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My Retired Lifestyle
I count myself as extraordinarily lucky: I don’t have to work any more.
I should re-phrase that: I don’t have a job any more. I still work my buns off, but it’s time spent doing things I enjoy: reading, writing this website, collaborating and conversing with other people. And somehow I make money off that: enough money that I don’t have to bother working for other people at jobs I hate, which is how I spent my time before this.
My web projects, right now, are fairly limited in scope: mainly this blog and a couple small offshoot projects. But between them I make a thousand dollars a month on a regular basis, with a slow but sure incremental increase every month. A thousand dollars a month is certainly not a princely sum, but it allows me to live how I want.
This is how I live:
I wake up every morning some time between 9 and 11am, depending on when I feel like it. The first thing I do is make my bed (it’s important to have regular rituals when you don’t have a job). I check my email and website comments, maybe respond to a few people. And if I’m feeling up to it, I’ll sometimes write first thing in the morning. Mostly though, I just take it easy. I take a bath, eat some fruit and yogurt, and then come back and write some more. Mid-afternoons I’ll run over to the University District or similar to run pointless errands and perform arbitrary tasks that I make up for myself. I find it’s important to get out of the house at least once a day and join the regular world in its goings on. Sometimes I will get myself some lunch out, head over to the grocery store, or pop into some favorite local bookshops.
Then I come back, unwind (if that’s even possible, considering how not wound up I am), listen to some music, read a bit, write a little more, talk to my roomates as they come home from work in the afternoon hours. I sometimes go out with them for food, drinks, or to play some pool. I tend to walk around a lot, and take things very slowly. And I pepper everything I do with writing, listening to music, and making notes to myself about how awesome life is.
It’s pretty fucking great, really. Like I said, I’m not a millionaire, but I don’t need to be either. If my life carried on just like this for another few decades, I would be supremely satisfied. I’m already retired, really. And when you knock out working from your life, and drop suffering from your vocabulary, things are pretty sweet. I literally can’t complain: I have nothing to complain about.
Because I myself have reached a point where I have everything I need (I’m even living below the poverty level, I think, right?), I find myself drawn more and more to sharing this gift with other people. I know, at this point, what makes a successful website, how to drum up audiences, get people involved and interested, and make money from doing so. Those are valuable skills, especially as we move forward to greater levels of media saturation in our lives. I personally don’t see why everybody isn’t living this way: it’s so easy and satisfying and enjoyable. And it gives me time to work on whatever I want to work on, and do cool things with other people. I’m going to begin threading into my writing more tips and observations about how to creatively escape worrying about money, because there are better, more productive and more entertaining ways for us to live our lives than slaving away at pointless jobs which we only have so we can afford a bunch of shit we don’t really need or want.
If you’d like to start copying my business/life model, please do so. It’s no great secret. In the sidebar, you’ll find affiliate links to my Google AdSense and Text Link Ads accounts, which are my two workhorses for money-making right now. Click on them and sign up. I’ll get a small kickback from it, and you’ll take solid steps towards freeing yourself from pointless money/job games. Sure some people hate looking at advertisements, but those people are probably also working jobs they hate which make them get irritated by every little thing they see! (See how that works?) I am lucky enough to have found a solution that balances my needs and desires with real world solutions that make everybody involved money. It’s called a win-win situation, or a non-zero sum game. It’s all the rage these days: you can live your life how you want to live it. All you need to do is take the steps to make it happen!
Just look at me: I’m 27 and retired and I’m getting more stuff done now than ever!
September 28th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
[…] Many people look at my lifestyle and wonder “How did he do it?” I make money doing what I love, and I have given up suffering. It took me a long time to figure this stuff out, as well as a great deal of hard work, and honestly a lot of trial and error. Now that I have all these things up and running in a stable way though, I feel like I’m at a good place to begin sharing what I’ve learned so that other people can live like this as well: simply because it is a lot of fun and I feel great! […]
September 29th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
If everyone lived this way, eventually no one could live this way.
I think it works better at this time if we could spend part of our lives, living as you do (should one wish too live this way), and part of our lives doing something like repairing pot holes, cleaning out sewers, throwing hay bales or somesuch.
Unfortunately most of us have been born into a dependency (dependency for our basic needs) based society, kind of hard to turn back the clock now.
September 29th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Why? Explain your reasoning.
I like what you’re saying. This stuff is important and living the way I do has enabled me to take jobs like that when and where I want to and I have gained a lot from them!
No, it’s really *not* hard to break free from a “dependency-based society” - that’s what I’m saying. All it takes is pairing your life down to the essentials and creating recurring revenue streams to cover your costs. It’s stupid easy and I can teach people to do it.
The key though is in how you’re thinking about and approaching the world. That first needs to be reconfigured, which is what the SIX STRATAGEMS are designed to do.
The key point I’m trying to make with this piece is simply that: you can live outside the money-system and all the pointless and conflicting drives that most people live according to. And you don’t need to be a millionaire to do it: that belief is propagated by the money-system to keep you chained to those types of drives, and to believe that gaining more money is the only way to fulfill them. It is not. It’s not even a good or the most efficient way to achieve fulfillment in life.
September 29th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
If your roof starts leaking, will you replace it?
If the power goes out will you replace the neighborhood transformer?
If the highway that brings much of your food to you breaks up, will you fix it?
etc.
Seems self-evident to me, so this interchange becomes extra interesting to me, because there presently is a large gap in our thought proceseses here
See above. No it’s not if you are comfortable living in a cave, or a wood cabin without amenities or something like that.
Yes, I agree absolutely. But if you still live within the comforts that the money system offer, you are doing so on someone elses back, and that person may or may not want to be patching roads or picking fruit.
If you are trying to give everyone as much freedom from dependency as possible then the system has to be changed. I think it could resemble something more like you keyed on:
September 29th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
I like this kind of thinking. What if we all said yes? Instead of waiting for someone else to come fix our problems, we sat down and marshalled the resources amongst ourselves to take care of them.
I will have to learn more about your thought processes to see the value in this gap you speak of. I hope you will allow me to do that.
I do not live in a cave without amenities. I live in a house with my friends. We drink and go to the movies and the grocery store.
Let’s go talk to these hypothetical people. Let’s find out what they want and let’s work together to give it to them.
You cannot give someone freedom. As Lion Kimbro said to me today: You cannot wake up someone who is only pretending to be asleep!
No system needs to change. You need to change. That is, if you’d like to have things be different, you must start acting differently. Saying the system needs to change is asking everyone else to be different to suit you, which is bullshit.
October 1st, 2007 at 11:28 am
oooh, I have a bad cold, movin kind of slow-
Haah! Ya, my statement was obtuse, sorry, what I would say in retrospect: “It appears that our views are quite divergent on this at the moment, I find that I have the most potential to learn in these types of situations.”
Yes, that is kind of what I am getting at. It would be neat, I think, if you could talk to people early on in their life, and maybe make some sort of desires inventory, and then let people learn skills for more than just one or two ways to make a living (including a semi-retired and retired category :>): just for fun say 10 or 20. Then people could switch jobs as one became boring. I think I got this ideas from Hakim Bey.
that is a very helpful statement
I agree with this, it all starts with the individual if it is to be true change. I still wrestle with egg/chicken issues.
October 1st, 2007 at 12:56 pm
I remember taking a kind of “desires inventory” in high school. Can’t remember the name and have no idea if they still use that kind of thing. One answered a whole bunch of questions and then the test spit out 2 or 3 “professions” that you were most suited for. It’s design was clearly to get you fitted into a mold, for rapid assimiliation into busyness and efficiency versus overall life happiness.
Something like that, but retooled to find one’s maximum enjoyment/work ratio through diversity and flexibility might be much more interesting.
October 1st, 2007 at 2:33 pm
“it’s gotta start with the individual”
thinking about this further, you might end up changing the system, but it will be because enough people have arrived at a critical mass of shared values as a result of internal change.
October 2nd, 2007 at 3:09 am
This is what these guys were all about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_congress
You need to do this constantly.
http://timboucher.tumblr.com/post/13515186
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007/08/29/intentaction-harmony/
Something like “ADULT APPRENTICESHIPS” has a nice ring to it. This of course closely connects to:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/07/15/open-source-teaching-clubs/
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007/09/17/creating-a-skills-bank/
Love this idea: you could have a pool of people who trade jobs the way some people trade cell phone contracts (which themselves resemble:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servant )
But how cool would that be if we had a labor pool of people who all had base skills in XYZ areas, and who could be plugged into jobs as needed and desired by employers who respected the shared value community models, and could even pay in complementary currencies, or at least partially!
Damn, the ideas are flowing. I can’t do all of this stuff myself. I need the help of everyone out there with all their ideas and energy. Find ways to make this stuff work on independent and small scales: make everyone money off it, abstract the business model out of it and teach others how to apply what you have learned.
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:30 pm
[…] In any event, one of the current Socratic threads which I would like to engage in has to do with the future of online advertising. As I’ve written elsewhere, getting into the advertising game has enabled me to work full-time on my website. And it has allowed me the opportunity to live a lifestyle which is much more pleasant and useful to me creatively. So while there are certainly drawbacks, I have derived great value personally out of finding the best methods to make money online. […]
October 5th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
[…] Apparently Portugal is closest to having this system actually implemented on a national scale, followed by its colonial cousin, Brazil. This is also fairly similar to some of the ideas I have been exploring with regards to individuals being paid licensing fees by governments and corporations in exchange for surveillance and data mining. I’ve often thought about how similar my receiving checks in the mail is to people who receive welfare or unemployment. The only difference really is who gives me the money: private corporations instead of the government. That, of course, and that I add value into the system by producing content and harnessing audiences for advertisers to target. […]