It feels like we’ve developed some kind of histamine reaction to imagination. We are afraid that people will “catch” a bad idea. Well, stupid people are always gonna think dumb things and do dumb shit. That’s their whole thing. The solution can’t be to make artists dumb too.
— (CW)TB
I’m going to start living on minimum wage. Sort of. Not really. It’s complicated.
Some types of sophistication won’t make you enjoy the object more, they’ll make you enjoy it less. For example, wine snobs don’t enjoy wine twice as much as you, they’re more keenly aware of how most wine isn’t good enough. Avoid sophistication that diminishes your enjoyment.
There’s basically two parts to a budget. There’s the part where you track things, and the part where you use it to make decisions. I’m decent at the first part. Awful at the second.
I’ve been using YNAB since it was desktop software. It does an incredible job of tracking how I spend my money and assigning it to categories. Categories that I have, nominally, assigned my income to. What it can’t do is tell me to stop spending money when I’ve overspent a category. Which is fair, because I can’t tell me to do that either.
Broadly, in practice, I spend my money on vibes. I know roughly how much I can get away with spending, and I’ve got systems in place to cover when I overspend, so I’m never at any real risk of the bills not getting paid, but it’s not a great way to achieve my longer-term goals.
I’m old enough to have worked jobs where my paychecks were actual checks, delivered to the building, by hand, that I had to take to a bank to deposit.
Dinosaurs and Margaret Thatcher roamed the earth. Mosquitos the size of Volkswagens. Etc.
But for at least the last decade or so I’ve worked for companies with direct deposit, and where there’s direct deposit there’s usually a way to split that deposit between multiple accounts. I’ve used that ability to functionally “hide” money from myself. Probably a solid third of my paycheck skips my checking account each month, diverted to various savings and investment accounts.
This is the mechanism that supports my tendency to overspend. While I know there’s always money in the rhetorical banana stand, I don’t always know how much and I don’t think of it as “available to spend.” A few times a year, I end up raiding one or more of those other accounts to cover. And that’s broadly what I think of as “the system working.”
As a consequence, I’ve never missed rent. Literally or rhetorically.
It turns out I’m actually pretty good at living within the limits of what I think I have. I know how much money is in my checking account at any given time, and that creates a rubric for what size of purchase I can make without needing to check the balance. Mostly it’s fine. Sometimes I overshoot, but then I’ve got savings to cover.
I call this the “zone of indiscriminate spending.” How much money can you spend without needing to think about it? Maybe it’s a couple bucks. If you’re fortunate, maybe it’s a couple hundred.
Right now this zone is much larger than I’d like it to be. I’d like to be operating like $10 is no big deal, but $100 requires scrutiny. In practice I operate at about one order of magnitude above that.
So I’m going to start living on minimum wage. Sort of. Kind of. Not really?
I’m going to put myself on an allowance roughly equivalent to minimum wage.
It’s a more extreme version of the technique that’s always worked: hiding money from myself.
The key here is to reduce my intuitive sense of what’s available to spend without actually putting myself in danger of bills not getting paid.
I call this a “load-bearing lie.” We all know it’s not true. I know it’s not true. But maintaining the fiction is important to achieving my desired outcome: I need to behave in all ways as if the money is not available to spend in order not to spend it.
How do I do this in practice? Too many bank accounts.
My income from any and all sources will flow into a clearinghouse account, implemented as a money market account at my main bank. Their money market accounts have the same APR as a high-yield savings account, so money sitting in that account earns as much interest as money I’ve sent to savings.
However, money market accounts have withdrawal limits, so the next step is routing “spendable” money out of the clearinghouse in as few transactions as possible. Each of the following will happen on the last day of the month, to set up the next month’s spending.
Notably, this is exactly half of the “allowed” number of money market transactions in a month. That gives me breathing room to transfer again if something goes wrong. The whole point of this system is to automate as much as possible and avoid the need to do so, but I have the flexibility if I need it.
Okay, so what is my allowance? I thought about this for quite a while and decided to pin it somewhat arbitrarily to Maine’s minimum wage.
Why Maine? Because I’m planning to move there in the next few years. Why minimum wage? Because it’s a psychologically useful framing. People find a way to make minimum wage work.
The problem I’ve set for myself is actually much easier than truly living on minimum wage, since the family’s fixed expenses don’t need to come out of that pool of money, but thinking of myself as trying to live at or below the minimum wage line provides a point of reference and an identity designed to guide me away from overconsumption and overspending.
As you’ve probably already noticed, the devil is in the details. When I talk about not needing to pay for the family’s fixed expenses from this pool of money, that potentially leaves a lot of room to keep spending money the way I always have, except now with more steps.
What counts as fixed? What counts as discretionary?
In practice, it comes down to how the thing is paid.
I run almost all of my finances through credit cards, paying them off in full each month, and harvesting those sweet rewards points to help defer the costs of travel. Because I can’t have my credit cards pay their balance in full split from multiple checking accounts, each card effectively becomes a boundary.
Bills like the mortgage, insurance, card payment, and utilities don’t generally accept credit cards for payment. They autopay through ACH transfers.
All of the ACH transfers will go through the family account. All of the credit cards will get paid through my personal account.
If I swipe a card, it’s discretionary. If it autopays, it’s fixed.
I’ve spent a lot of words on what I’m planning to do, but not what I’m trying to achieve by doing it. I think because that part’s clear to me but somewhat harder to capture in words.
One reason is to fight back against lifestyle inflation. It’s so easy to spend money that I have on things that do not, ultimately, serve my long-term goals. And, once spent, it’s frequently hard to unspend. Sometimes in ways that accrue over time, such as additional subscriptions.
Another reason is to avoid developing sophistication that diminishes my enjoyment. If we “can’t afford” the fancier soap, are we really any worse off? What about those nicer bed sheets? That name-brand food product?
Eventually I’d like to reintroduce a significant gap between what I earn and my lifestyle, such that if my material circumstances changed I would not be worse off. This feels like, amongst many other things, good future-proofing.
At the end of the day $2500 per month is actually quite a lot for pure discretionary spending. People I respect immensely fit their entire life into that or not much more. It feels like a realistic and worthwhile goal, even as I acknowledge the ways in which I’m on “easy mode” in comparison.
Some of the concepts and terminology I’m about to use, as well as the title of the blog post, were lifted directly from here.
Having said that, I think I’m going to end up at a very different final destination than the original poster. So, credit where credit is due, but don’t feel compelled to read the original to understand my point.
King Power is money. I think the original article would try to lump in other things, like status, but one of my foundational operational primitives is that all of those things are fungible with money.
It’s technically possible in some communities to have status without having money, but those communities do not themselves have status in the wider culture. You’re welcome to feel about that all kinds of ways, and we may even agree, but it’s not germane to my point.
King Power is your ability to exert your will on other people, to achieve an outcome. This is most likely because you can pay them to do the task. (Originally, I was going to use another example here, such as being CEO, but that’s basically just paying them to do the task. See what I mean about it being fungible with money?)
Modern, industrialized, Western society teaches us that King Power is Good. You are virtuous and should be rewarded for seeking it. Gather money. Gather power. Become the CEO. Start a company. Own the local car wash.
What is best in life?
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!
— Conan the Barbarian (1982)
In contrast, Wizard Power is your ability to exert your will on the world. All those things the King is paying for? That’s other people exerting their Wizard Power.
Fixing your own car? Wizard Power. Sewing your own clothes? Wizard Power. Growing your own food? Wizard Power.
When a king exerts King Power, they’re constrained to the world of options that have been made available for purchase. They can have anything on the menu. We are told that this is good.
When a wizard exerts Wizard Power, they’re constrained to the world of what’s possible. They can have anything which could be put on the menu. That we are not told this is good is a lie perpetrated against us by those with King Power.
Because the more effort and energy you spend on acquiring King Power, the less effort and energy you spend on acquiring Wizard Power. Each person has only so much energy, so much time, and though you can do anything, you cannot do everything.
I mean. Inasmuch as basically everything I write is sort of a manifesto. What is a manifesto if not a dark essay?
Let’s call it a primer. It’s going to make a lot of future things make a lot more sense if I can refer to King Power and Wizard Power without having to define the terms.
I suspect you know where I’m going with this, and you’re very likely right, but the devil is infamously in the details.
I have removed his place, his seat, and his tomb.
I have destroyed his soul, his spirit, his body, his shade, his magic, his seed, his egg, his bones, and his hair.
Though thou shalt not exist, thou shalt suffer.
— The Book of Overthrowing Apep (~400 BCE)
One sentence on each place in Europe that I’ve been, in order of preference.
Perfection.
Feels like walking through a storybook about mice that run a bookstore.
I will spend the rest of my life angry that nowhere in the US has public transit this good.
Purchased a book of soviet propaganda art from a woman who spoke almost no English, 10/10, no notes.
Feels like walking through a storybook about mice that run a bookstore, but in the Middle Ages.
Estonia has perfected the McDonalds French Fry, no I will not be taking questions.
I remember almost nothing about Aarhus but at least it isn’t Copenhagen.
The exact moment I realized that I never want to live in a city again for the rest of my life.
Deserves more of a chance than I was able to give it.
I would go back another time, but their predatory taxi cab situation does a lot to sour the experience.
“At least it’s not Poland” feels unnecessarily cheeky, but I’m really struggling to come up with anything else.
The only place I went that I could not be convinced to go back to.
“Hamlet? Is that a sandwich?”
— Ash
Oslo is, without a doubt, my favorite country in all of Europe. It manages to feel expansive without feeling big. Cozy but not confined. The people were, without exception, warm, kind, and welcoming in a way that many other European countries were not.
It’s the kind of place I’d like to imagine I could aspire to live in, and perhaps some day be worthy of.
My frustration around products that include AI isn’t the AI itself, it’s that I’m already paying for Claude and I’m not interested in paying for seven more copies of Branded Claude. Stop trying to sell me things I already have.
Not gonna lie, when I find someone who’s weirder than me in the ways I want to be weird I get a little jealous but like in a crush-y way? Like let’s be friends, but also enemies. Frenemies. I will make you soup and steal your soul and you will fill my house with spiders and we’ll be besties.
My seasonal theme is more thoughtful use of less space.
Operating at the very top of the game, for any value of game, necessitates a single-minded devotion to the exclusion of all other interests or hobbies.
The reason most of the people who are the best at something love doing it is because it’s to the exclusion of all else.
“What is soup, but a potion for the soul?”
— Ash
“The French are good at two things: bread. Snails.”
— Ash
“I was complaining about this game two yahtzees ago.”
— Ash
Lately I’ve been trying a new system for how I manage my evenings. Someone else might try “no system” or “having fun” or “relaxing,” but I am not that someone.
Instead, I’ve cobbled together something from the charred husk of the Bento Method that seems to work pretty well for me.
Of course, to make that make sense, I have to describe what came before.
In the early days there was StumbleUpon, and it wasted a lot of time, and I got nothing done for approximately 2008-2016. Very little of that is StumbleUpon’s fault. I just wanted to mention StumbleUpon for some OG time wasting cred.
By the early 2010s I was using the then-nascent Bullet Journal method. By the late 2010s I was using GTD.
Over the last half year I’ve been using time blocking, which has gone through several iterations. Originally rough time estimates became fixed time blocks, deep focus to light focus. The problem with that level of fixed schedule was that frequently the real world happened, and things slipped, and I had no good way to get them back on track.
Once the train missed the station it was hard to go back.
I was looking at the Bento Method and I thought, “well, this seems interesting.” Not really looking to buy a new app though. I’m actually quite happy with OmniFocus. But the idea of setting tasks that sort of roughly align with how I was time blocking, but that would remain to be re-scheduled if I missed them was pretty compelling. And seemed to solve for my main pain point with what I was doing previously.
The other problem I set out to solve, related but unrelated, was bringing more focus to a single project at a time. I tend to have too many hobbies and interests, and in turn tend not to get very many projects to a proper “finished” state.
So I married the bento method up with two week sprints. I actually like sprints. I know, crazy, right? But I like the idea of bringing a limited amount of laser-sharp focus to a problem. And, I was able to bake in a little bit of a reward. After my two weeks? A week off!
I’m now halfway through my second week of my first sprint under this system, and it’s been great. I’ve gotten a satisfying amount of work done on a single project. Naively I thought one sprint would be enough to finish it, but of course bringing my attention to bear meant I found all kinds of new things it could be extended to do.
C’est la vie. At least I have next week’s “break” to look forward to.
Is there a service that would let me input the details of a future trip (dates, location, cost,) and let my friends decide if they want to book concurrent trips, and then let me know their details so I can coordinate plans?
I’m not a traditionally “goal-motivated” person. For certain values of goal, motivated, and person. I have a formative memory of telling my third grade teacher that I would not be setting any new years resolutions because the idea is quite ridiculous, thank you.
I continue to agree with past-me about that.
“Goals” are sort of like a report card: some people are super motivated by getting good grades for some reason. If this is you, stop it. Grades are a scam. Do as little as you can to pass, and spend as much of your time as possible being curious about the world around you. Go outside. Lick a bug. Everything worth doing is as far from a classroom as you are allowed to get.
I digress.
Nothing about having a goal helps you achieve a goal. The goal doesn’t define the process that leads to the goal’s success. The goal doesn’t punish you for failure. The goal is Gary Busey standing over your bed breathing slightly too loud while you sleep. Unsettling, perhaps, but it’s not kicking your ass and telling you to achieve your destiny.
You’re defined by what you do, not by what you say you’ll do. Set a goal to have beautiful teeth in a decade and then stop brushing your teeth. Clearly the operative lever here, the essential fulcrum, is the tooth brushing habit.
Best case scenario, you’ve set out to do something you were already going to do, and you did it. Most likely case scenario you failed to achieve the goal, were a failure, should pour salt on yourself, shrivel up, and die.
Yes, I am a perfectionist, why do you ask?
I can’t speak to how anyone else conceives of goals. I suspect not like I do. Given the above, can you blame me for not finding them motivating? A “goal,” as described, is an opportunity to demonstrate my limitless capacity to fail at my own ambitions. Why would I even start down that path?
Except, apparently, I have always set what a normal, rational person would call goals. If you’ve known me long enough you’ve probably heard me say I want to be the CEO of the company. Quite possibly with an almost feverish level of intensity.
Listen, I know I’m not going to be the CEO. I mean maybe a CEO. Eventually. But not at my current day job.
This is what I call a Wildly Unachievable Goal. The point isn’t to ever do the thing. It’s to pick a direction, burn the boats, set out across the American Southwest, and see how close I get. Because every step of the way is valuable. I’ll learn, I’ll grow. I’ll end up closer to it than I ever might have imagined.
I think that for a WUG to work, you have to take it at face value. You have to believe in it with your heart and spleen. If at any point you acknowledge that it’s not really your intention, the magic breaks. It’s the productivity equivalent of a placebo.
Something new I’m trying out are Wildly Achievable Goals. WAGs. This is, I think, much closer to what a normal person would call a “goal.” It’s a thing I want to do, or have, or be, that through a reasonable series of steps, could happen.
A WAG might be “write a book.” It might be “launch an app on the App Store.” They’re things that normal human people do, but maybe you’ve never done.
The point of a WAG is that at the end of it, you have the thing you set out to do. No matter how audacious it is, you have reason to believe you could do it. No matter how long it takes, you think you could get it done.
A WUG is something you know you’ll never do, but you’re going to run full-chested at it anyway, because the point isn’t to get there, it’s to land among the stars.
WAG and WUG. Pass it on.