On Time, Money and Health

As a 30 yo person with health issues (nothing really bad, but not cool either), I totally acknowledge with the idea that staying healthy is the best gift you could do to your kids and I’ll work hard to give that to my son.

As on money, I have the feeling that the thing you must solve is finding not only your house, but the house you’ll love, so you can invest all of your « useless » extra money in it (extending it, renovating it, decorating it…)… It’ll only increase your house value while making you happier.

Simple way to understand this is, 50s is your retirement decade. Therefore:

1. When you are 40, your resume has just 10 years worth value.

2. When you are 30, your resume has just 20 years worth value.

..

Sometime back, a manager advised me the surest way to get promoted is do the job of the level your are aiming for. Same applies to retirement as well. You can't retire unless you are already retired in some way. Else you will just continue far into your 50s without retiring. Then you will be forced to.

Given all this FIRE is definitely a great strategy. The other point on health is very good advice as well. In fact every hour post age 35 spent on things on Leetcode instead of swinging a Kettlebell in many way is wasted time. More importantly in many cases might even give negative returns(Obesity, Diabetes etc).

None of this applies to the outliers of human race of course. But for most folks out there with ordinary lives. Retirement planning and health care should be the single biggest priority of your life through your 20s and 30s.

But

F** all that. Somehow we're obsessed with optimizing our lives with ever new ideas how we can have the best life, with the best health, the most money, most free time. We all work with computers and optimizing algorithms, or click-through-rates so we apply these techniques now to our lives and compare ourselves to others. Does someone online has better weights, should I still eat fruits or does this spike my insulin too much. Good god, just live your life without constantly checking on others, it's perfectly fine to live a basic life, it's perfectly fine to waste your time. Yes you don't have unlimited time, but you will be relieved and relaxed without having to self optimize. That doesn't mean you have to be unhealthy and miserable, if you want to change that it's fine, but do it on your terms (The author says, "just stop eating much", which is just arrogant, some things are hard to change and take years of willpower). Will you regret something at the end of your life? Maybe, but you lived your life on your terms and didn't ran from guru to guru. Kierkegaard said the following

``` Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both.```

Another big factor in this is Change jobs often is not a workable strategy here. Anybody with regular focus on their health and investments will tell you. You just can't raise money for making big investments(like above) when you don't have a stable job. Same happens with health too. Unfortunately most people often equate rapid changes to a process with progress. Whereas big progress is often a result of consistent improvement to a single process over long periods of time.

In an economic system with Inflation, increasing responsibilities and biology making aging and being healthy hard. Hoping to save up to buy some thing later is strategy that just doesn't work.

Simple reasoning tells us you need to go into debt a lot, early and often.