Retirement is wasted on the old. I mean, there’s no guarantee that you’ll even reach it, and if you do that it will be long. So I’ve adopted the approach of taking mini retirements throughout my working life.
When I can afford to I take time off from work. A month or two, maybe three. Sometimes 6-months to a year. On one occasion two years. The point being to blend working with enjoying life. Taking time to travel or spend time working on your home, car, or fitness.
If you do manage to reach retirement, at whatever age, and you do get to enjoy a long one. Then congrats you got to have your cake and eat it. For me, I’m taking as many mini retirements as I can while both enjoying life and working as retirement at the end of your lifespan is not guaranteed.
Tag: life
It’s the side missions that count
I’m playing a computer game following the main campaign and I keep dying. Over and over again at the same point. It seems impossible to make any progress past this particular point in the game. Not with my character’s current level of experience, armour, and weaponry.
The only way that I can make any kind of progress is by taking a break from the main mission and spending some time in the game world undertaking side missions. This way I can build up my character’s stamina, strength, XP, buy new armour and weaponry and practice combat with easier opponents. Then I can get back on the main path and start to make real progress.
This got me thinking about how relevant this strategy is to life in general. Everyone is trying to get ahead as fast as possible without investing any time in bettering themselves. Improving your skills and experience can only help you be a better version of yourself in anything you tackle in life.
We often forget that half the fun of the journey is who and what we encounter along the way that contributes to small changes in ourselves making us who we are today.
So don’t rush to the finish line. In life sometimes it’s the side missions that count.
Smart TVs
I own a few smart TVs. Not all remain so. Some manufacturers stop supporting them after a while. They stop receiving updates or the apps stop working. Eventually nothing works and they become a monitor, a screen.
You end up sourcing another device to re-enable the feeds you subscribe to. A USB / HDMI stick, a games console, or a set-top box of some kind. The smartness moving outside of the screen hardware into an externally connected device.
Some retailers offer up to 5-years cover on the hardware, but not for the software. That could end in a year or maybe two if you are lucky.
Your smart TVs are basically PCs with no upgrade potential. At some point the manufacturer will cease all support and you can’t upgrade it. Better to buy a large computer monitor and have the smart part in something external that can be upgraded or is cheaper to replace.
Richard
I decided to pay a visit to an old friend that I hadn’t seen in a while. His son answered the door. Apparently he had fallen down the stairs some weeks back and is now in a home in the north of the county. He also has dementia.
On my very first day in my career as a professional tester I was given a tour of the offices by a lady who introduced me to Richard as someone who would act as my mentor. I was given a seat next to him and told that he would show me the ropes. She then left and I turned to Richard and asked “So what are we doing?”. “I haven’t a f’ing clue” was his response. We’ve been friends ever since.
Many years later after he retired we would meet up regularly for beers and chat about anything and everything. Others would join us over the years and invariably move on. Then around several years ago he would arrange beers and wouldn’t turn up. This happened several times. Each time he claimed to have just forgotten. Months later I saw him walking his dog. I said hi and he asked who I was. Then he appeared to recognise me and claimed to have been pulling my leg, but I wasn’t really sure.
We lost touch again and I was passing his house so figured I’d call in. I was saddened to hear that he was now in a home and that he had dementia, but in the back of my mind I had guessed what was happening. His son assured me though that I should visit and he was confident he would know who I was having known me for so long.
An hour later I pulled out my phone and looked up the home and decided to call. A lady confirmed he was there and said she’d put him on. I heard her mention my name to him and him replying “I can’t think who that is” in a frail voice. He came on the phone and after several references to past events he knew who I was and we were chatting like old friends. But every so often he would start to mumble and get distracted by something. He would then forget who he was talking to and I’d have to trigger some memories to bring him back, but briefly, he came and went throughout the conversation.
Afterwards I just sat and thought about how sad it was to lose yourself like that. It’s clear that the Richard I knew is slowly fading. I’m not even sure he’ll remember me if he saw me in person. I guess I’ll find out as I plan on paying him a visit soon.
When things don’t go to plan
When things don’t go to plan.
When a spanner is thrown into the works.
When people let you down.
When it’s one of those days.
When the brown stuff hits the fan.
It’s easy to become depressed, trigger anxiety, and become stressed out. It’s a natural reaction. Yet the more you feed that particular reaction the stronger it will get. The trick is to grow thicker skin. What doesn’t kill you and all that.
Life is complicated. Plus the more technically advanced we become as a species the more complex the problems will get. The more big things you own like cars, houses, and businesses, the more problems you are likely to face. Renting properties? You have to deal with lettings agents, tenants, and contractors. Own a business? There are customers, suppliers, employees, lawyers, accountants, and so on. You get the picture. The more you take on in life the more opportunities there are for problems to occur.
When life knocks you down the trick is to get back up, brush yourself off, and get on with it. Grow thicker skin. You will have to deal with idiots, incompetence, plain stupidity, angry people, delays, wear and tear, the economy, inflation, greed, and many more variables that shape the world that we live in.
Each day that you wake up, think that today will be a good day, but I will probably have to deal with people who are lazy and incompetent, or mean, angry, or just generally having a bad day. I may suffer losses in terms of time and money but I will survive this thing called life.
This problem that is stressing you out right now; you won’t remember it in five years time. Maybe not even in a year. So why stress about it now? Resolve it as best as you can and move on. Learn from it, grow, then let it go.
Things don’t always go to plan, so plan for them not to, and then you won’t be so stressed when the inevitable happens.
Embrace the wild rain.
Conversations with the dead
The older you get the more conversations you can recall with the dead. I’m not being morbid here, I’m just remembering conversations I’ve had with people that are no longer here.
I can recall being sat at a table with four other people discussing the latest mobile phone screen technology, demonstrating a video of waves hitting a beach playing smoothly in the palm of my hand. Yet I am the only one of the five present for that conversation as the others have all since passed.
I can remember conversations with friends and colleagues over the years where I’m the only one still around to recall it. Like a failing RAID server with my mind the last media in the array, still holding onto the data, those memories.
It’s both a sad and happy thought at the same time. It’s sad that the others are no longer with us, but happy that I have those memories of them.
Occasionally my mind will trigger such a memory and I’ll recall conversations with people that are no longer here. No one else has those memories but me. The older I get the more such memories I share alone.
Friends come and go
I’ve been let down by a few ‘friends’ recently and it got me thinking (again) about friendship. Friends come and go but family is life as they say, and this is generally true. As a freelancer I’ve worked many contracts where I’ve met some great people. We’ve sat next to each other five days a week for months on end, gone to lunch and for a drink or two together. We’ve talked about everything and consider each other friends. Then something happens. The work comes to an end, they move away or onto something else, and you never hear from them again.
It’s sad but it’s best not to dwell and to move on yourself. Friends will come and go. Don’t take it personally, it’s just life.
Life moves pretty fast
Alone time. Taking time to just be on your own can do wonders for your mental health. You don’t have to go far. It could be a quiet room in a busy household, or the garage or shed. Maybe go for a short or even a long walk. Maybe sit in your favourite coffee house and read (or write) or just think. You could meditate or clear your head and just enjoy the sights and smells of being outside or somewhere different.
Too often we feel the need to fill all of our time with doing something. Whether reading a book, watching TV, surfing the web, or doing jobs, crossing things off from our to-do lists. We forget that there is joy and comfort in just doing nothing, just being, embracing the moment.
In the immortal words of Ferriss: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it”.
Car modifications vs insurance
Over the years I’ve modified many cars that I’ve owned. Everything from small modifications that improve security or passenger comfort, to engine, suspension, and braking modifications. And there’s one thing I’ve learned with insurance companies. It’s how you explain the nature of modification in terms of how it affects performance and risk that affects the cost of your insurance.
One of the many jobs I’ve had in my career was working on the development of car insurance software and I got to see first hand how the process works behind the scenes. You essentially start off with a baseline insurance quote based on the stock version of your vehicle. Then you add the modifications, and the underwriter, the actual company that will insure the vehicle, reviews the modifications based on their understanding of the changes made, plus algorithms involving risk, the amount of time the car is likely to be driven on the road, etc. Then an additional amount is arrived at and added to the baseline cost to provide you with your individual quote.
So the key here is to ensure that you correctly inform your insurance company about all modifications that have been made to the vehicle, while trying to get the lowest quote you can. And there is an art in doing this.
Note: You must inform your insurance company of every and all modifications that have been made to the vehicle otherwise your insurance is null and void. It does not pay to lie! Many modifications are now standard, in that they are a selectable option, such as alloy wheels, wider wheel arches etc. Here I am talking about modifications which can be interpreted or stated in different ways.
As an example I once modified an Austin Mini by installing a ‘stage 1 kit’. There are at least two ways of informing the insurance company about this particular modification, those being that:
1 – I have increased the vehicle’s bhp by 20%
2 – I have increased the vehicle’s bhp by 8bhp
Both are factually correct. However as an experiment when repeating statement one to the potential insurer I was quoted a three-figure increase to my insurance, whereas with statement two they said it’s so low that they will note it on my policy but that it would not affect the premium in any way.
Notice the difference?
The work-life balance
Having a work-life balance is very important. You don’t live to work, you work to live. You work to pay the bills and have a comfortable life.
I’ve previously mentioned that it’s worth knowing how much it costs to fund your lifestyle. This is very important so you know how much you need to earn in order to keep a roof over your head and food on the table. If you can work smarter, not harder, all the better. It’s a great feeling to know that you only need to work three to six months a year to pay the bills for the whole year. You can then take time off or have long breaks between employments.
When I first started dating my wife (to-be), she was an employee with an annual holiday allowance of 25-days. We would look at the calendar for the upcoming year and note all the bank holidays and take those 25-days and use them to make weekends longer here and there and bank-holiday weekends even longer. We worked out that we could have short breaks every month. We would plan out where we were going next, somewhere in our home country or maybe abroad. Both the holiday itself and the anticipation of the upcoming holiday helped maintain a great work-life balance. We would often have 12 holidays a year. One year we had 14!
Another thing I like to do is to take “me days”. These are days when I know that no one is going to be home during the day. My wife will be out and the kids will be at school and I’ll have the place to myself. I’ll book it a month in advance so both my clients and family are ok with the date. Then I’ll start planning what food I’ll have. Maybe pizza or a takeaway. What snacks I’ll have and what beer I’ll be drinking. Not the large packs of beer but a carefully chosen selection of real ales from independent breweries. Then I’ll choose what video game I’ll be playing or movies I’ll watch. It may sound strange to you but this is heaven to me. I’ll get up, have my favourite breakfast and I’ll probably stay in my PJs all day long. I’ll play my video games and watch TV with no interruptions. After lunch I’ll open my first beer and continue gaming until the family comes home. Sometimes they’ll just leave me gaming till bedtime. Bliss!
Your “me day” may be different. Maybe you prefer a spa day or a day at the golf course or racetrack. Whatever your preference, the key is to just take a me day every once in a while to unwind, chill-out and enjoy yourself.
I had a colleague once to whom I explained the concept of ‘me days’ and who informed me that he couldn’t do it as he’ll be leaving money on the table. His thinking was that a day off meant a day’s money lost. Going from contract to contract working every day to earn as much money as you can is no way to live. Would you not rather enjoy what you do and be able to afford to take time off whenever you wanted?
Another rule of mine is that I don’t work my birthday. It’s the biggest ‘me day’ of the year so no way am I working that day. I’m far too busy celebrating me.
One other thing I’d like to point out about a good work-life balance is that the power people have over you is an illusion. Think about that for a second. When you are interviewing and are negotiating terms, at no point in the conversation does your new client say “..and I will have the right to berate you, to talk down at you, to shout at you when I feel like it, and generally treat you badly”, yet this happens. I’ve had clients shout at me as if they own me. They don’t. If you let them treat you this way then you are giving them the illusion of power and they will continue and this can lead to stress, anxiety and other mental health issues developing. The trick is to nip this in the bud quickly. Do it calmly and professionally but make sure that they understand that this is not acceptable and that if they cannot continue to be professional then you are prepared to walk away from the contract.
So remember that your health and well-being comes first. You are working so that you and your family can have a good life. You are not working just to work or just to earn money. You want a great life and you need money to do that, but not at the expense of your well-being.
Family and health come first!