Living The Semi-Retired Life: Bad Days And Building Community
The other day I had an off day. A relatively bad day. One of those days when a confluence of factors puts you in a bad mood.
Everything I wrote was shit. (Or so I thought). And I didn’t really feel like working. Not even in one of my 1-to-3 hour quick bursts.
When this happens, I piecemeal my work more than usual. I target 2-3 things to get done. Because I know if I don’t, I’ll end up in an even worse mood. It’s not about the work not getting done. That happens from time to time when I’m in my normal good and positive mood. It’s just that if a bad mood stopped me from getting what I set out to do done, it would bring me down even more.
Maybe you can relate?
Anyhow, when I got what I set out to do done, I reflected for a little while. And came to the conclusion that, while it’s perfectly fine to get down on occasion, you can’t wallow in it. Focus on the good shit and make more good shit happen.
Which led to me think about Sunday’s well-received newsletter post.
If you haven’t read it, here it is—
The more I think about the things I said in that post—and considered the response to it—the more I feel like we really are building a nice little community here. A community where we share a broad view of life and the world, but differ in how we think about individual issues; what our goals in life are; and how, when, where and why we hope to achieve them.
As I noted in that post, I want to make Substack my primary source of work, alongside Medium. I legitimately plan on writing this newsletter until the day I die. I’ll be 48 in July and plan on living until I’m 100, so that’s—at least—a solid 52 years. It will be pretty fucking cool if I write a “I just turned 100 post” and a solid chunk of you are here to read it!
Anyhow, in the spirit of making this a community, I’m finally enabling Substack Chat.
I hesitated at first because when Substack introduces a new feature, many authors rush to use it. So you get a bunch of emails all at once telling you that everybody you subscribe to just enabled chat.
I prefer to see how the dust settles and take it from there, looking for an opportunity to work each new feature into the natural flow of my writing.
While you can access Chat via the web, Substack encourages using its mobile app.
So—
In a few minutes after you receive this email, I will make my first post to Substack Chat. From there, I will make a post from time to time, however, I encourage subscribers to take the lead.
Only paid subscribers will be able to start new Chat threads. However—unless I’m reading the rules wrong—everybody can contribute to active threads.
The initial thread I’m about to start asks three questions. I’m basically asking you to introduce yourself to your fellow subscribers!
Where are you on your journey? Where do you live? Do you consider yourself semi-retired? If so, what does that look like? And anything else to illustrate your situation.
Where do you want to be in 5, 10, 15 years? For example, in less than five years, I want to be living in Spain, working about half as much as I do now. I hope to live this version of the semi-retired life into and well beyond relative old age.
On a day when you did something—in your thought process or materially—to get closer to where you want to be, tell everybody what it was. Either on the original thread or, if you’re a paid subscriber, by starting a new one. I hope this can be a nice way to cultivate one of the main benefits of community—sharing and support.
Whenever you ask for this level of input, it runs the risk of falling flat. If it does, so be it. As I write this, I think it’s a good idea that can enhance the value of the newsletter.
So I’ll see you in Substack Chat!
This is Barcelona. Basically on the edge of the Eixample neighborhood. A nice visualization of where my partner and I would love to be living within a few years.