Deuce

My phone vibrated and twitched its way across the dining table, like an epileptic in a nightclub.

It precariously hovered on the edge of the precipice. Weighing up whether there was such a thing as too much communication with the outside world? Another incoming message appeared to tip it over the edge. I understood how it felt.

£1,000+ worth of electronics leapt into space. Vibrating a couple of more times as it plunged towards its doom on the hardwood floor. The value proposition of having invested an additional £15 in an off-market phone case was about to be tested. An insurance policy skipped only by the shortsighted or impractically fashion conscious.

Instead of the expected dull thud or sound of shattering glass, an aggrieved yowl echoed from under the table, immediately followed by the sound of the cat flap swinging closed. In a spectacular display of bad luck and poor timing, the lazy cat happened to have chosen that moment to emerge from between the maze of chair legs.

Brained by a weighty object randomly dropped from upon high by some unseen force. Sometimes the gods just have it in for you. I understood how that felt too.

As I bent down to rescue the phone, I experienced a sense of déjà vu.

Two years

Almost two years ago to the day, I had been sitting in the same chair at the same dining table when I had decided on a whim to start { in·deed·a·bly }. Come to think of it, I had even been wearing the same t-shirt as I am today.

The cat had been sulking then too, after being told off for bringing the first of what has proved to be many robins, sparrows, and wrens into the house. All of them very much alive. For the most part uninjured.

Two years is an interesting period of time.

Long enough to not be considered the short term.

Insufficient to be considered the long term.

An in-between duration.

What had I accomplished during those two years? How many bucket list items had I achieved?

Off the top of my head, the trophies and milestones were mostly educational.

I completed two post-graduate qualifications, just for fun.

Operation Gordon successfully secured a viable pathway through the state school system for both my children, which should make it possible for them to gain admission to any university they choose. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for many state secondary schools.

It occurred to me that I had added nothing to my 250 word life story during that time period. I was two years older, but had neither achieved nor changed anything of note.

A curious observation, I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it.

Next, I took a read through my goals list.

The majority of the goalposts listed were behind me. Races already run. Challenges conquered. If I’m entirely honest, there was little remaining on the list that I would be overly bothered by not achieving.

Strangely, I was not particularly troubled by this revelation. I am drifting, but content to do so.

I had long ago outgrown the desire to rule the world.

Dispelled the illusion that success equated climbing the greasy pole or living the largest life.

Lost any interest I may have once had in impressing others, or even caring what they thought.

Professionally I am treading water.

Doing the same thing I had been doing a decade ago. Lucrative, yet unfulfilling.

Which wasn’t all that different to what I had been doing a decade before that.

30 years ago I was a paperboy. Definitely not lucrative! Yet it involved getting plenty of exercise and no stress. Apart from occasionally being attacked by a territorial dog or swooped by a broody magpie! Sometimes it is hard to argue with the suspicion that I should have stayed a paperboy.

My semi-retired lifestyle requires a certain income to sustain it. My preference has long been to minimise the duration of my winter working hibernations by maximising the price at which I sell myself.

This year has been unusual in that regard. In many ways for that matter.

The COVID-19 lockdown has resulted in my working longer and harder than I have in years. My thinking had been that if I couldn’t get out and about, I may as well get paid for staying home. What I hadn’t counted on was the constant juggle of work and homeschooling.

The rational part of my brain tells me that I should step off the treadmill. I don’t really need the money or the stress, so why subject myself to the ordeal?

In hindsight, I would probably be happier working for less while doing something I enjoyed more. A life lesson I have learned and forgotten more times than I would care to admit.

Yet my inner saboteur is warily eyeing the horizon and shouting “make hay while the sun shines”!  A looming tidal wave of unemployment approaches. A pandemic induced recession + hard Brexit + disguised employment changes creating the prospect of a perfect storm likely to see many United Kingdom based white collar professionals warming the bench for an uncomfortably long time.

Solving genuinely interesting tricky problems for clients used to be sufficient. Providing me with a mental challenge. Sometimes a feeling of achievement.

However, in recent years I am increasingly encountering clients who don’t want their problems solved. Instead, they wish to be seen to be doing something, throwing money at problems without any intention of actually resolving them.

This phenomenon has long been the domain of politicians and high priced consultants, but the preference for virtue signalling and style over substance appears to have infected the corporate world.

This yields frustrating and unsatisfying client engagements.

The change I’m observing may well be in myself rather than the corporate world. A realisation about how the world works that once seen, cannot be unseen. The magic forever lost as soon as I peered behind the curtain and saw how things really operate.

Financially too, I have been treading water.

Net worth marginally higher than it had been at the beginning of the blog.

No new money contributed to the portfolio. No capital withdrawn from it either.

The natural yield funding most, but not all, of my family’s lifestyle costs.

I do miss the feeling of tangible progress. Of simpler times when my bank balance was measurably larger one month after the next. Yet when daily market swings shift the needle more than annual earnings, such feelings become a quaint memory of the distant past.

Much like my paper route, I’m not sure the practical realities of that rose coloured reminiscence would make it worth trading places for!

Next stop… destination unknown?

The most interesting thing about my second year of blogging has been observing how the community evolves and how quickly its members turn over.

Bloggers start with much enthusiasm and a head full of ideas. Some fantastic new voices such as Finumus and Banker on FIRE have burst onto the scene offering insight and spurring debate.

Over time, audiences plateau. Some valiantly keep adding value year after year. Monevator and QuietlySaving are great examples.

For others, their publishing cadence slows.

Enthusiasm wanes.

Life happens.

Eventually, other priorities claim the blogger’s time, and their journey comes to an end.

Over the last 12 months, a host of blogs that felt like they were going strong when I started have fallen silent.

• Bangkok to Blighty
• Ditch The Cave
• FireThe9to5
• Fretful Finance
• LittleMissFIRE
• Ms ZiYou
• The Canny Contractor
• The English Investor
• YoungFIGuy

To name just a few. It is an attritional game, blogging.

Another interesting thing is how other blogger’s stories and attitudes have evolved over that period.

TheFIREStarter forever immortalised himself as the poster boy for sequence of returns risk, pulling the trigger on early retirement moments before the coronavirus pandemic swept around the globe.

SavingNinja working his ass off in pursuit of his dream to join the Silicon Valley gold rush… and it appears that his dreams came true, only just around the corner from Kungsträdgården.

Meanwhile, RetireInProgress turned in his shovel, having decided he had mined enough gold.

Another riding the rollercoaster of life has been Gentleman’s Family Finances, who jumped into freelancer life in pursuit of the big bucks, then had the epiphany that some things are more important.

What will year three hold in store for { in·deed·a·bly }?

For now, I’m enjoying the writing and the self-discovery, though not so much my demonstrable lack of follow-through once I observe an issue! While that holds true, I’ll keep pouring the contents of my head onto the keyboard. At 330,000 words and counting, that is a lot of rambling!

I wanted to thank all the readers. So far you have collectively read my ramblings more than 250,000 times, from locations scattered across 161 different countries around the world. That blew my mind when I knocked the dust of my Google Analytics account and ran the report.

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