On Living Well

Spending 40 years of my life working just to buy stuff seems a bit extreme to me. Yet working that much is the norm in the US. It is so ubiquitous that spending all day away from home does not factor into people’s “comfort calculations”—only leather seats and oversized furniture do. However, living is about what you do, not what you have.

Jacob Lund Fisker runs a truly amazing website called Early Retirement Extreme. The site disseminates ideas around the maxim that life is too short to squander on mindless drudgery. Instead he recommends sage financial prudence: frugality, asceticism and sensible investment.

Any one of Jacob’s posts is worth a read and I’d encourage anyone to buy his upcoming book as soon as it’s available. To get you started, I’d point you at this recent post or this concise manifesto. You’ll soon be hooked. In fact, I’m reading the whole website from the first post.

It’s entirely possible to eliminate the need for pointless graft.