These days you can’t throw a dwarf without hitting someone preaching than you should value experiences over things. It is continuously the case that a certain, but changing, personality type dominates the culture in terms of what should be desirable—I can’t wait until my preferences rises to the mainstream; some years ago, it was the spontaneous crowd that ruled the day. Carpe Diem. Seize the day! Apparently the reasoning was that any action was great as long as it wasn’t planned.

Now the current paradigm is that experiences are so much better than things… Perhaps it would be helpful to step back and consider that everything really is an experience. A thing, as well, is experienced on some level, so in the following an experience typically denotes some kind of event isolated in time and not earned knowledge of certain things… and that the people who revel in experiences like travel, movies, concerts, and so on consider themselves so much more enlightened, kinda like the crowd of yesteryear who thought it might be a good idea to spontaneously, oh say, self-combust, because that would surely be craaaaaazy, yay?!

Now, I say that may be fine for whoever in inherently into experiences and unintelligent for those who go along. Not all experiences are inherently better than things. Some of the things I own makes my life better on a daily basis unlike pretty much all the memories, I don’t think about it. (DW will probably say that that’s just because I’m getting senile.) Hence, events are all sunk expenses unless they can be brought forth; and when it comes down to it, how much is the memory of some old event worth? To what extent does it enrich my current life? For me, not a whole lot. Experiences as entertainment are not better than things as entertainment. In fact, from an economic perspective they are worse, since they can not be sold. Also they come with the typical lifestyle inflation. Once you have experienced E, you want to experience E+1. It gets more and more exotic. It seems that the popularization of experiences is one more way of extracting money from people on the service level, although you can of course devise your own experiences. However, in this case I think it moves from event-experience to knowledge-experience: something which I value much higher.

Hence the politically correct notion of valuing experiences over things does not hold for me. I suppose the experience crowd gets a lot of traction from people, who are past-oriented, you know the type who has tons of family albums, who do genealogy, and still talk about the war (you know the war I’m talking about, yes?). This is about one third of the population. But many others just go along, because it’s fashionable; not because it is right for them.

Originally posted 2009-08-13 00:03:45.

The amount of thinking which occurs mentally is actually very hard to quantify. When I was doing research, I’d typically start out doing “nothing” for several hours—call it “warming up”. Then I’d hack around changing a few things here and there in a code or a manuscript. Maybe I’d suddenly get an idea and code it up in about half an hour. Finally, I’d read papers or try to make a good figure. If I managed to do that much in a day, I considered it a success.

If you’re just looking at what materially got done, it was very little. However, a lot could have changed mentally, though, both consciously but more importantly unconsciously.

It would be interesting indeed if it was possible to glimpse what goes on in other people’s brains beyond what gets reflected by their writing, talking, and actions.

I guess “thinking” is comparable to practicing an instrument except there’s no instrument and no sound. Still, by practicing you get better, and by getting better, you can produce something brilliant in short order when you finally do play.

Practicing is hard. This is why most people prefer not to. It is indeed much easier to “play” what you already know or to repeat what you’ve heard compared to composing your own things.

Much thanks to KC, BR, and Anon for the donations.

Originally posted 2010-09-09 22:45:34.

When I started the blog I debated what would make for a good blog name. One of the names considered was “Extreme Early Retirement” but I found that that name had already been “parked”. Early Retirement Extreme was free though and ERE also made for a better acronym than EER.

In retrospect, here slightly more than 3 years after starting the blog, the R-part of that name has turned out take have some annoying side-effects.

I found the crux of the matter to be that people have different and preconceived notions about what retirement means. Retirement has traditionally meant the part of life that followed a life-time of work. Retirement was for those workers who were broken down physically and sometimes mentally and unable to work further. The way industry had been set up meant that they could be replaced by a younger functional version much like a part in a machine.

As a more robust financial system replacement family dependence of having children, some people who managed to accumulate enough capital became able to retire a few years earlier than usual. A person could stop working even while being capable of continuing work. This was the first paradigm shift.

Traditionally households had a single income which meant that there were enough savings to support the household.

Recently, the idea of retirement has begun to change.

First, as households became poorer in real terms, single income households turned into dual income households. This now means that one person can retire while the other keeps working. This is the second paradigm shift. Here one person could retire several or even many years before the other.

Some people have also been able to push the age of retiring, that is, the age of no longer working for money far down. This is called extreme early retirement. This is somewhat different from using up one’s money until the pension rolls in. This is more akin to a lifetime of cash flows from investments that are not drawn down in value.

This is what I am talking on on this blog. This is the third paradigm shift. We have come pretty far away from the original definition of retirement: from someone who is too worn out to work to someone who has enough money so as not to need to work.

This is why early retirement extreme is a bad name.

Maybe financial independence extreme would be a better name?

Well, here the problem is that financial independence also has come to have many different meanings. For me it means having enough savings to pay for (finance so to speak) all my needs over a lifetime. Yet, for some it simply means not having any debt; for others it means having enough income to pretty much purchase whatever they want.

These definitions are even further removed from what I intend.

Another suggestion is “Independently Wealthy”. This is actually pretty accurate, except many people confuse “wealthy” (having money) with “rich” (spending money).

Consequently, I’m stuck with Early Retirement Extreme. Just make sure you don’t get stuck on your personal interpretation of what that’s supposed to mean, okay? 😉

Originally posted 2010-12-12 20:48:47.