Mrs Ermine makes a rare appearance here on Simple Living in Somerset as her normally smooth white fur was ruffled by news of national salad shortages.
The Ermine Household is far from self-sufficient, unlike back in the day when this blog was Simple Living in Suffolk and I ran The Oak Tree Low Carbon Farm. Despite this, old habits die hard and we have a large vegetable garden and I forage for wild greens on a regular basis.
So these days supermarket visits are a regular event, and wandering round Tescos last week this caught my eye.
Empty shelves in Tesco 19 Feb
An old friend lives in an area of Spain which is well known for horticulture, including for export to the UK, so I checked in with him. Our man in Murcia reported that there are no shortages there. Of course, they may ensure local supply by slowing exports, but it did make me wonder whether the difficulties of exporting into the UK these days might not be a factor? On the BBC Radio 4 News yesterday evening it was all put down to weather conditions, but this morning’s Guardian asked the same question, “Some suppliers said potential bureaucratic hurdles meant the UK was not the first choice for hard-pressed European producers, although others said leaving the EU was not a factor in the current supply issues.”
Regardless of all that, IMHO we’re putting ourselves in a very vulnerable situation (as a nation) by being so very reliant on imports of fruit and veg which are totally out of season here, and on increasingly expensive heated domestic greenhouse production. I honestly don’t know what the policy answer to all this is. If I was the one making the decisions I’d make it a priority to have a long chat with Professor Tim Lang https://foodresearch.org.uk/publications/horticulture-in-the-uk/ before doing anything.
On a household level growing your own veg is time consuming, many people don’t have access to a garden big enough to make a difference, and it may simply not appeal… if any of these apply to you then please feel free to disregard this post and wait for the next instalment here from Mr Ermine (though he adds a post script below).
But I wonder whether some FIRE folk might not be interested to learn how Ermine Towers is weathering the current salad shortage storm, which Radio 4 reports may continue for some weeks? Over the years I’ve found a decent veg garden to be great way to guarantee a supply of really good quality, utterly fresh seasonal veg, as well as saving thousands of pounds – I once read an estimate that a well-managed allotment garden could save a few thousand a year. My allotment certainly helped me to keep my costs down early on in my career in engineering, before I ran the farm, and my times outdoors helped keep me more or less sane through it.
Right now we eat a mix of bought and home grown veg, and salads are a regular feature on the Ermine Towers menu, so the shortages simply don’t affect us at all. I wouldn’t dream of buying fresh tomatoes in February as we eat more or less seasonally, and I focus on crops we both like that require the least work for maximum yield. My ten years as a market gardener (once I’d escaped working for the man) gave me the opportunity to hone this to a fine art.
Now, in late February, I’m harvesting the last of the winter leeks along with cut-and-come-again cabbage (variety Wintergreen- I sow them in late August, overwinter them in pots outside, then plant them out around now, they last over 12 months and I will still be harvesting the ones sown in 2021 for a few more weeks, harvesting the flower shoots like sprouting broccoli before clearing the bed). A more recent addition is perennial Kale, my variety is Taunton Deane, so far it is very promising and productive. Perennial leeks are to be this year’s experiment. My sprouting broccoli isn’t doing terribly well this year after the very cold winter, there are always winners and losers every year.
Salad Leaves
Right now our salads are a mix of:
Home cooked lentils. I like the British grown green ones from Hodmedod’s – and just to prove I’m not getting a kickback, you’ll need to Google them 😉 I did meet the people who set it up ages ago and they were really inspiring, and it has been incredibly successful since then. Good for them.
A mix of seeds, again from Hodmedod’s.
One vegetable (ed: carrots) I buy organic as I am suspicious of any chemical that can bump off carrot fly. I can’t be bothered to grow them here, not least as we have clay soil which doesn’t suit them. I use a vegetable peeler to make strips of them, it is prettier.
Chopped red onion. Again, bought – they are cheap and colourful.
Home produced lacto fermented veg, currently a mix of last year’s home grown green tomatoes that weren’t going to ripen, last year’s surplus French and runner beans, and sauerkraut made from shop bought red and white cabbage. There is a lot of song and dance about how complicated it is to make home fermented veg – it isn’t. It is cheap and easy, I wouldn’t bother otherwise. It is also incredibly good for you. I store it in sealed jars in big plastic storage boxes buried in the garden to keep them cool.
Mixed home grown, and foraged, salad leaves. The ones from the garden right now include claytonia and red veined sorrel from the greenhouse, broad bean leaves, dandelions, & cleavers: the mix varies through the year. I find most shop bought salad leaves insipid and stale – I’m convinced that home grown and foraged greens contain considerably more nutrients than most shop bought salads.
Our salads are cheap, good for us, and Mr Ermine, while not a huge fan of salad, admits they do “taste of something” unlike those in (most) restaurants.
fermented beans and cabbage
It does take effort to do all this, a few hours a week, but I enjoy it for the most part and regard it as a way to improve our health and quality of life without spending a fortune. Audiobooks transform the experience, when I first started gardening I used a Sony Walkman (remember those?!) to play books from the library. If you’re interested in these gardening ideas, please do bear in mind that the UK climate is quite specific and odd: our growing season is short and the light levels are quite low despite fairly mild temperatures thanks to the Gulf Stream. So what works here in the South West of England may not work elsewhere, even in the North of the UK… but it is all about experimentation and asking local gardeners what does work, then taking what they say with a pinch of salt, everyone has a strong opinion when it comes to gardening, and there is rarely a consensus. A bit like the situation surrounding Brexit, but that is another story.
Welcome to the Brexit, sir
We were indulging in some decadence on the south coast today, fish and chips with a glass of rose and a view over the English Channel.
this is from a previous visit, not sure the vinho was rose that time
Which meant I missed DPD’s attempt to deliver a secondhand camera lens. DPD only attempt one delivery, then deliver it three miles up the road, to a Sainsburys concession outlet. I wanted to get to play with the new toy. And take the chance to substantiate this scurrilous rumour that Blighty is running low on toms and veg.
Wot, no veg, guv?
Seems a fair cop. There’s a Lidl nearby, so it’s time to load up on beer, and have a reccy on the presence of green things
Lidl didn’t get where they are today tolerating such egregious waste of store space
On the upside, they had beer.
As the friendly Dutchman said, welcome to the Brexit, sir. A smaller market will experience more variability in supply. It’s not impossible to imagine better solutions within Brexit, but it takes strategic thinking and money, which seem in short supply with the crew that Got Brexit Done. I’m not even of the view it will take Jake’s 50 years. What is does need, is grit, determination and some attention to detail. Let’s take a look back in time.
As a child in London over fifty years ago, I recall there being some market gardens in the city1, as well as around it. There were many more allotments then, and even in the working-class area of London, New Cross where I grew up, many houses had respectable gardens. My Dad used to grow onions in the garden, I’m sure he grew other things as well but it’s a long time ago. These terraced houses had alternating apple and pear trees, on the assumption neighbours would swap. We had an apple tree.
Observant fellows will note that was before Britain joined the Common Market in 1972, we should note that times were very different. Once a week ISTR I would go along with my mother dragging a shopping trolley the two miles to Lewisham , and she would buy veg at the market stalls that used to line Lewisham High Street. Google tells me there is again a Lewisham open market there. We did not have a car 2, although we would walk there sometimes we would get the No 21 bus back to New Cross if we had bought something like spuds. It took some doing to heft a loaded shopping trolley up onto the open platform of a routemaster double-decker, I think you could stow it in a cubbyhole under the stairs, next to the platform.
Much of this fruit and veg, though not things like oranges and bananas, was grown in Kent though some was grown in the city. People didn’t buy veg from supermarkets then, they were much smaller than now and a much smaller range, mainly focusing of dry goods and non-fresh stuff. Few people had freezers then – our fridge had one star, where at best you could keep ice-cream where the ice cube tray went, and even then it would start to lose the fight after a few hours.
We can’t replicate that world. Housing is very different. Jobs are very different. Families are very different. But we could probably find a better way to grow our food, and perhaps not be such punks as to demand strawberries and tomatoes in February. Working a little bit more with the grain of the seasons might reduce those energy bills farmers are grousing about. But until we apply ourselves to making a better fist of this we will have empty shelves more often.
The vast majority of veg was grown outside of London, and interchanged in the early hours of the morning at Covent Garden market. Kent used to be the Garden of England due to its proximity to the Great Wen and its southerly location with a warmer climate ↩
Although some readers may jump to the conclusion we were living under the railway arches poor not having a car, it wasn’t that unusual in the 1960s – it took until the 1970s for half of British households to own a car ↩
It’s January. The nights are long, and it is cold, and rainy. It’s about this time of year that they always run the articles abut Blue Monday when it’s the most miserable time of the year, because we are done with the Christmas debauchery and it still doesn’t feel light even though the Sun is rising earlier. They are still wittering about the economically inactive. The BBC have at least identified there’s not much chance of getting you FI/RE lot to do your patriotic duty for the economy.
Almost nobody who has retired early says they want to return to work.
A new year, new start
I am old enough to have determined new years resolutions don’t work. I don’t do gyms anyway, but the best way to avoid that sort of resolution is not to pig out to excess extendedly. It’s OK to eat and drink to excess a couple of times in the Christmas period, but debauchery and gluttony are to be avoided in excess.
One thing I am experimenting with is to reduce screens/online. Interesting that Weenie is taking up jigsawing to go in this direction, is it a zeitgeist thing or great minds…
I have already taken step through the end of last year to reduce news consumption. I still remain informed, it’s the time/attention thief I am trying to reduce, rather than to do the full Walden Pond thing. One way is to to act more like it were 1998 on dial-up. As long ago as work I got a win on this with email by not running it all the time, once in the morning and once in the mid-afternoon. I have forgotten what office-worker’s guru put me onto that but it worked. For a wider win I aim to concentrate interwebs in bursts, like it were before the Millennium. GenZ has taken this battle to the enemy with customary panache, at the cost of never clocking off. I wonder if that Zuckerberg isn’t barking up the wrong tree trying to create the metaverse. It’s already here, just unevenly distributed. Poor old Zuck he’s pushing forty, and his younger self called the problem out
Young people are just smarter
I get to listen to a lot more music. Which is more reflective than using t’internet, although when I stream it is from a NAS rather than the likes of Spotify or Apple. I did consider using Tidal but I still can’t bring myself to do subscriptions. It is possible to buy downloads from Qobuz but it’s usually cheaper to get the CD s/h. I listen to music through the electric, instead of on their phones.
I stopped working for The Man ten years ago, at the end of June. I spent my last working day in the Athlete’s Village in the 2012 Olympics. It was a little bit odd to end my career working off-site, but I had a little bit of annual leave to use up. I did return the The Firm at lunchtime at the end of June for a valedictory round of drinks at a local pub and a send-off, and that was it, three decades of working life came to an end. It was a good way to finish off, on a high as the last manager said. I look at the pictures and they are good, though I see the signs of three years of the stress and the effects of drinking too much to dull the pain.
Not many FI/RE people are still writing after a decade, so here are a few takeaways from the ride. It has been against the background of a long bull run that is only just fading, as the firehose of central bank interventions begins to surrender to the irresistible force of the accumulated pathologies stoked with it.
I did not get bored
Honestly, I still can’t understand why bright young fellows like Monevator still link to cruft like this. Seriously, if work is the best thing you can think of to do with your limited time on Earth, then you need to get out more and get some hinterland in your life. Preferably half a lifetime ago, but now is better than never. I am sure that for 1 or 2% of people their profession is their one true passion. They tend to be outliers, often psychopaths like Elon Musk, or Mark Zuckerberg, and that passion tends to be unbalanced. That leaves over 90% of us who can probably do more congenial things with our time than working, if only we could solve the conundrum of dreadful things happening in our lives if the flow of income from our jobs were to stop. You know, like losing your home or your kids starving, that’s the sort of thing that keeps most of us working past the point that the Do What You Love, Love What You do meme has transmogrified into Suck it Up, Our Way or the Highway. Solving that is what financial independence is about, but too many people end up with Stockholm syndrome with work. The Escape Artist summed up the problem. Don’t just load the gun. Pull the trigger.
The world is plenty interesting enough to reward an inquiring mind and an inquisitive snout. Learning new stuff has never been cheaper or easier, though it pays to remain critical as there is also much more misinformation about. In many areas of factual learning, favour books over online, and I personally almost always favour the written word over video1.
I got less hard-line about working than my younger self, who was running away from a crap situation. But the key takeaway is still the same. Don’t rely on income from work after you have become FI. Save it, spend it on champagne and caviar, but never, ever, set up your life so you depend upon it again. Otherwise you are no longer financially independent. This severely limits what the financially independent can safely do with the proceeds of work.
Spending FI/RE earnings on lobster is OK. You can live well without lobster, but perhaps better with.
Breaking that rule is fair enough if you opted for thin-FI/RE and came to the conclusion you don’t want to live that way – financial independence is not worth more than anything else, and if you want to live high on the hog, or live in London, or send your kids to private school, then you are probably not going to be financially independent as early as someone who can eschew some of that and drink prosecco rather than Dom Perignon.
I picked up a copy of Die With Zero, H/T Monevator, and it was a pleasant read over about half a day. The TL/DR summary is that we are doing this FI/RE stuff all wrong, and should start spending more earlier.
I certainly found the book worth the Amazon Kindle price-tag (£7), and I have occasionally wondered if I should be spending more. DWZ’s takeaway is a resounding Hell Yeah, and it’s certainly a different way of looking at things from your normal FI/RE trajectory – eat rice and beans while working in the City/IT Big Cheese/well paid job and quit at 45.
Some things I have already got right – retiring in my early fifties and not working at any significant level is very DWZ. I’d really like to be able to say that was a carefully planned strategy marshalling all my resources from the previous 20 years, but it wasn’t. Learn well from the error of my ways, young fellow
There’s an app for that
I was unable to get his app to work properly, in the sense of giving me useful insights, though it seemed to function serviceably1.
It didn’t like a lot of things about me. For starters it can’t process someone who retired nine years ago. Computer sez WTF?
HAL9000 –> Ermine, I can’t do that
so it’s one for all you pre-FIRE-ees out there. So I decided to start hacking. I pretended that I want to retire in a year from now, I have an income of my pension, and I get 100% of that in future. After all, a DB pension is an annuity, innit. Continue reading “Die With Zero–FI/RE, the YOLO edition”
It is August, California has recorded the hottest temperature on Earth at the aptly-named Furnace Creek. I just can’t imagine 54 degrees. I went there in 1993, and overheated my rental Grand Am in the 1500 meter lift up from Zabriskie Point through Daylight Pass, with the heater flat out and all the windows open. In July…
Nevertheless, in Blighty there is the hint of Autumn in the air in the changes of the natural world. Birdsong has changed from the frenzy of the breeding season, perhaps most clearly and commonly with the Robin, which sings a song that sounds in a minor key to me, which we associate with mournfulness, though of course this is pure anthropomorphising. The retired Ermine is more physically active than the working Ermine. Earlier this year in lockdown there was an edict from the government that you were permitted to spend an hour walking. I stayed with some of this, while I don’t do it every day I cover about three miles. Walking is good for reflection and rumination – in the heat of summer I started earlier, and there is some reward to doing it before wrangling anything that needs an Internet connection to happen.
I get to know the small area better, and living in a small town it is easier to get out into the countryside by shanks’ pony. The transition between town and country is sharp, I cross the liminal space in about fifty yards. Earlier in the year I got to know the territory of some of the blackbirds and robins by their individual song. Now these ranges are more fluid, and I hear the lovely sound of flocks of goldfinches who have swelled their ranks in the breeding season, feasting on the seed-heads. Although the swifts have gone some time ago, the swallows are still swooping over the fields with their chattering sound.
Swallows chattering hawking insects over the fields as I come to the main road
The bold song of the chaffinch has been replaced with the double finch-finch sound of their alert call, and the lovely arrow-like white tail feathers flicker in the morning light as they make their swooping flight away from the paths into the trees. I have seen herons courting and the odd egret drifting lazily on the summer breeze.
Egret, another type of heron. Probably a Great White, this was big and the wildlife trusts say they are in the area
I have learned that the sound of the wind in the oak is not the same as the wind in the ash or the willow. In some ways it is reminiscent of the almost animistic approach of my primary-school self, where I knew a very small area intimately. I cover more ground, and there is far more natural variation in the natural world of the Levels than there was in the urban landscape of New Cross. When I checked the size of my childhood world on Google Maps the size of my patch was amazingly small. Continue reading “winter is coming”
Monevator has a diverting ding-dong started last year that tried to split off the financial independence from the retire early part. I get it, nobody should be made to retire early if they don’t want to. I didn’t take part in it because much of it was a rhetorical construct. In the end being FI is necessary for you to retire, but it’s not sufficient reason. If you don’t want to retire, well, just don’t.
This is a particular case of the general question how does one live well?
This has occupied philosophers and religions since we found ways to have the opportunity to ponder such questions. There are as many answers as querents.
These answers diverge more as you get older. You had much more in common with your schoolmates that you do with the people you work with at 30. This divergence in aims, goals and lived experience continues throughout life. The branches of the decision trees fan out to more and more widely spaced points as they cascade. You are the product of all those decisions as well as what happened to you outwith you control.
FIRE is one aspect of this general problem, but first we should acknowledge that life is a journey, not a problem. It involves change. Your fifty-year old self is not the same as your 20-year old self. If you had good fortune and played your hand well, your fifty-year old self with be deeper, happier, wiser, more tolerant and gentler than your 20-year old self. If not, well, all sorts of other outcomes are possible. By no means all are bad, people are adaptable as hell, provided they don’t ossify first.
Let me call this “out in 20 years approach” extreme FIRE, xFIRE, in homage to the grandaddy of FIRE, Jacob Lund Fisker, of earlyretirementextreme. He was a great exponent of FIRE ASAP, and his manifesto gives you it straight between the eyes
I posit that most people can attain financial independence in less than 10 years and in less than 5 if they are truly determined. I also submit that many people are not willing to make the necessary changes.
I lapped this up, because guess what? I wanted out in 3 years. Yesterday would have been better, but the numbers showed 3 years. He was a great inspiration.
Worked for me. But I didn’t do it starting at 20. I had almost paid off my house. I had a decent company pension scheme. I was 12 years from normal retirement age, at the then white-collar retirement age of 60. So while I used a lot of ERE’s xFIRE methodology, I built it on a very different foundation.
If you are 20, that option is really tough, and the risks are very high because your retirement is 40 years long rather than the more normal 20.
If you’re a footballer, you better get it done and dusted by the time you are 35. If you work in industries where burnout is rife, like law, finance and IT, look around your office. If there’s nobody over 50, don’t aim to be the 50-something exception in 20 years’ time. Don’t fight the obvious evidence.
Everybody else under 30, take a step back. and think. There are two main columns to the FIRE methodology.
Don’t be a financial muppet
The first is ‘don’t be a muppet’. Don’t buy anything with debt except a house and the tools of your trade, which may include education though not always. All else pay cash and do without until you have saved enough.
Fail to do that and stick it all on 20% APR revolving credit card debt and the best that will happen is you only pay 20% extra for everything you buy. It’s that simple. Don’t be a muppet. There are other aspects of don’t be a muppet to do with consumerism and spending. All of these, twentysomethings, knock yourselves out and take it all the way. There is absolutely no downside apart from the months of cold turkey when you catch up with your previous muppetry and pay it down. If this is unrealistic (the debt is high multiples of your monthly salary) then seek outside help with the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, Debt Stepchange or the Money Advice Service. Just make sure it’s a non-profit and never consolidate loans on your mortgage. You heard it here first. JFDI. It’s never too early or too late to stop being a muppet.
You will observe nobody’s talked about early retirement so far, and financial independence ain’t on the horizon. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition for FIRE to stop being a muppet, but even if you are happy to work till you drop start off with not screwing up. Anybody wanting to lend you money is looking to make money out of you, and their gain is less money you can spend on what you want. Don’t be a muppet.
The second column – take back control of the track of your working life
There’s significant privation to be gone through in becoming finacially independent (FI) earlier than normal in the FIRE sense. It appears Monevator’s definition of RE means people want to quit the rat race after 20 years1. You’re looking to do it in half the time it will take most of your colleagues. You want a good reason for taking such an iconoclastic path. All other things being equal2 your peers will have a lot more disposable income than you. Humans are social critters, you’ll feel that. I only did it for three years, I felt it!
This is all part of this “what does living a good life” conundrum, and people seem to miss out that fact that what looks like a good life changes over your lifetime. It’s more obvious in the early stages: Living a good life at two means not shitting on the carpet, but that’s probably not quite enough to make the grade at fifteen. Once we’ve nailed the muppetry, to see if the view of xFIRE is worth the climb, we need to broaden the frame of reference.
The seven stages of life
What does a well-lived life look like? It depends. I did sciences rather than arts, and philosophy is firmly on the humanities side of the Two Cultures so I start from the wrong side of the tracks. But a general education, a life’s worth of reading and an inquiring mind hopefully compensates a little for my absence of Oxbridge PPE…
There’s a lot of woo in this, but the stages of life are found across human endeavour and through the ages – Shakespeare’s All the World’s a stage, Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, Carl Jung’s work on individuation. In the spirit of holding contradictory viewpoints a la Scott Fitzgerald, I thought I’d run with it, because the metaphor speaks to the human condition.
Your twenty-year old self should be different from your fifty-year old self, else you aren’t doing something right. I would hate to have the concerns of my twenties now. I struggle with some of the reincarnation bits of that, but compared to the Immortalist society freezing their heads in search of the Elixir of Life3, who am I to call it. Savant cryogenicist man-children like Ray Kurzweil didn’t invent this. Old men looking for the Elixir of Life is a search thousands of years old, ever since terror management theory became a thing in the Palaeolithic.
Old men have been looking for the Elixir of Life for millennia. This is the White Rabbit making the Elixir on Life on the Moon, from ancient China
What I liked was the resonance with my observation of humans changing over the stages of their lives. I have passed through some of these stages – the forecast of a fall in grades in the third stage (adolescence) surprised me, but it was true of me in the lower-fourth, and looking back, for those reasons. As indeed was the quarter-life crisis, which overtook me at university in my second year undergraduate level. All those angsty Millennials writing in the paper have a point that some things are tougher now, but being twenty to thirty is always hard because you’re taking on a lot of change, most of which is new to you, and you are changing your social role in the world.
The adult stages of life are indistinct in our culture, but they are still there, unsignposted. The modern world is delaying some of these stages of life compared to previous generations. “Adult” children seem to remain dependent on their parents beyond 30 to a degree that would have been shocking in the past.
The adolescent to mid-life FIRE-aspiring you must throw switches that route your life differently from your peers. But the facts of FIRE don’t change – if you haven’t got your shit together and started along the track by the time you are 30, you ain’t retiring by 45. Retiring by 55 is ten years early and very doable. 50 can be done with serious effort, but ERE does have a point. Most people won’t want to take the hit.
So young pup, give up a little bit of life now if you can, so your older self may have a choice, though I confess I am with Monevator – don’t kill yourself to get out in 20 years.
I am closer to Monevator than I thought on xFIRE, even though I used it
I disagree with him on some things, like that work is a meaningful part of life in and of itself. In one respect I agree. There’s a nasty hair-shirt streak developing in the xFIRE ethos.
My younger self would have struggled with suck it up, work sucks, keep your eyes on the horizon in my 20s. At the start of your career you have greatest freedom of action and least to lose by trying a different track. To sign away twenty years of your life to trying to get away from a working situation you detest is selling yourself short. You owe it to yourself to ask if that’s the best you can do.
I lived the counterfactual view: 20 years of your life is far too long to stay somewhere mediocre when you only have maybe 40 healthy years left – get a new job first, your house is burning down! I was OK with London apart from the price of rents and houses, but I wanted more money and more interesting work, so I changed job three times in the 1980s, improving my situation both in terms of pay and congeniality.
I never solved the housing cost problem so I left London, because no job I could get was going to solve the housing problem for me. I’ve spent a lot of time bitching about work here, but for 27 out of thirty years I was okay with work. There was enough interest, people were good in the main, and particularly in the early days at The Firm I was learning a lot of interesting new things from some really bright people. I could still have made a decent fist of being a gentleman aristocrat if I’d had a trust fund, but work wasn’t a terrible second best.
I used xFIRE at the end, but that’s a very different thing from using xFIRE for 20 years. What’s wrong with xFIRE from the get-go is that you are telling your young self that the next 20 years is going to be hell. Form may follow thought. Just as work isn’t a panacea or even a serviceable reason for living, it may not need to be hell either. Provocatively, perhaps xFIRE is more suited to desperate old gits at the end of their working lives than Page 1 of the Book of Working Life for twenty-somethings 😉
There’s a Jungian stages of life aspect to this too. Susan Roberts says
The young person’s task is to get into the world
Early adulthood asks us to establish ourselves in society — through vocation, relationship, and a stable material life. Now the idealistic youth must bank his or her fires in order to adapt to the world on its terms. Hopefully, in all the striving for worldly accomplishment, the twenty- or thirtysomething will not lose sight of the original vision, but find ways of working his or her gifts in spite of the compromises demanded by reality.
suck it up, work sucks, keep your eyes on the horizon is an avoidance technique. In the world but not of it, not quite failure to launch but probably not engaging. While I reject wholeheartedly that work is the non plus ultra of meaningful achievement in the second half of life, perhaps it has its role in the first half. Roberts’ description is a decent account of the accommodation I found with work – I wanted to rise above the first technician job, the second studio engineer job, I wanted to design, to innovate, to originate, which is why I eventually aimed at research. I did not lose sight of the original vision. For twenty years I lived it.
Having given that point, I am now going to take a pop at some things that are red herrings in my view.
well-paid part-time as FIRE-lite? Yeah, right
Here’s a canard. You don’t have to go nuclear on your career, you can just do some well-paid part-time work. Nothing I have experienced in three decades of the world of work supports this view. There are inherent problems with part-time – other people will be learning faster because they are full-time. They will get better quicker other things being equal. People bitch about there being a penalty for taking time out of the workforce but it’s not rocket science. Practice makes perfect.
I lived this prejudice. The Firm was dead keen to reduce its costs by encouraging part-time working in the 2009 crash. I didn’t entertain the idea for a heartbeat. If my career was flaming out, then at least full-time I could make the most of the last years – three years gone part-time was probably equivalent to another ten years shelf-stacking at Tesco to make up for the money I wouldn’t earn. I’d still be there. There was a second fear, because if they can get along fine with only half of you, there’s an obvious extrapolation to be made.
Of course we officially applaud people taking time out to do more important projects in their lives, but if it’s my business that takes the hit when you’re telling me that your choices in life are more important to you than my company I hear the message. I’m likely to take the line that I’ve very happy for you, but don’t do your important project at my cost. Fortunately, I’ve never been anywhere near being in charge of HR with such unreconstructed views, but I didn’t originate this, and I’ve seen some small companies stiffed that way. There are some great paying part-time jobs, but not as many as full-time. Why is this? Part-time cleaners are interchangeable. Part-time CEOs? Not so much. It’s also a right pain in the arse for full-time workers to interface to the particular part-timer with domain knowledge on job-shares and continuity sucks. Which are all part of the reasons why part-time work generally pays less, if you don’t want to hear it from me, hear it from the office of national statistics4.
If you want a high rate pay, go full-time for better odds. Low pay is 2/3 median, high pay is over twice the rate at 1.5 median
So when Monevator nonchalantly says you can save yourself the trouble of saving up a quarter of a million pounds if you can earn £10,000 p.a. for the lifestyle you want, I think WTF? I can’t even think of something I could do to earn £10k p.a., other than work in a shop. I could probably earn more than that if I worked full time, but from what I’ve seen of the world of work it has become more demanding and always-on rather than less. Don’t fancy that much.
OTOH, if contracting is your taste, then I can see there is much less of a problem. I believe indeedably uses this method, favouring recreation in the warmer months and work in the colder ones. Hats off to him for innovation.
Some of that objection to part-time is I have no desire to go contracting. Contracting comes with self-promotion and always hustling, and I’d rather crawl over broken glass than hustle. I have done occasional hit and run jobs since retiring. I earned an higher hourly rate with one than my working self ever did, but not on a sustained basis. And having to do 10k worth of that a year gives me the creeps, indeed having to do anything for x amount of money gives me a very bad feeling indeed. What part of financial independence am I missing here? FI for me is not having to sell my time for money. End of. To paraphrase Kate Moss
No consumer shit tastes as good as financial freedom feels
I have enough to buy more consumer shit than I want, and arguably consumerism is/should be a little bit less important as you get older. Erich Fromm summed it up in the title of his book, To Have to To Be. When you are young, Stuff makes more difference to your life, because you start out with now’t – you first kettle and your first chair and your first house make a huge change to your lifestyle. That lessens with time.
The percentage of workers who are freelance instead of salaried grows each year. House prices are prohibitive in any place with a strong labour market. […] the greatest wealth now comes from the accumulation of invisible capital, not physical stuff: startup equity, stock shares […]
Meanwhile, crisis follows crisis and mobility now feels safer than being static, another reason that owning less looks more and more attractive.
Some of us are cut out for that part-time required sort of FI-lite (thin FIRE? sputter? unFIRE? extinguished? never ignited?) , but I’m not one of them. I had a working life as a full-time employee with no break between getting my first job and leaving work for the last time other than a one-year MSc.
I’m an all or nothing guy here. It would be a bit rough to work thirty-five hours a week for less than my money does sitting on its backside. That isn’t a good message for me. Easier to work a decent job at a decent rate and parlay your savings into a decent stash than work some shit job.
Now that’s just me and my unreconstructed ideas about work that were probably set forty years ago. I could see the rationale for elective spend, if you need to work part-time for essential spend then you ain’t FI. If part-time working nets you 10k so you can go on holiday more often and that lights your fire, then have at it.
Do what thou wilt, and harm ye none.
Your time gets more valuable as you get older
Supply and demand. There’s less of it left, bud. The young just don’t get this, because, well, they’re young.
As a well-known vinyl record from my youth said
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.
So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.
I would agree with Pink Floyd that the fourth stage, midlife, is where may people stall. Overly invested with the meaning that served them well for 20 years up to then, they freeze rather than abdicate that source of meaning. For some (more often chaps) it’s work, for some it’s the contents of the nest that if done right should become empty in the natural order of things.
At least becoming overly invested with work doesn’t do anybody else any harm. Helicoptering your kids can seriously arrest their development, much must happen between the third (adolescence) and fourth stage else Philip Larkin’s prognostications of This be the Verse may come to pass. You will recognise those children later on – arrested at the puer aeturnus stage. The gold of character is at times forged in the furnace of adversity.
As an example I did not gain understanding from the crisis of confidence in my third year at university. After many years I did eventually learn to let it go, it was a product of time and stage, not a curse set to play out again and again.
Had an external force alleviated it, however, then like getting a childhood illness in adulthood, the injury may have been worse because the transformation would not have happened. I wonder if our Western societies fail us in having no real rites of passage across the stages of life, particularly those early ones. Passing your driving test or getting your first credit card don’t really match up to slaying a boar, or a walkabout. With no model of transformative challenge, is it any wonder that Western adults can freeze at the crossroads of midlife, clinging to the empty shells of old forms that have served in the past, but now stand in the way of change?
Midlife is a big hazard, because you are established enough that you can get away with stalling it, clinging on to past glories. Compared to the fusillade of transitions across childhood, you’ve settled in steady as she goes for 20 years and think you have it sussed. The words of Carl Jung indicate the problem: What is great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.
The problem isn’t that the world changes. You do. Worse still, the tendency is to regress, to capture a lost youth but without the innocence. This inflates the sales of sports cars and persuades flabby men with a beer gut that their Russian bride thinks he’s 21 year old hunk.
In her section finding lasting values in the afternoon of life, Susan Roberts says:
Few of us today have the financial resources to become renunciates, and so we may have to keep working into our elder years.
Hmm, having this option is what FIRE is all about. It’s an option, and just like a stock option, it is an option, not an obligation to retire early –
But whatever our outer activities may be, our attitude needs to change if the afternoon of our life is not to be one long process of decline and ourselves to become embittered old people.
[…] a flowering of its qualities of imagination, depth, and understanding. With nothing to prove and no one’s approval to seek, the old person may gain a delicious freedom to return to the original vision first kindled in him or her in youth. He or she may then become a character, a wise old man or woman, and ultimately an ancestor, a bearer of values that outlast the fleeting concerns of the present moment.
To reach this point, one must submit to the archetypal tasks required by each stage of life. By allowing the deep processes of nature to work on us, the acorn of our destiny may grow into the mature oak tree of our fully-realized individuated self.
Clinging to the chimera of you are what you do may not be the best way of doing that. But in my observation fewer than half of those who make it to old age achieve individuation.
And yes, I am making the case that perhaps the meaningfulness of work is a truth that may be more of the morning of life than its evening. It was in my case. It was much more important to me at the beginning of my career, a big part of who I was, neither of my parents had gone to university and my Dad worked with his hands. As I grew older it mattered less, I have now rendered unto Caesar the value of a working life, exchanging my human capital for financial capital. It is time to move on, to embrace the seasons.
It really doesn’t matter whether you retire or not at some point earlier or later than anybody else. To make it possible5 your younger self needs a motivational story. “just suck it up for as long as you have been alive and there will be a pot of gold over the rainbow” is not inspirational.
If your older self thinks the same about work as your younger self your development has become arrested, and you will not individuate. The hazard of that is of a long process of decline and ourselves to become embittered old people. You may, of course be fortunate enough to avoid physical decline and die in your sleep. You may project all your energies into the grandchildren. It is not mandatory to deepen as you get older. Just try and avoid the embittered Victor Meldrew, eh, for all our sakes.
Your older self may come to the same conclusion about early retirement as your younger self, but if the reasons are different, that is good. Let the option lapse. Give your freedom fund to your kids, or the cats’ home, or shovel it out of a helicopter over your home town. Your younger self will have lived a bit less large. Insurance against adversity always costs.
I have seen people who fall apart after retiring. Often they fall because their sense of meaning is bound up with work. What was true in the morning failed them in the evening. Some struggle because they are skint, or they become infirm. Some fail to maintain their human relationships and web of life, or don’t build these up before they retire. There are many ways to screw up in life, ain’t that a thing? That perhaps many fail does not mean all will fail.
Happy New Year to y’all, and a cautionary tale of work I came across.
I had been in the States working on a project when it became apparent that an internal takeover was going to bust my project in Feb 2009. Americans look after their own, while The Firm now owned that subsidiary this work was going to move over there and out of my division. Project work was drying up due to the financial crisis.
Your job gets more brittle as you get older
One of the problems you tend to have as you get older is that you specialise more. You also get paid more, if you are any good. That makes the shape of the sort of holes you are going to be a good fit for quite specific and therefore rare. Monevator nonchalantly says
get a new job first, your house is burning down!
That’s a young man’s game. It might be an argument for living in London6 rather than Ipswich, because your pool of potential alternative employers is larger. Selling up and moving would cost me a year’s wages, and we owned a smallholding at the time. I just didn’t have the get a new job option – there wasn’t more than 10 years of work to play for. So I chose to play a weak hand, as it happened quite well.
I was fortunate enough to be able to use a different legacy skill for my final project, But before I got that project, I faced this exchange which summarised the working environment. Let’s call the chief scumbag Graeme F, he was my division head’s boss7. GS stands for generally satisfactory, the performance management mark of 3/5 (average). My boss had made mine “needs improvement” before I got that work. I had already applied for voluntary redundancy, though it would have been premature. The shithead GF demanded a conference call with me and my division head just before 17:30 hours because he “had some news he thought I’d be interested in“. These are notes made at the time – the first thing I did next day was buy a telephone recording coil so I would have an incontrovertible record of that sort of intimidation should it happen again.
Friday March 6th 2009
GF: [We are] Raising the bar next year. will be harder to improve GS
Me: This sounds like a threat to me (this was verbatim, I could hear the bullying sneer in dear Graeme’s voice.)
GF no, effectively saying how it is
Me: okay carry on
GF: you cannot get [voluntary redundancy] on a GS
Me: outline that I am going away from that anyway, outside opportunity needs [VR] to work, time has passed, [The Firm] looking better, new projects etc
GF: but we may be able to do something else for you
Me: ok
GF: offers three months’ salary plus gardening leave to go
Me: that is not enough
GF: seems taken aback
Me: I will not change the course of my life for such a small amount
GF: reiterates stuff about raising the bar
Me: I say ok I hear what you say, sorry if the news didn’t get to you, wasting time etc
Graeme didn’t meet his target that day. Three months VR after 20 years was derisory, plus I would have lost an advantageous Sharesave. I was at the very outset of a three year journey out, I couldn’t get there from here. Another entry in the log celebrates my division head (who brokered this delightful meeting as the offer of a great opportunity) getting the bum’s rush without VR. How did that happen?
Finished at fifty is a thing
They even made a TV programme about it. All sorts of people will holler in yer ear if you don’t like you goddamn job so much go get on your bike git a new one you lazy bum. Hello IDS, Digby Jones, I’m looking at you . The trouble with that specialisation is my division head was shit outta luck as far as finding another job for a division head at a FTSE100 like The Firm. There weren’t any, and there was a large pool of competitors – the guys the CIO had let go in the days before. The CIO’s management style was to call all division heads one after the other into the office, and ask each one to describe a weakness of the just departed fellow. A commenter elsewhere described the CIO’s modus operandi as
replacing British IT workers with resource from India here and remotely – decimate the workforce.
Lots of guff about new tech, agile, under the hood it will be nothing but using the cheapest IT workers they can get.
That sort of environment, young fellow, is why your older self needs a RE ejector seat and parachute. He may earn more as he gets older, but his position gets more brittle as it gets more specialised, and more susceptible to hatchet men like that CIO.
I was able to switch direction out of IT and use a legacy analogue RF electronics skill on my final project, which is how I was left standing after that division head left. More by luck than by judgement, a specialism that fitted another set of odd-shaped holes was in demand at that time. So after three years I brought the damaged wreckage of my career to a successful landing and was even glad-handed on my leaving do as having left on a high. It could easily have gone differently, and I would be stacking shelves rather than writing this.
You don’t forget that sort of learning in a hurry. What I learned was never rely on selling your time for money again, it makes you a hostage to fortune.
Even if that hadn’t happened, I was already past the apogee of life, and hopefully the individuating self would have gotten the message through:
Self, you need to start looking for new ways to be, because what is great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie
In my life one of those things was work. Had that crisis not happened I would still be working, running on the old default assumption of working to NRA. In hindsight that would have been a dreadful waste of my time.
We are all headed for different waystations on the branching railway lines of life, maybe this will be different for you. But if you see no things that were desperately important to you in the morning of your adult life become less so, then ask yourself how you are so invariant in the face of change. The sun is making its way across the arc of your life. Change with it, for the moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.
I am a RE failure by that definition, I worked for 30 years, so 10 years behind schedule. I am still a long way to getting my State Pension, and not even at the NRA for my works pension ↩
One of the tenets of the FIRE movement is that not all things are equal and many people spend like muppets or carry revolving debt. All this is true, but you just can’t bring the difference in lifestyle down to zero by spending smarter though perhaps it won’t be half their disposable income. ↩
For some reason unbeknownst to me extremely bright materialist rationalists are drawn to cryogenics likes moths to a flame (for example). It is possible I am just too dumb to understand, but it seems obvious to me you must not lose state. I do not find it impossible to conceive that humans could live forever, but I’d say you must not die first. Reanimating a hunk of meat strikes me as a hiding to nothing. Sure, future alien visitors might be able to recreate humans from DNA like Jurassic Park, but these would be new humans, not the deceased living again with all their past memories and foibles, in the same way as your children don’t remember your schooldays, first love or skills in Latin though they may look like a mini-you. ↩
Parents can try, but there be dragons in that territory. The dead hand of parental capital coming at some unspecified time to transform their lives easily robs the children of agency, because it doesn’t seem worth it for them to make the effort to try and save something that will be lost in insignificance to the inheritance. There is a similar problem with the legions buying lottery tickets – Lady Luck seems to be a harsh mistress when she pays out, because the recipient has not learned the value of the windfall. No idea how the aristocracy used to fix this problem, though it seems they did as many estates have been in the same ancestral hands since 1066 ↩
Just kidding. I left London in 1988, and my career went titsup in 2009. That’s twenty years of outrageous London prices I haven’t had to pay in rent, I left there because I couldn’t afford to buy a house. That Guardian millenial’s lament that “House prices are prohibitive in any place with a strong labour market.” held true before. I had a decent job and savings, but I was living in one room. ↩
Researching this on Linkedin, it is probable that Graeme F was a hired gun brought in from elsewhere in The Firm to ping people out from my campus. I guess like management consultants on the cheap, outsiders will be more ruthless because they don’t know anybody locally ↩
There are intrepid folk like RIT and TA flaying fees on their investment products. Quite rightly so. Anything to do with storing and processing your money should cost as little as possible, subject to delivering a satisfactory service. After all, your money is embodied life-force. You exchanged hours of your life for it, and you want the leak in the tank to be as low as possible.
Oddly enough, when it comes down to credit cards, this seems to escape people totally. I can live with over 20% APR on my credit cards because I don’t pay it. I pay them off or I use promotional deals. If you carry debt on a credit card at 20% off, that’s like every store you buy things from using that card having a big notice – Anti-Sale – pay 20% more for everything. However, clever marketing folks being what they are, there are even more methods to separate credit card users from their money – even if they don’t pay interest! Step forward modern fintech fast-movers. Y’know, the guys that don’t come with lots of legacy Big Iron in their IT systems, who can most fast and break things, and rip you off on the Q.T. , make you feel special about the colour or materials your credit card is made of. The thing replaced by that whizzy fintech app is on your phone so you don’t need to use?
The Ermine failed to understand why some of da yoof chooses to spaff £72 p.a. for a Hot Coral Monzo card. It’s not a one off. I sparked up You and Yours on the wireless1. The programme was mainly about Greta Thunberg, but there was a segment about money saving.
handsome Monzo CEO in front of the colour he’s managed to separate his customer from their hard-earned money for
Apparently as well as rushing some punters for a brightly coloured card, Monzo is ripping off their even vainer customers charging a premium for a Metal card, as are Revolut. I was tickled to hear Alexander, a fresh-faced and insecure twenty-something digital media wallah opine that a metal card is also more environmentally friendly, well, no use of plastic, innit? Dude, if you are in the presence of a fire, piss on the nearest bit first. That’s your food packaging and Amazon Prime packaging, not a 5×9cm piece of plastic you replace every three years… Continue reading “Monzo, metal cards and bullet journals”
Over at Retirement Investing Today there’s an intriguing differentiation between work and jobs. I confess that I never thought about either until mid-teens, and conflated the two. Let’s hear it from RIT
Soon after joining it became very obvious that while there were some pieces of meaningful work (where I define work as something you do for purpose) the vast majority of what I was going to be doing was just a job (which I define as something you do because you need the money) and right now I don’t need a job.
You know how listening to someone speak, somewhere in the back of your mind there is a guy with a tape recorder taping the incoming soundstream1. Every so often you have a hey I didn’t quite get moment and yell down to the guy in the depths of your brain “Hey, roll tape and gimme that again”
Well, there must be a similar process in reading, I had gotten past that section on to
Living it again enabled me to see that the role, my industry and my own needs had changed beyond recognition and at some point, much like the boiled frog, my meaningful work / career had actually predominantly become just a job with me just not noticing.
before it occurred to me that this was a way of looking at work that was seriously new to me and something I had missed through a lifetime of work 😉
RIT approach to work and investing is in some ways the yin to my yang, or perhaps the other way round. Anyway, he is a steady and rational investor of the passive kind. He had sufficient overview of his industry to lay out the distant early warning system that picked up the sound of incoming thunder early enough for him to plan an exit strategy
I originally pursued FIRE as back in 2007 I saw some changes starting to occur that made me think my job at the time would eventually be outsourced to a low cost country.
Whereas I discovered I was in trouble after The Firm took a stake in an outsource and my work turned into a job (in RIT’s parlance) and then started to become seriously shit.
When a Job is not Work
I confess I never sought meaning from work, this is still something I don’t get. What I wanted was for it to be interesting and above all to be enough to live on. I saw leisure time as the time to chase meaning. It has not escaped me that this seems to be an atypical approach to work nowadays. Perhaps it comes from a working-class background, people don’t carry bricks or fix cars as a source of meaning in their lives. These were jobs, though people still think of it in terms of going to work.
So I am intrigued by RIT’s taxonomy, and perhaps what I called a requirement for work to be ‘interesting’ was what many people call ‘meaning’.
Certainly as time went by micromanagement became more and more a feature of the workplace although I rose a few levels up the greasy pole. When I started at The Firm I could sign off up to £500 of spend, when I left two decades later and some layers up the tree I had to get return train tickets authorised in advance to London (where the project was). There was much more job in my work.
A company doing white-collar work used to be a group of people working together to a common goal, there was more leeway and co-operation. Nowadays it’s a bunch of work units performance managed to an inch of their lives, measured individually against following processes. No surprise that there’s less esprit de corps then 😉
RIT’s experience and description of retiring and returning to work and then leaving it again confirms my prejudice that once you walk away from a professional job you become pretty much unemployable in that sort of thing.
The work is all right, it is the job part that sucks. Filling in timesheets, getting authorisation for spend, all hands events where lying bastards lie blatantly to you and it’s not the done thing to call them out on it or ask “why is this going to work this time when it failed the last three times it was tried here?”
Those locked into the hamster wheel make the best of a bad thing I guess and say they get meaning from this and good luck to them. An Ermine in The Firm would be a very dangerous thing indeed, because a company runs on a shared belief system that does not necessarily correspond with reality, and it doesn’t need troublemakers highlighting the dissonances.
There seems to be an increasing trend to corporate belief in the principles of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret2 – the current UK government seems to also be a fan of the modus operandi of wishing for what you want really really hard and it will happen. Perhaps there is truth in “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad“.
Companies avoid dissent in the ranks against the obvious stupidity of the latest management fad with the simple threat of economic sanction – do it our way and don’t rock the boat else you’ll lose you job. The financially independent think to themselves ‘so what’ and also ask themselves how they could better use their time.
Others say contracting is the way and many people make a success of that. You don’t have to buy into the corporate ethos. I could never see that as a reliable source of income of the sort I’d have the balls to raise a mortgage against. I wasn’t even aware of it as a possibility for the first decade or so of my working life, BPO wasn’t a big part of the companies I worked for at the time. Mrs Ermine, who comes from a different background, has no trouble with the notion. It ain’t me.
When Work is not a Job
… it’s called volunteering. Presumably nobody volunteers for things they think are without worth, and the great advantage volunteers have over employees is they can walk off the job at any time with no downside. As an aside, that can make managing volunteers really tough. When the task in hand is obvious – like clear this brushwood, then one volunteer is better than ten pressed men. And employees are pressed – they show up because they need the money 😉
But when the job is obscure, or controversial, like shooting deer3 in woodland, or will have a result in the long run, or just lacks feelgood factor, well, give me paid staff any time.
By RIT’s definition, though not by mine4, a while ago an Ermine did about a week of work. I can’t say the process agrees with me, getting up regularly for a particular time malarkey isn’t to my taste these days. It was a long video job shooting unpredictable stuff under awkward light. You have to make a lot of decisions quickly as an event starts5, because professionals can get away with zooming the camera in vision but I am not talented enough to do that, though I can track action serviceably enough with a sort of fluid head.
Much has improved in this biz since I worked as a studio engineer at TV Centre in the 1980s, the cameras are sharper, better, smaller, lighter. The combination of optical stabilisation and software post-stabilisation makes handholding without a Steadicam feasible6, indeed I was amazed I could raise the camera on a monopod four feet above my head and still get a usable result. So I learned a combination of practical stuff and people stuff, and hopefully the result will make people happy.
The web of life
I am far too conservative to make RIT’s sort of move. The place you worked is not necessarily a good place to retire – London is the classic case in point. It’s easy to feel poor there as the joint fills up with the super-rich. Simple economics also points that way – people congregate where there is a higher density of well-paid work. This tends to push the price of accommodation and some services up. We had someone from New York stay with us and they were amazed at the low cost of wine. Even American wine, which is illogical, it’s come a long way and we have significant alcohol taxes. Her perception was that the discount was a lot more than the 20% due to the fall in the pound. Presumably stores in NYC can charge higher prices because the market will bear them.
I stayed where I had worked for several years before moving westwards. Although the move was logical for someone interested in ancient stones and occasional hillwalking, we had commitments and a retiree should take a lot of time to ponder their web of life before moving. Before we moved we had made contacts in this area and taken on some common projects, expanding who we know. I personally think with contacts that matter you need to have physical connections with – see them, walk with them, do things together, eat and drink together, celebrate significant events. In the flesh.
During your working life these connections are easier to make7. You usually are in the same place as the people you work with, and share breaks with them. People who have young children also connect with other people with similar age children, and coincidentally this tends to be in your working life due to the vagaries of human biology. As an (early) retiree you are probably past those opportunities, so you need to take a lot more care about moving. The aspect of who is as important as where.
The ‘nearer to the grandchildren’ trap
Beware one trap regarding the who and where, though it seems to be particularly for those around 60. The first time I saw this I though that was just tough luck, but I’ve seen it several times now. Some people move away from an existing web of friends and acquaintances and somewhere they know to be closer to their children and new grandchildren. It all sounds idyllic, and they can help greatly with childcare in those pre-school years etc. But while those ties are strong, it seems to start unravelling roughly when the grandchildren start going to secondary school and being more independent.
You don’t want to be stuck in a place where you have no other friends and are too far away to see your previous friends who have drifted away as you start entering the hazard of having lower mobility or not being able to drive, that seems a very lonely row to hoe. Particularly if you are unlucky enough for your children to have to move for work, as can happen. So if you are going to do that, make non-family connections in the area a priority too. Do things with other people, seek shared interests.
Non-family connections matter too
Modern work is inimical to non-family connections in many ways. For starters, you move away from your home town, often for university, very likely for work. So far so good, as you are still in the early phases of life where making connections is easier. You may make connections through work or children, but compared to previous generations jobs are less stable, and people move for work more often. Childcare seems to take up more energy that it used to do. Work oozes past the 9 to 5, seeping through smartphones and computers into a low-level background load.
This is a hit for very early retirees, because their peer group is largely still at work. I don’t know what the answer is. Moving to an area where there is less employment because it’s cheaper may not be wise, because this tends to skew the age distribution too. Philip Greenspun tackles this in where to live for early retirees.
You can, of course, take the digital nomad route – you can reduce your costs and see a lot of the world that way. Great if it is for you. I did a reasonable amount of travelling for work for a few years. About once a month was great. I was single, and could extend the journeys with some extra vacation allowance and have many fond memories.
More than that and it became wearing. Being ill on the road is particularly tough – and this was only things like the flu and gutrot.
I can’t imagine a more alienating and lonely experience than travelling all the time, but it seems to have a great following, particularly with Millennials. A chacun son goût… I would suggest at least say try it for six months before building it into your future permanently. It seems to work for some.
All this is tougher to get right for the very early retiree. You have to live with the results for longer, you are making some connections many people make in the workplace, and you are an atypical retiree. That is not a reason not to do it, but it’s a task that needs more getting right that simply for an early retiree. People look at me as an early retiree and assume I was lucky. Whereas if I were 40 they would file me under the category ‘alien being’.
Even as an introvert with less need for human connection than average, this much I know. Early retirement is not all about the money. Humans are social creatures. Make connections, and do things with your fellow people. Having more time to do that is one of the gifts of not working.
apparently this tape recorder guy in the depths of your head is a real thing, a bit like the job VT did for TV studios when I worked there – they were banished to the basement of TV Centre. So says the Guardian: “Audiobooks, by contrast, exploit our “echoic memory”, which is the process by which sound information is stored for up to four seconds while we wait for the next sounds to make sense of the whole.” ↩
I have never read The Secret but it seems a take on the earlier fad of cosmic ordering. Humans are storytellers and to some extent you do make your own world, but there are limitations to how far that will take you. If you want to step beyond those limitations then you probably have to dedicate time and effort to improving your art of changing consciousness through acts of will. Even with that there are going to be hard limits somewhere ;) ↩
I have never seen Bambi and don’t see anything wrong with shooting deer, but it’s a real tough one for conservation organisations who really don’t want the public to know they shoot deer to stop them browsing new growth and generally buggering up forest management. ↩
I wasn’t paid, so it’s not work in my book. But it was interesting, so it sort of falls under RIT’s definition. Certainly wasn’t a job… ↩
Too many people tried this previously on automatic settings, which looks ghastly in tough light. But on manual, you get to rack levels yourself, in real time. In my TV days there was someone solely dedicated to racking and colour balance ↩
There are now gizmos you can buy that use motors and gimbals to do the chicken-head thing and I may get me one of these. Paradoxically I had an easier time holding the monopod at the bottom with the camera raised over my head than with the damn thing on the ground and holding the head. Either I improved my art over time or there is something weird going on. Bird necks are amazing, I once videoed a hunting kestrel through a telescope, and the bird’s eyes were held steady it seemed the rest of the bird body moved around in the wind. ↩
This article posits a counterfactual for millenials, I don’t know if this is a peculiar pathology of London where most journalists seem to be, because the millenials I see don’t seem to suffer such a shocking dearth of friends. I do agree that when your cohort start having children is a massive nuke for school/college friends if you are child-free. You do start seeing some of these again in their mid-fifties for some of the reasons this article takes the piss out of Fern Britton. ↩
I read my first copy of Richard Bolles’ seminal job-hunting tome What Color is your Parachute in the late 1990s. The big cheeses at The Firm had decided to move away from research, and out of electronics towards development and software. I was wondering if I should stay with my first love, which was electronics design, or stay with the Firm.1
Parachute is a great resource and a good read. At the heart its message is as old as the Delphic Oracle itself – know thyself. Around that message, however, is a good periphery of tactics and perspective. There is only one problem. Parachute is a weapon of contemplative reflection. You can’t use it under fire, IMO, and when do most people turn their attention to looking for a job?
When they either need a job right now, or are fearful of losing the one they have already.
Here in the West we have a lineage of puritanical belief systems that still leave their mark, and all forms of Christianity teach that suffering brings us closer to God.
Niall Ferguson made the case a few years ago that this Protestant work ethic is the reason that the West is cock of the rock, his crystal ball didn’t show that the fire was burning out rapidly. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Read widely – library ebooks don’t have late fees
The Ermine reads widely, particularly as the library lets you borrow ebooks for free, and a little munging with Calibre gets that onto a Kindle which makes it easier to read in the park, or a particularly favourite little beauty spot near me with a swing seat and a glorious view. So when I saw a copy of WCIYP 2018 I thought I might take a look at what’s changed over 20 years
Billed as a practical manual for job-hunters and career-changers, it is an interesting read. It has been nearly thirty years since I last applied for a job in the open market2, and getting on for eight since I applied for an internal job, so much has changed. The first part of the book is about the conventional approach, and why this doesn’t work. This is the method the DWP push the unemployed into – registering with Monster jobs and scattercasting CVs3. I’ve only actually ever once had a CV work, and this was at the very beginning of my career, and even that was responding to a newspaper small ad which invited applications with a CV.
One of the advantages of being an employee is that The Man usually air-conditions your cubicle. Well, for knowledge workers, anyway, rather than, say, brickies or landscape gardeners. And the heat is on in England at the moment.
Way back when, in the 2003 heatwave DxGF and I bought a standalone air conditioner and we thrashed that unit, but it used a horrific 3kW to sort of chill one room. It seems to take far more energy to cool something down through a certain temperature difference than it does to heat it up by the same difference, I guess these things are dreadfully inefficient, particularly standalone units that try and pump out the waste heat carried in air as opposed to dual systems with an inside and outside unit with the waste heat carried in a circulating liquid. So you get a 3kW heater in the room to add to the load. Not only that, you have to open the window a crack to get the exhaust hose out.
We were grateful for that in 2003, but it made an unconscionable noise and power was cheaper in those days.[ref]Americans will be tapping their heads, and go just get damn split system aircon, but I wonder how you have any hearing left. When I arrived in LA after a long flight and got to the motel the room aircon unit was on, and I thought I can’t hack this racket, so I turned it off. You don’t do that in LA in July – not getting any sleep was preferable to being fried 😉 Airconditioners I’ve come across in Europe are usually made by Japanese firms like Mitsubishi and are much quieter, but that thing was an all-American GE unit and made a terrible noise. Elsewhere in the city aircon seemed unwholesomely rowdy until you got to a Fortune 500 company offices or a bank. I guess people just get used to the noise.[/ref]
Dunwich beach
So it needs some lateral thinking. I need a large body of water, and the North Sea will do. Time to park myself down by the waterside and chill out to the waves –
and the peaceful sound[ref]the intermittent rumbling is sadly the wind, I only had a handheld rig as I wasn’t expecting to do any recording.[/ref]. There was a pleasant breeze off the sea – it was almost too cold.
I did look around and wonder why the other punters weren’t at work – some were retirees but half seemed to be families. I can’t really moan that the beach was teeming like Benidorm.
So the ermine air conditioning isn’t really that portable. But it does have some extra features, like the fine ruins of Greyfriars Friary
Greyfriars, Dunwich
and it seemed rude not to celebrate the moment with some fine dining
Local strawberries and cream from the Friday Street farm shop just off the A12
Londoners travelling up the A12 for a weekend break may want to note the Friday Street farm shop, which is a few hundred yards detour off the A12 on the London-bound side. The strawberries and cream set me back £3.23 which I thought was a good deal for quality in both items, and they have a good range of foodie delectables. I paid roughly twice that in fuel. There are some that may carp that you can’t spend £10 for gratuitous decadence every day, but I have done my time of ultra-frugality now. No nightingales to be heard in Dunwich forest, where I’ve heard them in previous years, it’s probably too late in the season now
Dunwich is noted for mostly having disappeared into the sea. In 1250 it was a rich port town of 4000 souls. Since then the sea has gnawed away about 1.5km of the coastline, so most of the old town has fallen into the sea. It is now a village of about 100 people.
The last surviving gravestone from All Saints church, lost to the sea. This was Jacob Forster who departed this life March 12th 1796, age 38
The sound of the sea is not far from Jacob Forster’s grave. It’s coming for him after two centuries of undisturbed repose…
Mr Money Mustache will no doubt consider seeking air conditioning an act of pusillanimous weakness, but the trouble is that no part of Britain is very far from the sea, and in a maritime climate it always really wants to rain. Even on a hot day with blue sky – the inherent desire to rain results in high humidity. So things like swamp coolers work fine at the lower latitudes of LA, but are a waste of space and money here.
In LA at the same temperature this would be way down towards the 40% mark
So I am leveraging the fact that I own my own time, and summer is a good time to live like a king, reasonably cheaply. Strawberries and cream by the seaside is pretty good 😉
Incidental rant: why doesn’t Britain have proper cadastral records?
I came across this notice walking from the car park to the Friary:
No cadastral records, no bloody clue
Every other European country has a definitive land register of who owns what. But not in Britain. Because all the land was seized in 1066, what the King didn’t keep for the Crown was handed out to the aristocracy, which hoards it and passes it down the generations, much of the land in the UK is not on the Land Registry, so you get situations like this.
In any French village you can ask to look at the cadastral records at the Mairie to know who holds a piece of land. Isn’t it about time that we sorted ourselves out and demanded of the aristocracy and anyone else that it bloody well registers every single claim to every piece of land it asserts that it owns, and if no claim is made after 10 years then tough shit, it belongs to us all? After all, if it isn’t registered then Lord Warburton-Smythe can simply make sure everyone looks the other way when his sprog Jimmy Warburton-Smythe-Pollock take over that part of the family estate when he pegs it because no bugger knows about that acreage, because it isn’t on the records. Decent cadastral records would help catch sneaky buggers avoiding inheritance tax and would be a prerequisite to introducing a land value tax. It smacks of dire incompetence not being able to find out who owns what of a scarce and finite resource, and one every other civilised country has solved. But since the lack of transparency serves the aristocracy perfectly well, they won’t let anything be done about out it, the piss taking bastards.
Much of this fruit and veg, though not things like oranges and bananas, was grown in Kent though some was grown in the city. People didn’t buy veg from supermarkets then, they were much smaller than now and a much smaller range, mainly focusing of dry goods and non-fresh stuff. Few people had freezers then – our fridge had one star, where at best you could keep ice-cream where the ice cube tray went, and even then it would start to lose the fight after a few hours.
Simple Living In Somerset 