Thoughts and reflections from the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.
Progress on my goals
Boat life
Last weekend we enjoyed the nice sun, hosting on our little deck and making a tasty sweet chilli and lime salmon steak.
This weekend we’re off to the UK for another family wedding. In fact, I’m typing this on the train journey after landing in London City Airport.
So no major boat life updates this week, nor likely to be any next week.
Distractions and detours
Caffeine detox
I’m now on Day 7 of having neither coffee nor tea.
The first five days were pretty rough. It felt like my brain was a tender sponge and someone was gently squeezing it. Focussing on my work was incredibly difficult and unsurprisingly my motivation was a little low.
Going to the gym and getting the heart pumping helped with this. Exercising with caffeine withdrawal feels slightly better than exercising with a hangover, but I found that you still get out of breath and a little dizzy in the same way. However, after fighting through to the green fields beyond it gave me a reprieve from the squeezing headaches for a couple of hours.
Anxiety was very real on day 5. I woke up anxious without anything to actually trigger anxiety. Took me a while to realise I wasn’t forgetting something and it was really the coffee talking.
I don’t think I’ve seen the last of the symptoms, but now at day 7 I can say it’s manageable and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Wattpad
I discovered Wattpad this week. It seems to be a practice-in-public social media app for writers, but I haven’t interacted with it yet beyond creating an account.
Allegedly it’s an OK side hustle and/or it’s helpful to develop writing skills via direct feedback, but then again every social media platform tells you how great it is to entice you in. I’m also conscious that it seems to be mainly erotica/ erotic romance, and that despite setting my preferences it pushes werewolf erotica really hard at my profile. Clearly its algorithms have strong biases, maybe it’s just like publishing on KDP but without money.
If I find some free time around my jet-set and boaty-lawyer lifestyle, I’ll have a look and experiment with it.
Philosophy
I’m about 80% of the way through Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I’ve been reading it on my decade-old Kindle and used the highlight tool to pick out bits that I thought would be interesting for FIRE people. If there’s enough of them then I’ll put out a post about it and share the reading. Should be finished before I fly back to the Channel Islands.
You can tell it’s Marcus’ own notes to himself, mind you. A bit of a ramble, the structure is at best absent and at worst confusing, but then again he didn’t expect to actually share his notes. Seriously, history did this for him. He didn’t even provide the title, it’s a later addition.
Non-FIRE goals
My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)
We tuned the strings down a whole tone and played around with Call Me Little Sunshine by Ghost. I didn’t quite get the riff up to speed in the lesson, but it was a cool introduction to drop tuning and I’m tasked with coming up with a riff for next week in drop tuning.
Fitness
As mentioned, the gym saved me on Monday and Thursday. I would have gone again on Friday, but I’m travelling.
Final thoughts
To be honest the caffeine detox project stole most of the week.
I’m a little conscious that I haven’t made much progress on any major task line, but you can’t rush financial independence too much. There’s a limit to what I can do each week, unless I genuinely want to experiment with getting 0.00001% better return on my investments every week.
Can’t be in the business of obsessively chasing diminishing returns on my time. The whole point of this campaign is to free up space and time to live and enjoy the boat life. Gotta make some time for living.
My financial independence campaign continues!
