focus too far in front of you, you won’t see the shiny thing out the corner of your eye.

...

I said at the beginning of this ramble that life is meaningless. It was not a flippant assertion. I think it’s absurd: the idea of seeking “meaning” in the set of circumstances that happens to exist after 13.8 billion years worth of unguided events. Leave it to humans to think the universe has a purpose for them. However, I am no nihilist. I am not even a cynic. I am, actually, rather romantic. And here’s my idea of romance:

You will soon be dead. Life will sometimes seem long and tough and, god, it’s tiring. And you will sometimes be happy and sometimes sad. And then you’ll be old. And then you’ll be dead.

There is only one sensible thing to do with this empty existence, and that is: fill it. Not fillet. Fill. It.

As ever then, the question is "What am I going to do all day?" And, little by little, step by excruciating step, I'm beating into this thick skull of mine (blame genetics! I can't but be an idiot! It's determined! No free will!) that I need to keep this stupid brain of mine focused on the thing that I've chosen (ha) to do right at that moment and get lost in it. If it starts to wear on me, change the channel and do something else for a while.

edit: I should add that this approach is only possible because I feel like my stressors have significantly lessened over the last 6-8 weeks. I almost feel like some people say when they retire -- that they just do nothing for weeks and it feels like they're just decompressing. When you're jacked on cortisol all the time, it's hard to add anything more to your plate. Once you're able to calm down to baseline, that's when you're able to start adding things.

[ertyu]

Great post

This want -> do -> should transition still happens to me and I experience it as quite distressing, but now that I'm more aware of this happening, I've been working hard to consciously let it go when the feeling arises.

This looks like an excellent candidate for navel-gazing. If I've ever seen a thing that screams "early programming" this is it. Whether others programmed you into it, or you yourself did as a misguided application of good intentions, figuring out where this one comes from might help lessen its hold on you.

[suomalainen]

We've talked about narratives before, so this article caught my eye: To Lead a Meaningful Life, Become Your Own Hero.

We found that people who had more hero’s journey elements in their life stories reported more meaning in life, more flourishing and less depression.
...
We then wondered whether altering one’s life story to be more “heroic” would increase feelings of meaning in life. We developed a “restorying” intervention in which we prompted people to retell their story as a hero’s journey.
...
In six studies with more than 1,700 participants, we confirmed that this restorying intervention worked: it helped people see their life as a hero’s journey, which in turn made that life feel more meaningful.
...
Furthermore, the intervention increased participants’ tendency to perceive more meaning in general. For instance, after retelling their stories according to our prompts, people were more likely to perceive patterns in seemingly random strings of letters on a computer screen.

I mean, I guess that's a good intervention if it reduces depression and whatnot, but, like, isn't this just replacing depression with delusion? And if you know that's what you're doing, will the restorying work?

As I read this article, this song was playing in my head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPK2HwYzjkA