2 Things I Relearned This Week That Make Living The Semi-Retired Life The Best Thing Ever

And, no, you do not read "430 other Substacks"

When someone subscribes to the newsletter, I receive an email notification.

If the new subscriber reads other Substacks, the email points this out.

No. You don’t read 430 other Substacks. I’m sorry. You’re a Substack collector.

Fine and good, but the last thing we want—readers, authors, those of us who do both—is for Substack to turn into the follow-for-a-follow fiasco Twitter is and has always been.

For the record, 430 is nothing. I regularly receive notifications that say the subscriber reads close to 1,000 Substacks. Not possible.

While I get personal in all of my writing, I get more personal—and will continue to up the ante in this regard—on Substack. To paid subscribers.

This isn’t to say I don’t value genuinely free subscribers. I do.

But it is to say, I’m on a journey in my life, with a mid-range and long-term goal. To Never Retire, with my partner, probably in Spain. Chronicling this journey with you is—by far—my most favorite work of the small handful of things I do.

Maybe you’re on a similar path or my story and writing just resonates with you. Either way, I feel like we’re forming a community of people here who feel something is inherently wrong with typical American life. I know this from the response I receive.

You are super passionate about the core topics we discuss: cost of living, saving, housing, place, culture, public life, travel, food and the ultimate culmination of the aforementioned things, living the semi-retired life. Whether you do it now or have set it as a goal.

To me, this is what community is all about. A convergence of thoughts and ideas from a set of people who see eye-to-eye, but don’t always agree. You might not live the way I live in response to a society we generally agree is physically, mentally and financially unhealthy. But we get each other. We’re on similar wavelengths, if not trajectories.

Each one of us lives and/or wants to live life differently, whether it’s in the United States and eventually Spain for me, or wherever you reside now and might reside in the future.

That’s at the core of the value of a paid subscription to the Never Retire: Living The Semi-Retired Life newsletter. We’re on our own distinct journeys that fall under the same diverse umbrella. We’re taking—and talking about—these journeys together.

I am committed to writing this newsletter till the day I die. So, if a week goes by and you don’t hear from me, there might be something seriously wrong.

Therefore—

Speaking of the handful of things I do for work—

I’m happy to announce that, if things stay on the current pace, my income from Substack will soon surpass what I make, in a typical month, on Medium. Still, I do other work that produces more income than what happens to be my two favorite endeavors. The ultimate goal is to not do anything else and only do Substack and Medium.

I get at the reasons for this goal as we discuss my other work and how, over the last week, I relearned two super critical things, central to living your best semi-retired life.