Life Archives - Page 2 of 14

March 28, 2024March 28, 2024

A Therapist on Satisfaction in Sport, Life, and Love

If you haven’t noticed, the concept of achievement and even competitiveness has weighed heavily on my mind as of late. A gift of the nontraditional life is the opportunity to step back and see the world around us with a degree of unusual clarity, far from the treadmill. For years I valued athletic and professional progress in ways that weren’t making my life better, but I thought they were. I searched for and implemented solutions to the wrong problems. Meanwhile, what truly mattered—mainly my relationships—withered on the vine. The journey toward rectifying these tendencies continues today.

My guest today, Lincoln Stoller, is a former mountaineer who now specializes in psycho-, hypno-, and neurofeedback therapy, in tandem with numerous other counseling and coaching services. Lincoln holds a PhD in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics from UT Austin, including a post-doc assignment at UC Berkley. Lincoln eventually moved from quantum physics to create a management and automation software platform for businesses, learned to build Norwegian log homes, traveled and lived abroad in far-flung foreign lands, and is even a certified pilot. To say Lincoln lives well outside of the bounds of normalcy is probably a half-truth at best. As he says in the interview, we should “just keep doing out-of-the-box stuff. And if people aren’t calling you a little crazy or a little nutty, then you probably aren’t exploring enough of the boundaries.”

Today’s conversation revolves around the high-risk potential of hard-charging performers and achievers, whether they exist in sports, business, or other areas of life. While these individuals hold our collective attention and admiration, Lincoln outlines how their psychological roots run shallow. They often struggle to stay satisfied with themselves or those around them. Lincoln might even say he holds an anti-hard-man philosophy. I think you’ll see why.

March 18, 2024March 15, 2024

All Work and No Play Makes You…Normal

The concept of play conjures the image of my three-year-old (and blonder) self, plastic shovel in hand, amorphous stains down the front of my pants. And certainly slobber. Lots of slobber. That three-year-old was certainly not concerned with social hierarchy or status, lacking a whiff of ambition to put the best version of himself forward. He played with a shovel in the sand because something needed to be dug and that was all that mattered.

As we age (and start to exhibit bladder control) the nature of play changes but is not altogether lost, at least not at first. Instead of digging in the sand, we might play a game of Twister, something I played as late as my college years. I challenge you to toss out that board on the floor—putting your head through someone else’s legs—and try and stay serious and stoic. It’s impossible. You’ll be giggling like a child. And that’s the point. We need more play.

February 28, 2024February 29, 2024

Four Years of Financial Independence: The Slow Growth

For four years I’ve watched something slowly bloom. In my old life, the “before time” you might call it, I moved from task to task. If I wasn’t working, I unknowingly made a practice of turning recreational or hobbyist pursuits into something that, from an outsider’s perspective, looked an awful lot like work. Goals and accolades were everything, and the more quantifiable, the better. But the farther I’ve separated myself from this life in space and time, the more clarity I’ve gained.

Grasping for metaphors, I was tempted to explain this budding awareness as a slowly growing flower. But for perhaps all the wrong reasons, I hesitated to describe my growth and awareness as floral, preferring to drop the metaphor. But I can’t quite shake it, because I have watched something slowly grow. It’s not me that has bloomed–again, all the wrong imagery–but it is the world I could not see then. I could not see the flawed logic buried in the cold and wet earth because I identified with it. It was my life, so I could not reject what protected me. And four years later I’ve watched something slowly take root.

February 12, 2024February 11, 2024

The Psychology Behind Poor Investments and Other Important Decisions

When we make important decisions, we are often not as rational or objective as we’d like to believe. The base rate fallacy is the tendency to misjudge the probability of a situation by not accounting for all relevant information. This cognitive bias affects everything from first impressions to voting preferences to broad market behavior.

January 22, 2024January 21, 2024

QA12: Will A Life Of Financial Independence Meet Expectations?

We’re back to the digital mailbag to answer your questions!

For this week:

An update on markets and our personal finance situation
The role of dividends in growth and withdrawal assumptions
Expectations vs reality on a life of financial independence
Our experience with health insurance without employer-sponsored plans
Real estate investing: an update on our experiences and economics as remote landlords
Health insurance considerations for long-term travel
Short- to medium-term savings goals (like a house) versus saving for retirement
Loss of purpose without a traditional job
So much more!

January 8, 2024January 9, 2024

Facing the Rest of the World with a Nontraditional Lifestyle

When I left my corporate career in early 2020, I didn’t fully understand the ways that I would, in later years, slowly become decoupled and desynchronized from a society that values hustle, status, and self-worth generated to a large degree around our career titles. You’ll read the same thing repeatedly on the internet: Ignore the haters, do your thing.

But when I actually sit down and talk with those who are living a similar nontraditional lifestyle, regardless of their financial position, I find that the tidy internet talking points leave many of us dissatisfied. After all, humans are one of the most social species on the planet. We shouldn’t be surprised by the difficulty in overriding instinct, to go against the grain of what the herd values most. My thinking has evolved dramatically on this subject in recent years, so let’s dig in.

December 26, 2023December 25, 2023

“The Rewards of Being in One Place for a While” (Meghan Walker and Callan Cooper)

By popular demand, I’ve decided to extend a travel series centered around the topic of building community or maintaining our need for social interactions when away from home. Community building is especially complicated when abroad, where cultures and languages vary considerably from our own. My guests today, veteran travelers with considerable expat experiences, are perfectly suited to discuss this topic.

Meghan Walker, a previous guest who writes at awaytofi.com, spent many of her formative years living abroad in Kenya and New Zealand. Her husband, Callan Cooper, is an expat living in the United States from New Zealand, where they met. Meghan and Callan joined me in my home in Colorado for a rare in-person interview, where we discussed in detail the beauty and challenges of international extended travel, careers, evolving travel philosophies, and financial tactics that can have you living a similar life much sooner than you think.

November 6, 2023November 5, 2023

Uncertainty Is Forever (And That’s Good News)

Uncertainty is a fact of life, yet we yearn for known outcomes. Every day we make decisions. Some decisions are small and inconsequential, while others are profound and life-altering. Sometimes events happen regardless of our decisions. And above it all and looming like a nervous wind is uncertainty. Uncertainty is forever.

But those who learn to sit with and embrace uncertainty are resilient and innovative. Those who try to fight uncertainty spend more money and live with less contentment.

October 23, 2023October 22, 2023

James McHaffie: From Bold Climbing to Novel Writing

James McHaffie needs no introduction, at least in the United Kingdom. His approach to bold onsight climbing, particularly free solos, is unparalleled. He’s repeated the hardest sport climb in Wales, Big Bang (9a), sent Britain’s hardest sea cliff, Dave MacLeod’s The Longhope Direct (E10 7a), and made the first ascent of The Meltdown, a 9a slab in the slate quarries of his home in North Wales. And now he’s written a book. But unlike many books released by elite climbers, this is not an autobiographical account of hard climbs in the face of relative adversity. Caff, as he prefers to be called, has written a fictional account of Eleri, a young woman amongst the slate quarries of North Wales who in the aftermath of a family suicide takes aim at British politicians who pushed for austerity and the conditions that led to such suffering.

This conversation was such a gift. I can see even through all that rage that James is brimming with humanity, a trait sometimes in short supply. I hope you’ll enjoy this one as much as I did.

October 16, 2023October 15, 2023

Mini Episode: Is the Best Life Lived at Home?

Years ago, we decided to one day try living abroad for at least a year. We always loved traveling and also always felt that we never had enough time to truly experience a place beyond the superficial. I wanted to stay for a while, learn the language, and slowly morph into a new life mode. But now I’m starting to question the wisdom of this decision. Is living abroad a bad idea?