Being Like Water

My contract with Aalborg Kommune didn’t get extended, and so I am back on sabbatical. Oh well, can’t be too unhappy about that. Like I said in my last blog post, I don’t need the money and I have not yet tried to be without work in the winter, so I am looking forward to trying that.

Since I reached Coast-FIRE (meaning that I am done saving for pension and now only need to work enough to afford my lifestyle) last year my life has naturally been changing with the increased free time. That has given me more time and opportunity to think about how I want to live my life right now. What I’ve arrived at so far is a flexible mindset to life that can be summed up as being like water.

It means that you roll with the punches and pushes that life serves you, and let it direct where you go (unless that is off a bridge or something of course). I don’t mean that you are completely passive and never leave the couch, I mean that you live your life while actively looking for signs of the next place to direct your attention and interest.

Some recent examples from my life of what I mean:

• After we went on vacation late January (to Club La Santa on the Canaries, which I can recommend) my sister, who normally lives in Copenhagen, decided to work from Aalborg for a week and live at my parents place. So I also moved home for a week while she is here. In fact, I am writing this blog post from there right now!
• My good friend Kaj from university has quit his job and moved into his parents' summerhouse, so next week I’ll be visiting him for a few days.
• Taking the job for Aalborg Kommune is a good example as well, I think, as I was actually done working for the year but the way it fell into my lap was just too convenient.
• René has made companies with the same structure as mine (production + holding) and I’ve long thought that I pay too much for accounting, so now I am going to try to do my own accounting and build a small system for automating it as well.

These are all examples of me doing something I hadn’t really planned on doing, but the opportunities came up because of other people's choices, and I just went along with it because that made the activities better / easier than they otherwise would have been.

For this to work you need to expose yourself to opportunities. I do this by regularly talking to people to see what their plans are and what they are interested in, as well as doing my regular social activities like climbing and badminton.

So, yeah. Nothing revolutionary or novel here. It seems to be a good way of living life right now. Obviously a drawback of living like this is that nothing drastic will change. That is fine right now, because I like the general trajectory my life is on, but if I lived like this in the past I would never have started a company, as the starting energy to do that is not something that you just get handed all of a sudden. It requires sustained effort over a long period of time.

If you want to take this thinking a little further (which I always like to do), you can think of being a consumer in capitalism. There are often good and bad times to buy products because of the demand / supply cycle (demand makes prices go up which makes producers scale up supply until supply exceeds demand which makes prices go down). If you can at all wait, you should try to do your buying in the trough of the cycle. For example, RAM is expensive right now (like 3-4x as expensive as normal) because of the AI buildout. It takes a long time to increase RAM supply so it will probably be like this for a few years, so until then you can take the opportunity to be more efficient with your RAM usage. Maybe try out some open-source programs where they care more about resources than Microsoft does. Maybe try out Linux :D

Anyway, that was a sidetrack. One last example: In mid January my altan looked like this. I could have cleared the snow with great effort, or I could take that as a sign from the weather gods that I should stay inside playing Elden Ring instead. Guess what I did.