But it's not "nothing to show for it" if you use the subscriptions... people pay money to go to a movie, go out to dinner, go to the gym, etc. When you leave each of those venues, do you think you have nothing to show for it? Okay, maybe the movie was bad, or the meal was poorly prepared. Hopefully, most of the time, you enjoyed the experience and it fortified you mentally (and even physically, if the meal was nutritious and the gym workout was a good one). The same applies for any of these subscription services. You get value while you are paying. It is not nothing :)
"If their interaction with the Catholic students seemed like an expression of bigotry toward white people, some of their most vile language is reserved for black people in the communities where they preach."
"The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, categorized at least 80 groups nationwide that follow Hebrew Israelite theology as hate groups."
Would you rather that NY Times not report on confrontations like this?
Please do not be discouraged. You can't always beat dumb luck, but you can certainly fight it. Also, there's a saying: "you make your own luck". It sounds glib, but there's some truth to it.
If there is anything at all that you can do to automate parts of the unpleasant tasks that I have to do, I try to do that. Sometimes it takes quite a bit of thought to figure out a way to automate something, and sometimes it's staring you in the face. Anything you can do to shave off time from these tasks is probably worth the effort.
Another thing to do is to delegate them if possible. As an example, some people really dislike keeping their houses clean, so they'll hire someone to do that. Obviously, YMMV, and it may be that you cannot afford to delegate a task, or there's some other problem (e.g. you cannot offload work onto another freelancer due to an NDA, etc.).
It may be tough for people to give advice, because I think your options are going to vary a lot, depending on where you live.
The first thing I'd recommend, though, is that you keep track of all your expenses, if you aren't doing this already. This gives you the starting point for deciding how much money you really need to make in order to live the way that you want. Please keep in mind that expenses can increase as you age: for example, health insurance premiums can skyrocket depending on where you live, and things like hearing aids, expensive dental work, and so on, may not be covered by insurance. You may not want to worry about this stuff now, or maybe you'll get lucky. Anyway, if you track your expenses now, at least you'll have a handle on what you need for the immediate future, barring unforeseen emergencies.
A few years back, my goal was very similar to yours. I started tracking every single expense to figure out how much money I actually needed to survive per year. As someone else mentioned, you can amass a pile of money and live off the income stream from that, provided you trust the "4% rule" or one of its variants. Take a look at these blogs:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/blog/ - guy who worked and made a chunk of money, continues to work on his own fun projects that make an income stream
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/ - guy who lived a really lean lifestyle with just a small income stream (iirc 4 h/w doing jobs off craigslist) (but then he went to work for a hedge fund, iirc).
Anyway, seems like you want to check out the last link first.
You may also want to read "Your Money or Your Life" by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin.
Someone else mentioned Timothy Ferriss' "Four Hour Work Week". I agree that it can be helpful, but I think he makes it sound easier than it actually is to set up a small lifestyle business. So I'd suggest reading it for inspiration more than anything else. Also it's a bit outdated.
I think maybe what you're asking is this: you don't want a FT job because you don't really need all the money you'd make from a FT job. You'd rather have much more free time, and screw the FT job. If this is what you're asking, definitely check out the retire early extreme guy.
I'm sure you're aware that you might change over time and may suddenly discover a passion for sports cars, a spouse, travel, or whatever. So, if you can squirrel away any extra money, it won't hurt. Just keep that in mind, it can happen.
"especially as you mature and people aren't always getting on your nerves so much"
I found that as I got older, people got on my nerves more! The first few times people did something annoying, it was like, "whatever". After the 100th time, it was like "here we go again", and I was getting ready to explode. The only thing I found that helped was avoiding such people, and when you're forced to rub shoulders with them due to work constraints, it can lead to a lot of stress.
Regarding "freedom of will": I quit my job when I accumulated about $500K in net worth. (Needless to say, I did not live in SV. However, my rent was about $1200/mo.)
The day after I quit my job and I didn't have to go in to work anymore, I felt such an extreme sense of joy that I don't think I ever felt in my life. At the time, my feeling was that "the exercise of free will" was the cause of this bliss - similar to what you're saying about freedom of will.
I didn't have to report to anyone, there was literally nothing that I had to do which did not come from within me.
This feeling lasted for about a year. I moved to a cheaper rental. My cash runway lasted about 5 years, and I felt really pretty good about life for the first 2-3 years. After that, I started to become more worried about whether I'd have to go back to work, or what kind of life I'd be able to live without that.
What I'm trying to say is that you can get to the freedom of will state with far less than $1M. It may not last forever. But I highly recommend doing it. It may be especially sweet for people like me, who have delayed gratification for decades.
Are you aware of intersex people? This is why the editors of Nature are correct in saying the proposal has no foundation in science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex How do people with ambiguous traits at birth get categorized according to such a proposal?
It's kind of mental accounting for the employee, though. The law firm is basically giving you an extra $100 or whatever per paycheck. However, this $100 is earmarked to pay off your law school debt, so in effect the company is helping to pay for your training.
The nice part for the company is that they do not take on any risk paying for the training: the employee already shouldered all the risk for paying for law school. The company buys a little bit of loyalty by helping the employee pay off the debt over time. It probably makes the employee think twice before quitting or looking for other employment; it is similar to the health insurance benefit in that respect.
Prior to reading the book, I had a retire-early mindset. My idea was to work hard at high paying jobs and save a lot so I could retire early. After reading the book, I had the idea to create multiple streams of income in order to achieve the goal of retiring early.
Others have mentioned that it's not easy to find a lifestyle business that earns you enough income to live off of, and I've also had that problem. However, I've had partial success. I don't think I'd have ever pursued this path without reading 4HWW. It's not an instruction manual, though.
When looking at someone like Dr Seuss who kept trying after numerous failures, you also have to consider that there's an opportunity cost to doing what he did. Note: his story "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" was rejected 27 times before being accepted:
https://www.npr.org/2012/01/24/145471724/how-dr-seuss-got-hi...
Maybe if he'd been rejected 100 times, it would have been worth thinking about trying something else?
Also, if you follow the above link, you find that Dr Seuss admitted it was sheer luck that he got published. He was ready to give up! '"He bumped into a friend ... who had just become an editor at a publishing house in the children's section," McLain explains. Geisel told the friend that he'd simply given up and planned to destroy the book, but the editor asked to take a look... "He said if he had been walking down the other side of the street, he probably would never have become a children's author," McLain says.'
I'm guessing, but I'd think that for most people, getting rejected after trying the _same thing_ 100 times probably means that your product is not good. So giving up after some reasonable number of tries, and pursuing _something else_, is often the better course. If you have nothing better to do, and don't mind failing in the end, then you can keep trying, too!
The problem then is trying to figure out when to quit, and when to keep trying at the same thing. Some people have faith in themselves because they know that their product is great. But it's hard to tell the difference between justified self-confidence and unjustified self-delusion.
> In 1971, Terry Ellis, the co-founder of Chrysalis Records, paid him a flat $1,500 fee for the three paintings which would comprise the album’s artwork
It is too bad he didn't negotiate a royalty agreement, but then they might not have given him the work, either.
FWIW if he had invested $1000 in the S&P 500 on January 1 of 1972, that investment would be worth about $100K today, according to some online calculators that I tried.
Granted, investing is a lot easier, now that online brokerages exist. It was probably not something that many artists did back in the '70s.
> The health effects of specific types of fats depended on what people were replacing them with, the researchers found... people who replaced saturated fats with unsaturated fats—especially polyunsaturated fats—had significantly lower risk of death overall ... People who replaced saturated fats with carbohydrates had only slightly lower mortality risk. In addition, replacing total fat with carbohydrates was associated with modestly higher [my emphasis] mortality. This was not surprising, the authors said, because carbohydrates in the American diet tend to be primarily refined starch and sugar, which have a similar influence on mortality risk as saturated fats.
This analysis is also based on the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. Apparently, Stampfer finds the Nurses’ Health Study credible enough to support his conclusions.
> Eggs - full with cholesterol and choline, illegal to advertise them as healthy or safe in the US
This pdf from the USDA says "Eggs are among the most nutritious foods on earth and can be part of a healthy diet". True, the pdf then goes on in great detail about the potential health hazards:
https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/wcm/connect/5235aa20-fee1-4e5b...
The American Egg Board pretty much states they are wonderful for your health: https://www.eggnutritioncenter.org/egg-nutrition-basics
> Eggs fit into the healthy dietary patterns recommended by public health organizations.
> The high-quality protein in an egg is essential for building and maintaining lean body mass
Okay, I suppose it is possible that Krauss does "research" as opposed to research. This is what the article says about it: "The [meta-]analysis, overseen by Ronald M. Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, found no association between the amount of saturated fat consumed and the risk of heart disease."
So do you dispute this result? I was in fact under the impression that recent studies say saturated fat is not really bad, especially if it is not paired with highly processed carbs. Trans fats, OTOH, are extremely bad. Trans fats occur in small quantities in meat, FWIW.
Note that the Scientific American article cites several different studies and scientists, e.g. "Meir Stampfer, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health" (is Stampfer also in the pocket of the beef industry?):
> A 1997 study [Stampfer] co-authored in the Journal of the American Medical Association evaluated 65,000 women and found that the quintile of women who ate the most easily digestible and readily absorbed carbohydrates—that is, those with the highest glycemic index—were 47 percent more likely to acquire type 2 diabetes than those in the quintile with the lowest average glycemic-index score. (The amount of fat the women ate did not affect diabetes risk.)
I suppose you could accuse McDougall of bias; after all he does run a business around his diet. I wouldn't go that far, though.