On blogging
My old blog is still up. I ran a personal finance blog for several years, with the focus on the lifestyle aspects of self-imposed frugality.
I wanted to answer the question: What happens to your life when you aren’t spending as much as your peers?
I lived out the answer. Which turned out to be complicated.
The high level summary: It can erode certain connections with certain friends who are living large and don’t understand why you are not. It can take up a lot of headspace — saving and investing takes time and energy and thought. You may want to talk about this with your peers, but they may not be interested because they are instead thinking of ways to spend their money — travel, restaurants, home improvements, female escort services.
Congratulations, your lifestyle differences are now ruining your friendships.
On the plus side you may be motivated to seek out new people, with the goal of developing more meaningful relationships — relationships that aren’t based on consumption patterns. Maybe bookclub friends or running-group friends or a tabletop gaming group.
And on another plus side you will, undoubtedly, later in life, feel more or less secure financially. Those same friends who were living large are still living large but now you are all 45 instead of 30. You are getting older, you are thinking maybe you don’t want to work forever. You have health issues. You have issues with the consistency of your energy. Maybe you are also deathly tired of your job, now that you’ve been doing it for twenty years straight or more. Maybe you want to do something else. Or you are even thinking about retirement in ten years.
If you’ve been saving, you have options available to you. Early retirement may be on the menu. If you haven’t been, you may be forced to continue working as long as you can — or as long as your industry lets you. It’s interesting to view the accumulated results of lifestyle differences between friends after two or three decades of working and living.
Enough with the blog topic summary. The last post I made was in March of 2021. I took time off from work to see what it would feel like and I wanted to share how it went. And that was complicated too. Having oodles of free time was at once liberating and self-expanding — and also lonely, horrifying, bleak. Some of the bleakness came from the dissolution of my long-term relationship, a woman I lived with for 10 years, almost married, and then eventually broke up with. It took me a while to date again. I convinced myself I was fine by myself, alone – but I wasn’t. I couldn’t figure out how to spend my time. There was too much of it.
I realized that I am the kind of person that needs structure. And I am also the kind of person that needs a partner to care for. Someone around to love me and distract me. Someone to put first in my life. Someone to fill in some of the myriad blank spaces in myself, to provide some meaning outside of always trying to pursue my own goals and pleasures. So I wrote about these challenges, trying my best to be open and honest and vulnerable. It was well received in the community, 500 comments, 400K non-bot page views.
Since that post the blog has sat there, stagnating.
Now and then it comes up in my thoughts, though. This time of year I see charges on my credit card for the hosting provider. $22 domain renewal. $110 wordpress annual subscription to eliminate the ads.
I wonder: Should I take it down?
People still look at it from time to time. I have no idea if the content is even helpful anymore. But I feel connected to it.
If I don’t take it down, should I post again? I still have a lot to say about the effect various financial decisions have on of our lives. Experiences of my own to relate perhaps.
I can never make a decision about it one way or another, so the blog stays up, year after year, getting crusty and old, no-new-content, a relic of the pre-phone-culture internet when bloggers were a lot more popular than they are today.
Last Friday I brought up the blog with my therapist. I said I was thinking about posting again.
He asked why I haven’t posted in three years and I said well, it takes a lot of time.
Surely that’s not the real reason, he said. You told me once before that you had finished some posts but didn’t publish them. You had time to write those. What stops you from making new content live?
A whole lot of shit. Paranoia about how posts will be received mostly. A feeling that everything I do is wrong. That my opinions are wrong, my decisions are wrong, my feelings are wrong.
All we have is our own experiences and perceptions of the world. Someone else’s wrong is your right.
True. But if I post something, and the people who don’t like what I have to say start leaving comments and complaining — I feel compelled to respond and engage, and this is often exhausting. I feel like I’m under a microscope when this happens.
Did you feel this way when you started blogging?
In the early stages, it was different. Nobody read the fucking thing. It was like writing columns and sending them out into space. So the pressure wasn’t there. No comments, no readers, no problems.
When did it change?
After about two years, I got a decent readership. And at first, this was thrilling. I had done all of this work, generated a hundred articles, and suddenly those posts had comments on them, were linked to by other bloggers, were discussed on reddit. I kept up posting twice a month for a while after that — a couple more years — but became burnt out. I became tired of the sharing. And many people became critical of some of my choices. Yes, I know, it’s the internet, where you can always find people who hate you — it’s a recognized national past time nowadays, trolling and shitposting — but some of the attacks were personal. I wrote one post about divesting your portfolio from major gun manufacturers, for example — this was after the Parkland shooting — and got vitriolic comments from some people, even a couple of death threats. That might have been the beginning of the end. It really reduced my drive to want to share anything.
Did you fear for your safety?
Not really. But I felt ashamed somehow. I felt like people were branding me as some kind of social justice warrior and I don’t see myself that way. It made me embarrassed to voice opinions that were so strongly hated by certain people and sections of the internet. I felt like I just didn’t want to be involved anymore.
If you feel this way, what’s in it for you anymore then? What’s the conflict?
Maybe I just miss the attention, I say, laughing at myself. I have never been a natural attention seeker. The blog was anonymous. I don’t like sharing details about my life to others, most of the time. I have a facebook page that I update literally once a year, if that. I’m not that into social media.
But to answer your question a different way, I felt relevant. And made good connections with some readers.
Would you say that it provided meaning?
Yes. After a while the blog was tied to my identity. I thought about ideas for posts when I was out and about, took notes for articles, had several cooking at the same time — I found it to be interesting. Fatiguing too, but engaging. I mean particularly toward the end of my relationship with Serina (my ex) — when that was going off the rails, the blog was one of the main ways that I derived pleasure and satisfaction from the world. I felt like I still had something.
But it eventually became a weight that I couldn’t carry. The feelings of shame increased after the breakup — I felt like I was living this lie — that I had to get on my blog and write and pretend I was happy when inside I was crumbled and broken from the emotional carpet-bombing from Serina, rubble and debris on my internal superhighways.
Do you think you’ve recovered sufficiently from that to blog again?
I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t think I’ll ever be as strong and sure of myself as I was back then. Now I’m old, forty seven, looking at the back 9 of my life. I’m on antidepressants and exercise purely for the mood boosts. I struggle with consistent energy. I struggle to feel right about anything like I used to feel. And I alternate between wanting to share details about my life — to connect — and wanting to become a hermit who never shares a fucking thing.
Above all I feel ashamed about wanting to even share. There’s a line in a Steven Wilson song called 12 Things I Forgot that sums it up.
I forgot what it was that i was. There was a time when I had some ambition. Now i just seem to have inhibitions.
The inhibitions are likely a function of your childhood trauma coupled with the trauma from the breakup with Serina.
Yeah. I know. I can still remember my father telling me I can’t write, or shouldn’t write. That I should do a STEM career instead, make money instead of being poor. Forget my dreams. Focus on the practical. I remember showing him As on my English papers and expecting him to be proud. Instead he would tell me to not have a big head. One of my teachers, Mrs. Kane, in my sophomore year of high school, wrote the following in the margins of a story I submitted for creative writing: you have an uncommon gift for flow. I showed this to my Dad and he cuffed me, told me to work on Chemistry, where I only had a B+ish average. Told me the praise of an English teacher isn’t worth a damn.
He still does it. Gets mad when I show anything resembling ego or pride. I remember when I was 30 and I hit half a million on my net worth and I told him. It was the first time I had shared anything about how I was doing financially with him. He told me to never talk about money with anyone, said he didn’t want to know, said it should be 100% private to myself.
He minimized your achievement.
Yes.
And made you feel ashamed for bringing it up and sharing it.
Yes.
Did you dwell on that conversation for a long time?
I wish I could say no. A healthy person would immediately move on. But yeah, I thought about it a lot. He wanted me to be dependent on him. Didn’t like facts which seemed to show that maybe I had done some things right in my life. That I was accumulating money, that I had a modest degree of success. If I am successful, do I still need him? He is a man that wants to be needed so badly.
But internally I had trouble getting over it. When I was a teenager he urged me at every turn to focus my energy on landing a job in a decent paying career — to forgo dreams and pleasures and work I might enjoy to instead pursue work that paid and would give me security, status. Then I shared that I’d achieved some security and status — the things he wanted most for me! — and instead of making him happy, it upset him. He criticized me, shut me down.
I see a parallel here. No matter what you tell your Dad, the response seems to be negative.
Right. He has a need to withhold approval. And by withholding approval, I feel ashamed for sharing whatever it was that I shared.
Do you think this is his goal?
I thought about it. My Dad is someone with a lot of his own demons. A currently dry alcoholic. Anger problems. Hard of hearing. Limited access to emotions he considers to be “not manly.” Wishes he did better in life — bitter sometimes. A failed marriage with my mother. Completely failed parenting his three children. My brother is a mental-case and a deadbeat, my sister is 45, unmarried, poor. Physical and mental abuse to kids under the age of 10 will mess them up. Did he do any of this on purpose? Not exactly. He did it on auto-pilot. His father did these things to him — told him life is hard, get a job that pays, toughen up, be a man — so he did them to us. I don’t think he had specific intent.
No. I think it’s his goal to feel that he still has some control over me and if he provides approval then he loses some authority — some ability to tell me what to do and how to live. He might lose some of his identity as a parent, which is, as he understands it, mostly a duty to tell me all the ways I’m fucking up in life, to nitpick and nag.
We’re at the end of our session. Are you going to post anything this week?
The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, I tell him. And my behavior for the past three years is to not post anything, so probably not.
Ahh, but your past prior to that was regular posting. And we’re still talking about your way-back past — your childhood, from thirty years ago — affecting your behavior today. So which past best predicts the future?
I’ll tell you next week.
J and I watched a one-season show called Carol at the end of the world. It’s a cartoon but it’s not a comedy. Adult themed but not in the nude way.
Pretense: Another planet is on a collision course with Earth. Life will end in six months. What do you do?
Carol’s a middle aged single woman. While most of the people in her life and, seemingly, the world, run off to pursue raw pleasure in the form of travel and food and sex and breathtakingly wild and risky experiences (paragliding, hard drugs that do permanent damage), Carol decides to get an office job. She doesn’t get the same return from the hedonic life as so many others. Maybe she’s inhibited. Maybe she has trouble identifying her own wants. Whatever the reason, she thrives on structure. Knowing where to be every day — who you will talk to, what you will have for lunch, what is expected of you — it calms her down, reduces her anxiety, even gives her some purpose and meaning. You can clearly see that Carol has a “what is the point of this” attitude when it comes to, say, flying to Peru to check out Machu Pichu. Everyone tells her over and over again shit like
oh you simply MUST fly to Tibet! It’s so beautiful
And the food in Venice, wow, the peoples and cultures are so amazing and wonderful you must go
You can see it written on her face and her enormous, expressive cartoon eyes — she finds the consumption of so much raw experience to be off putting, exhausting, and devoid of meaning or connection. She has trouble affirming people who go on and on about their experiences. Perhaps it feels like bragging to her? At any rate, she cannot connect with them. People run around frantically trying to experience more more more before the end of the world — to simultaneously create their bucket lists and cross every item off with breathtaking speed —
And then, juxtaposed, is poor Carol, trying to experience less less less.
It reminded me of an article I read a long time ago about someone who made five million in software at the age of 30. They stuck the money into some account and were able to spend 3% of that a year very safely– 150K, an astonishing amount of money. So this guy, single and relatively young, traveled the world. For like five years. Said fuck it to the office life, to structure. Lived the dream. Then went home and no longer had any idea how to live.
His comments at the end: After a while the experiences all run together and you are left thinking about your life and what led up to the travel. The people in your journeys come and go. But when you go home you realize you don’t have the same connections with the people you left behind either. You can’t relate. They’ve been working and raising families — they’re in a completely different state of existence now. And it’s a world where you don’t belong. In a sense I was still traveling, but through my hometown this time, suspended by balloons, floating around as the wind directed, unable to touch down to earth, to become grounded again. I felt spectral, like I couldn’t connect with anything or anyone. It took years to re-establish some sense of being grounded. I had to get a job again, form new routines, make new friends — easier said than done when you are closing in on 40.
And I realized, that’s where the real action is in life. Routines and people and repeated connections and grinding through it, knowing that everything will be there for you again the next day, and the next.
His words haunted me, because it means that the fantasy solution to life’s problems — a permanent vacation — isn’t a solution at all. It means that there is no solution. Not money, not an abundance of free time, not travel, not orgies and feasts.
The real solution is to accept that there is no solution.
There is also an episode of Carol where she hangs out with her outgoing and adventurous sister Elena, an obvious foil.
Elena wants to share everything. She has a GoPro and it’s always on. This irritates Carol, who wants to talk without being recorded.
Carol feels their conversations will be more authentic if there’s no audience.
Elena feels that without an audience, the experiences and conversations have no meaning. (She would probably agree that a tree falling in a forest without anyone around to notice does not make a sound.)
It’s an interesting question, though. Have we now entered a world where experiences that are not shared are no longer real?
I woke up yesterday and read the front page of WaPo which had the following timely article.
If you didn’t share a recap video, did 2023 even happen?
Which is a rephrase of pics or it didn’t happen of course.
It’s difficult to pinpoint reasons why Carol has trouble with sharing. She appears to just naturally be shy. But in today’s world we don’t take that character trait at face value any more. We look for reasons. A bully in college? Bad experiences with sharing in the past? A father who told her to not listen to her inner voice?
I have this in common with Carol: We both struggle with the idea of being seen by strangers.
But we both also want to be real.