I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
As my theme for the week, I’m choosing Being Somebody and Nobody based on a series of dharma talks by Ines Freedman. I listened to these when they came out in May, but going to relisten.
In the third of five talks, she says “There’s a kind of healthy self-esteem that can be equally at ease being nobody, going nowhere, or winning the Nobel Peace Prize.” This aligns with what I was writing about Friday, that you don’t need to seek a feeling of self-esteem or self-worth, or rather, in her formulation, one can have that without looking for evidence in the form of accolades, recognition, and goal achievement.
I’ve reached a sense of enough right now, my activities are enough, what I have — tangible and intangible — is enough; I need not seek for more material goods, achievement, validation. I can just live, with joy and connection and, of course, suffering. Can’t escape that.
Being nobody while sharing more of my ideas and writing
At the same time, there is something else I want to do. I love writing here each morning. I look forward to it when I get out of bed, and I think about what topics I might address in upcoming posts.
But I want to share some of my ideas, especially around investing and retirement and health insurance and planning for a good old age. I haven’t written any newsletter articles lately, but have felt inspired by my older daughter’s newsletter Egghead, where she follows structured rules for each article. Each article includes a recipe, a personal reflection, and a question. She limits the length to “one page of double-spaced Times New Roman 12 point font content.”
I’m thinking of doing something similar on my main newsletter Greensborough Drive, starting this week. My focus will be on midlife-towards-retirement topics: managing investments, obtaining health insurance, tax planning, midlife psychology and philosophy, and more. I will keep the articles short, maybe 750 or 100 words (will write the first one to figure out a good length). I am contemplating including some type of downloadable resource with some of the articles. For example, I am thinking of writing my first article in this series — which may be a “limited series” — about using the 200 day moving average to move in and out of investments, an idea for “Panicans” or those who panic when the stock market starts to correct. I want to write up the idea in more depth and with evidence and references in a separate document from the newsletter article. And I want to use such a download to get new subscribers.
Isn’t this counter to my anti-achievement society position, and my acceptance of being nobody? Well note that Freedman references winning the Nobel Prize. She says you can have self-esteem even when you get one of the most prestigious prizes in the world. Well, of course that’s true. What she didn’t say is that “you can put down your sense that your self matters even if you win the Nobel Prize.” “You can be nobody even if you are celebrated,” in other words.
So why even try to get new subscribers? Because I want to share ideas that can help people, ideas that I wish had been available to me when I needed them, especially the idea that you don’t have to just pick an investment allocation and hold onto it no matter what.
Back to the idea of enough
Why do I feel like my life is enough now and it didn’t feel like enough when I started this project?
Because now I have a set of activities that add up to a full life:
- Lap swimming three or four times a week
- Walking my dog Bo, and a foster dog if I have one
- Fostering dogs on their way to their adoptive homes
- Blogging each morning here – studying ideas from philosophers, psychologists, and other thinkers
- Trading options
- Developing a portfolio allocation and management approach that suits me
- Building a software system to support my options trading and my portfolio management practices
- Regular social events with family and friends
- Making art as a creative outlet rather than to show it, win awards, sell it
I guess I am wanting to add one more activity: sharing what I’m figuring out about managing a retirement portfolio. But even if I didn’t do that, I would still feel satisfied.
Happy Sunday to you!