No TV but the more pernicious thing now is anything connected to the internet. Feels like “no TV in the bedroom” should be updated to “no screens in the bedroom” since a lot of folks end up doom scrolling instead of going to bed.

El Psy Congroo!

In-person meet ups are great, especially for shared hobbies. A lot of things are starting to be remote only, which can also be fine, but I just prefer meeting IRL.

Was a pretty good day. Walked to the park with my dog, made progress on a chair I’ve been building, and played some mandolin. Mowed the lawn too, I have one of those non-electric reel mowers so it’s a decent workout.

Waking up late on weekends, making a good cup of coffee, throwing on a record, and just relaxing before the day gets going.

Playing an instrument and jamming with others.

Finishing projects. Making stuff by hand.

Taking long walks with my dog.

Reading outside.

Music and dancing.

Being amongst nature.

It’s changed over time, but right now I’m digging Yorushika (Japan) and Lola Amour (Philippines).

When I was younger I might’ve said The Mars Volta or At the Drive-In.

Before that maybe Led Zeppelin

As others have mentioned, the common guidance is to figure out your annual expenses, i.e how much you need to live off of, and divide that by safe withdrawal rate (typically ~4% based on the Trinity study) to come up with a total amount needed to retire early. So for example, if you determine you need $60k/year, the formula would suggest saving $1.5M (60,000 ÷ 0.04 = 1.5M).

The basic idea is save a big enough nest egg so that you can live solely off interest, meaning you never touch the principal and your account grows in perpetuity.

The hard part is two-fold IMO:

1. Estimating your average annual expenses is difficult due to lots of variables, e.g.

• Health care costs vary greatly (if you don’t have access to public healthcare depending on your country) and tend to increase with age

• Housing costs are situational and can either decrease (if you own your own home and payoff your mortgage) or increase if you rent or have to move/refinance/etc.

• Your family size may change. Kids can greatly throw off projections. Taking care of elderly parents. Having a partner start or stop working. All these things can impact your assumptions. Therefore, it’s usually good to add some buffer.

• Inflation should also be accounted for. This can be difficult to project for the remainder of your life, so some tend to just look at historical inflation, but there’s no guarantee the future will follow the same trend. Same for lifestyle creep, but that’s (usually) more controllable.

2. How to choose what investments will allow you to earn a return in excess of your withdrawal rate. For example, if you’re withdrawing 4%, you need your investments to earn a higher rate than that to avoid having to dip into your principal.

• The common guidance (from say Buffet, Bolgeheads, etc.) for most people is to invest in low-cost index funds (availability depends on your country). I emphasize “low-cost” because there was another study that showed the only sure-fire predictor of alpha (performance above a certain benchmark, like the S&P 500 if you’re in the US) is the having low management fees. Historically, this should return anywhere from 5-10% but again past performance is not indicative of future returns.

• While you’re young and have more time in the market, you genreally want to invest in higher risk/higher reward type investments. Idea being you benefit from higher returns while having more time to weather downturns. Then as you age, you can shift towards lower risk/lower reward investments, like bonds, so you’re not as exposed to market fluctuations.

One last thought, there are also variations of FIRE, like Barista FiRE, Coast FIRE, where you don’t have to completely stop working but are financially independent so you can choose where/how hard to work.

Good luck,

That’s awesome, have something similar but for national parks. Are you cutting them with a vinyl cutter?

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen features a pretty dysfunctional family and has some funny bits.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace is probably one of my favorite novels and has both a dysfunctional family and characters living in a halfway house. It’s main motif is addiction, be it to entertainment or substance. However, at a over 1000 pages and with a non-linear plot, it might require some persistence to get through.

Excited for fate/strange Fake and JJK. I need to catch up on Frieren, keep hearing it’s great.

Superfast Jellyfish - Gorillaz

I find it helpful to start by looking for hobbies you enjoy for the hell of it and then seeing if there’s a community around that. Making friends seems to be a bit easier when there’s a shared activity to chat about. For example, I took up acoustic guitar and met a lot of people who like to jam together. Also started learning a type of dance and got involved in the community by attending classes and socials. My buddy met his main friend group at a rock climbing gym when he took up bouldering.

For apps/websites, I had luck attending a few Meetups, e.g. like for people learning a foreign language who want to practice with each other. Some people join rec leagues or attend tabletop game nights.

I personally don’t use social media much but it can be useful to see if there are any local events to checkout nearby.