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My Life in Weeks

weeks.ginatrapani.org

81–90 of 272 posts

Re: My Life in Weeks

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I have thought about it for a while, I think I have to get rid of work or family to be substantially happier. Apparently getting rid of family is morally wrong, so the only option is to get rid of work, somehow, anyhow. I fully understand why people buy lottery tickets. Hope beats probability on every single instance. I, a Master of Statistics graduates, buy them too.

What’s going on with your family? I can’t imagine much joy without mine.

Me too. I’d have more freedom to do certain things I love, but they’d quickly lose their appeal and I’d have no one to share any of it with. My family are literally the only people who give half a shit about me. Life would be quiet and hollow without them.

Re: My Life in Weeks

#82

What strikes me is the empty spaces where we don't recognize what we did, or didn't do anything memorable. I made an app to try to address this about a decade ago which I called Bucket52, the idea being that every week you put one memorable thing in it. Trying to do this just for a year was surprisingly difficult.

For me I just want to remember what's gone on in my life better, even if it's sometimes mundane. I've tried short-form daily journaling, but I've only made it around 3 months before I start skipping days and stop doing it altogether.

When it comes to doing something new/memorable, I'd be fine with aspiring for just one thing per month (with the assumption that sometimes/often I'd end up with more than that).

I think the way to make things like this work is to start with a low-ambition target, and then scale up until just before the point where it starts to feel difficult to keep it going. I'm not sure I could keep up a cadence of doing one memorable thing per week. Once a month seems doable, though. But if I were really uncertain, maybe I'd first target once per two months, and then see how much more frequently I could do memorable things before it started feeling like a difficult burden.

Re: My Life in Weeks

#83
post #74

Weeks is the most terrifying unit of time to think in. Short enough so you have a good sense of how long it feels but long enough to add up quickly.

And the best part of it is that there's really only about 4000 weeks for any one of us! It's an interesting metric.

4000 in total. The first ~1000 are spent in the the very limited tutorial area.

Re: My Life in Weeks

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest failure has been not getting an extreme income ( 300k TC a year +) before 30. I had planned to retire by 40 and be done with this work nonsense. Now I'm in my mid 30s and that doesn't seem possible. However I will say if you have a highly variable income ( one year you make 100$ an hour, the next year you have no work), you should max out your 401k during the good times. Having 30k in retirement funds that…

Yup. My advice to young people is -- if you can't figure out what to do in life, make more $$. With enough $$ you will have a world of time to ponder what to do. I also regret that I gave up a FAANG level opportunity because my faily doesn't want me to go to another city. I would hit well over 200K TC by now -- a very comfortable salary in Canada.

I earned over 200k base in Canada and it didn’t make that meaningful of a difference. I gave up chasing money and went to work for an NGO I care about, earning slightly more than half as much as before, and… I love it. I wouldn’t trade incomes if it meant trading the work.

I thought the money would help, but with family, something will always suck it up. A trip, furniture, house, extracurricular, etc. I wasn’t getting much closer to any semblance of independent wealth, but I was burning myself out.

I’m glad for anyone who can pull it off, but I haven’t met them personally. I have met people who ground themselves down trying, though. It’s a risky endeavour.

You don’t have to go FAANG to earn over 200k here, either. But people will expect you to work for every cent of it, every working hour… and then some. It’s gruelling.

Re: My Life in Weeks

#85
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the best part of it is that there's really only about 4000 weeks for any one of us! It's an interesting metric.

4000 in total. The first ~1000 are spent in the the very limited tutorial area.

> The first ~1000 are spent in the the very limited tutorial area.

I think it's kinda strange that you're saying up to age 19 is "the very limited tutorial area", as if it doesn't count. Up to age 3 or 4, before you have stable memory, perhaps I could understand, but I'm well, well into middle age and I think of some of the time between say 10-19 as the most vivid in terms of my memories, friends, direction of my life, etc.

Re: My Life in Weeks

#86

Woah, look at how sparse our perception of reality is. We really can’t remember a full continuous memory, we constantly make things up to fill in the gaps. One take away here is to constantly and proactively fill up every single second with a positive memory.

That sounds exhausting.

Re: My Life in Weeks

#87
post #30

I immediately recognised the author’s name from Lifehacker in the early 2000s. Enjoyed countless hours reading that.

I recognize it from podcasts. She was a frequent guest on a podcast I used to listen to. Any episode she was on was a good one. If Matt Cutts also appeared, it was doubly good.

Re: My Life in Weeks

#88

Weeks is the most terrifying unit of time to think in. Short enough so you have a good sense of how long it feels but long enough to add up quickly.

Fun fact: Nordic countries use week numbers for all sorts of planning, e.g. vacation period, school events, company planning, statistics reporting, ...

All calendars show week numbers.

Re: My Life in Weeks

#89

From this view it's clear how wasteful ontogeny is. All of that physical and psychological development takes too much valuable time and investment. And we haven't even gotten to Gina's retirement years yet. Clearly the future is in using 3D bioprinting to build fully formed adults as if sprung from the brow of Zeus. Skill and memory transfer are a technical problem only as long as we cling to our bias against our art…

Are you serious?

Re: My Life in Weeks

#90

So much of our life is consumed by work. Seeing your lifespan laid bare like this, there's a perverse instinct to optimize what remains. Have to be more productive, more efficient. But it's a bit like seeing you're bleeding out and deciding to optimize your blood donation schedule, isn't it?

My biggest failure has been not getting an extreme income ( 300k TC a year +) before 30. I had planned to retire by 40 and be done with this work nonsense. Now I'm in my mid 30s and that doesn't seem possible. However I will say if you have a highly variable income ( one year you make 100$ an hour, the next year you have no work), you should max out your 401k during the good times. Having 30k in retirement funds that…

Look for jobs that have a good match and allow Roth megabackdoor. Because having 70k a year in retirement funds is somewhat life changing.
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