Hey, it's Brad. Before we get started with the episode, I wanted to pass along some incredibly exciting news in the Chooseify world. As we talked about on a previous episode, Jonathan has spent the last couple of years building something incredible, and we actually just rolled it out. This is our brand new Chooseify member site. It's obviously entirely free to sign up for. We're hoping this will take the place
of our Facebook groups, both for the main Facebook group and especially for our local groups. So how this is going to work, you just go to our main homepage, choosefi.com, and you will see front and center, register, sign up for an account, log in. It's really, really easy. We made it as simple as possible. So right now, Jonathan is...
building this in public. Every single day, he posts an update with the 20 or 30 things that he updated from the last day that people reported that, hey, I want to see this. I'd love to see this new feature. How can we do this? This is the ultimate crowdsource personal finance website and community. We finally built it. We've
dreamed of this since 2017. We finally have the technology. We are not beholden to Facebook anymore. We can actually send out events and you will get emailed notification of it. So it's not just the 1%. If you get lucky that Facebook shows you the notification now for your local groups, when you sign up, you tag, Hey, I'm a member of this local group. And when your admin sets up an event, you will get email notified. So you can't possibly miss it.
This is so exciting. We already have thousands upon thousands of people that signed up just in the first three days. And I expect there to be tens of thousands before very long. So I wanted to jot this off before the episode started, go to choose a fight.com our main homepage and sign up for an account today.
Hi everyone, it's Ginger and I'm so excited to tell you that today I am chatting with Vicki Robin. Many of you have read her book, Your Money or Your Life, but even if you haven't, you know about this book. It's changed the way so many people think about work and money, so many, that it has influenced the way you think about it, even if you don't realize it.
I loved that book. And since reading it, I've heard Vicki on many podcasts and enjoyed seeing her in Playing With Fire, a great documentary that you should all check out. But I don't really want to talk to Vicki today about money, or at least I don't want that to be the center of our conversation. I want to talk to Vicki about growing older.
And even as I say that, I feel shy, like this isn't a phrase you're supposed to say in polite company. And I guess that's partly why I'm interested in aging, because it's not something we really talk about with real people. We talk about it theoretically, and we talk about the systems around aging. But in general, when it comes to people's experience of aging, we really kind of tiptoe around it.
We tell everyone we're 29 and we tell everyone we think they look 29, but this is so misguided because it robs us of the opportunity to learn really, really important lessons. I'm so grateful that Vicki was willing to talk to me today about what this process has been like for her. So welcome, Vicki, and welcome, young and old, to Choose Fi. ♪
Welcome, Vicki. You know, I'm thinking about all the things I just said and how it kind of taps into this myth that we have about aging, which is that older people are wiser people and that we should talk to them because we can learn something from them. But really, that's a way that what we're doing is we're objectifying you, right? Yeah.
I wonder if that feels annoying in some way or what you think about that. Please objectify me. No, you're like half the older people I know are just sort of sitting twiddling their thumbs waiting for somebody to ask them something.
And, you know, older people, we, they, we have stories to tell, insights about things, mistakes we made. I mean, not everybody is generous with their stories. And some people are more interesting with their stories than others. And the other thing with older people is that very often the partner dies, the kids are gone, older people are alone in their house, and...
maybe have some challenge so that it's harder for them to get in the car and go someplace and, you know, go to the bingo game or the church service or whatever it is. So a lot of older people are quite lonely, you know, because they can't as easily put themselves in the flow of life. And, you know, I know plenty of older people who can't
They can't keep up with tech. I mean, there's like a ton of sassy older people, you know, sort of like me who are delaying as long as possible the devolution. There's a feeling, you know, definitely this is an age of society where the youth culture is worshipped. And so as you lose your youthful skin, your youthful gait,
access to words. One of the biggest pains is to feel irrelevant, like you have nothing to offer and invisible. You can't muscle your way into a conversation like you could when you were 40, nor are you invited. Yeah. There is such a prejudice against older people. I mean, people in their 40s say they're already too old to get hired. So this is ageism. This is
all sorts of fears projected onto older people or that you're in your second childhood and all you want to do is go on cruises. You know, I,
I wonder if this is something, if this is related. So this is partly why I wanted to have this conversation with you because I keep trying to have this conversation with people my age, like we're talking about. And in this community, we're always talking about the future and what we want to do now so that we can set up a good future, what we can do to sort of set up a better older age. And when you talk to people my age about what it will be like to be older, we all do the same thing, which is we bring up
Like, hey, I know this person or I know of this person who is like super fit, looks incredible, is doing incredible things. And then we think, so that will be me because I saw this example of this really extreme person who we would say aged extremely well, which what we mean there is like not at all. And then when we see that person, it kind of it lets us off the hook.
Because then we don't have to think about any of those losses that are coming. We don't have to reckon with it in a way because we're telling the story about, you know, like it won't be that way for me like it is for most people.
I will be this person who is so cool when I'm 80, so young-ish. And again, it stops the conversation because then we're not talking about what this experience is actually like, I think, for most people. I will be this person who is like so cool when I'm 80.
And again, it just like, it stops the conversation because then we're not talking about what this experience is like, I think for most people. I thought the same way all the way up to when I was 78. Yeah. I mean, that was old people and I was hot. And largely in the fire community, what I've noticed is there's a book called Die With Zero, I think that's very popular. And I looked at that book and he said, oh,
Oh, don't worry about saving. Have all your experiences when you're young and healthy and just get an annuity. That'll be fine. Dude, you know, that is such ageism. That's such prejudice against being older. That's so interesting because I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think I know what you're saying, but would you say more about that?
Well, I mean, you know, when you're young and you're healthy, then you should have all your adventures. When you're older and boring and unable to go anywhere and disabled and drooling in your wheelchair or whatever the image is of capabilities of people who are older, you know, then just get an annuity, which is insufficient, by the way. So...
Yeah, I get what you're saying.
And I don't think this is true of everybody, of course. You know, in this the Facebook group, Socially Conscious Fire, I find much more people aligned with my way of thinking. But I'll tell you a story.
Around about when I was 60, somebody who was my age showed me a picture of a, you know, paper-skinned, pasty-faced old woman with wispy gray hair, sitting with a lap blanket, you know, in a chair, and she was like,
And my friend said, well, what are you going to do when you're 80? You know, so that's 80, you know, confined to a 12 by 12 room watching television and unable to get up, you know, in your wheelchair and wherever the, you know, the aid puts you for the day, that's where you are for the day. And if they forget to respond to the bell, then you're stuck in your depends, you know, it's like, and it was a vision of hell for me. Yeah.
And I hadn't even thought about it. I was already 60, you know, which used to be old. And it triggered something in me. Number one, what it triggered is, okay, I'm not her. I'm 60. Between now and 60, I'm going to like...
I'm going to do everything I want to do just the way I want to do it. And there was a concept in sort of like Celtic philosophy or Wiccan philosophy of maiden, mother, and crone, you know, the young woman, the mother, and then the older woman. And I thought, nah, I'm not ready for that. And I found somebody who said maiden, mother, queen, and crone.
So I think, yep, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to be queen. And I had, you know, this has been one of the happiest, most creative parts of my life.
But then, as I say, I turned 78 and it was right toward the end of the pandemic. And we, you know, I live in a village where the median age is over 60 because we were able to buy in when real estate was cheaper and we're hanging on to it. So we just are aging in place. And I looked around, I thought, I am living in a goddamn nursing home. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, that was, I was so anxious. I was like, I don't want to do this. Next thing you know, it's shovelboard. And I realized that I hadn't created any images for myself of what this part of life was about. It was like, I'd always wondered, like you read an obituary of somebody who was prominent in some way and
the last time you'd heard of them was maybe when they were in their 60s. And then, you know, 20 years later, they're dead. And you go like, what were they doing? Yeah. What was that about? And I hadn't thought about it at all. I haven't identified with it. I didn't want to do it. I was like Peter Pan of the elder crowd. So that's when I dove into writing my blog, Coming of Aging.
to write my way through this part of life, to discover what was there and realize I have internalized ageism and many, many, many older people do. Many, many, many. So there's a suffering in that because it's loss, loss, loss, loss, loss.
So what I did, you know, going back to that 60-year-old, when I saw that picture, I thought Vicki at 60 is going to support Vicki at 80 because I'm going to get there. And so I became more of a saver. I had my older life in mind.
And, you know, I could be in a wheelchair. Who's going to take care of me? I don't have any kids. You know, what's this all about? I don't want to, you know, I'm going to die in my house. I'm leaving here feet first. I'm not going into a care facility. So I think that that idea that you presented me with of.
People refer to a very fit person and think they don't have to think about it. I think that's BS, you know? I think what you want to do is support the person you're going to be in an older body. You don't know...
what genetic disease is going to pop. You don't know whether you're going to break your leg in a skiing accident and not be able to walk. You don't know whether your wife or husband is going to leave you and they were the one who made money. You don't know this. You don't know. And so part of going into the unknown of older age is preparation.
And that's a very FI thing to do, you know, is to prepare for that part of your life. And the other part of it is surrender. It's like, okay, guess what? I'm going to be one of those people, and then I'm dead. So it creates a sense of – it can create fear, but it can create a sense of significance about this part of life. So that's a ramble. I don't know whether it fits whatever you said, but –
I want to go back to what you said about preparing. Like you said, it's a very five thing, right? And it's partly why we want to have these conversations is to think, okay, well, what did you do at 60 to prepare yourself for today that was helpful? I know you said you saved more money.
I did. And, you know, my situation is a bit unusual because I'm the author of a bestselling book that developed a new life in 2018 when I updated it, which I had no idea there was a fire community or anything. I was just updating it so that, you know, some of the antiquated, you know, hippie ideas from the 1970s, you know, I could update those.
I had no idea. And it wasn't until then that I met the fire community, which kind of came up under the book and lifted it. So that's part of it. But I, let's see, what did I do? I interpreted that statement to mean you were going to continue to be an interesting person who had adventures, right? When you were talking about like, that isn't the image of me. That isn't who I want to be when I'm 80, when you're looking at that picture. Right.
And so how did you make that happen? So between 60 and 80, I was, I felt there's a lot of backstory here. I had cancer and I just gave me an opportunity to like rethink my whole life. And that was when I was 58. So I moved to this small town. And one of the things I did was instinctually, I knew that I needed to belong somewhere and
We have the opportunity in this society to not belong anywhere or to think that we belong because we have Facebook groups or Reddit groups or whatever, but that's not belonging. Those are not the people who will emotionally or materially or physically care for you. And I don't mean like, you know, when you're in diapers and whatever that is, when you're a hundred or
But care about you. I mean, I think that's very important to think about. Yeah. So I instinctually came to live in a small village on an island where I knew a couple of people and built a life here.
resolutely, whether conscious or unconscious, made friends with younger people. I bought real estate here. You know, I know there's the fire way of real estate is you go, you know, you find something that doesn't have to be where you live. It could be somewhere else and you buy an apartment building and, you know, it throws off 12%, you know, whatever. But that's not what I was doing. I was belonging. And I've written...
quite a bit about belonging. And I just wrote a blog post for my coming of aging blog about how to go local. So that's part of it. And that's a transition that can seem limiting, you know, like
I don't want to live in a small town with a bunch of biddies who know my business, which is, you know, ageism. And that's one thing. And it's a maturation process of understanding that you are part of something larger and that you do owe almost your whole life to whatever that larger thing is, whether you call it God or the earth.
You know, it's like the fire community, not everybody is by and large individualistic. I'm going to get my together and she's the expression. And that's wonderful. And that's a part of life.
But if you develop that hyper individualistic mentality and you don't grow out of it, then you'll just be a selfish older person, you know, trying to figure out where you're going to go for your next trip. And maybe that's offensive to some people, but you have to learn. You don't have to. I learned.
What happened is this village sort of sanded the edges off my ego. You know, I came here with a lot more self-importance than I have now by far. But you've got something really important that I want to dig into a little bit where you said how important it is to have people care about you and for you to care about other people. And I think...
For younger generations, this kind of becomes, this is harder and harder. Like we are losing our ability to connect with people in that real way. And so even if you think about an action step that a younger person can take, right? If you say your life's task is to care about people and to be cared about, right? Like, what do you do about that? It's really hard, I think, to
To figure out what to do about that. And partly it's what you said about we have these false sense of community online that is not the same thing that's not being cared for.
Right. But it's adjacent. And so it feels good when someone writes something good to you in that form. Right. But it's not the same thing. And so I wonder, after having that experience many, many times in your life of connecting with people, what would you say to younger people about how to move in that direction? Yeah.
Well, number one, participate in real life, IRL. There's an aspect, you know, whether you're in a town or neighborhood, you're never going to live somewhere or you're out in the tules, you know, and you've done the back to the land thing. And so participate in real life. Like one of the things that I've done, I'm not saying this is the right thing,
We used to have two great coffee shops in town. Now we have one. But I would take my computer down every day, you know, for three hours and be there, you know, show your face, go to the hardware store and buy something rather than buying it online. Forget hello fresh, go to the grocery store, go to the cooking classes, you know,
you know, get in the bus and go up to the mountains for skiing with 30 other people, participate in real life, volunteer. You know, it sounds so basic, but I think that
It's too easy for us. And now with the pandemic, I mean, I got so used to just being at home. Now we're talking to each other. I'm glad to meet you, but you're not in my village. That's fine. Go to the bank. You know, it's like the consumer culture is now pushing us online, you know, everything. And online is completely controlled. And it's way more fragile than in real life. But we don't realize it. Work out at a gym.
You know, don't buy Peloton and just be home. Go to the gym. Show your face. It'll take a while for people to notice that you're there.
Yeah. Another thing that I learned very late was, you know, because I had an unusual life and for many years, I didn't have to make friends with anybody. Number one, I was well known. So everybody wanted to be with me. So that was the excruciating process of trying to make new friends, not even like dating, but just new friends. The vulnerability, that's big. So what I realized when I was here was, oh, people are
Yeah.
Yeah, I think about that list of different things that you gave. And I was thinking, okay, well, why don't we do those things? And really, all of them, we have this story about convenience. But really, it's about taking a risk. And I think this is kind of funny in our community where we talk about convenience.
talk about risk related to money very easily, right? But we don't want to admit that it feels risky to say hi to a stranger because they might not have the kind of response we want them to have that injures us in some way. We've become more fragile in that way. And so, gosh, we're going to avoid all this risk under the cover of our great convenient life. But you have to be courageous to accomplish this thing, I think, that you're talking about.
You know, I gave a talk recently that was just sort of my first effort at communicating this, but because I'm a big believer in relocalization, not just because it's fun to live someplace pretty, but because this, as the global systems become more fragile,
As the rug gets pulled out from under entitlements that we didn't even know we had, we're going to be stuck out here with one another. And I've padded myself with investments, so I don't feel vulnerable in that way.
But I gave a talk on community as currency that through sociability, you build wealth, you build, you know, there's like a collective pot of wealth that you're putting something into just becoming a reliable face in a pew in a church on Sunday. And it's not necessarily a direct one-to-one exchange, but,
But it's building the connections in a community that build trust, that gives the community confidence that we can muddle our way through. It is so important to me.
you know, and I said this in your money, your life, and other people have said it very well through permaculture money, what we call money is only one form of currency and relationship is another, you know, there's a current of love competency is another, you know, being able to do for yourself, not as a survivalist, but, you know, not to be so dependent on money alone to manage your life.
Competency is another. Relationships is another. Belonging is another. Service is another. And so, you know, from a FIRE point of view, you could say that you're building an alternative account.
You know, you've built your money account and now you're building your community wealth. Oh, I love that. That's a task of fire. Yeah. And maybe after, you know, you reach your number and you go like, we are free and all you are is out of a job, you know. So that's the period of time when you build. If you've ignored everything in service to your financial independence, that's the period of time when you build community wealth.
Yes, you go on the trip to India with a backpack, but you're starting to do that. And in Your Money, Your Life, we talk about work is just money is a very small part of the notion that you work. Work is an expression of community that you make yourself useful to other people and you build the word that comes as integrity, but it's not really the word I want.
You mature. So that's a task of fire.
And not many people talk about it. They're all talking about money. The person I love who talks about this is Laurel Daney. If you know her, she is very prominent on the socially conscious fire. And she's a permaculturist and she's extraordinarily creative. And she's done a lot of research on investing with your values and on non-monetary forms of exchange and currency. So anyway, I just highly recommend her.
Yeah. I mean, all these things are really important to the FIRE community because why do you want to quit your job? The idea is you want to have a life that you love, a life that you feel good in. And of course, in order to do that, I think you said something really interesting about being useful to people is a big part about how we're wired, like what makes us feel good. Totally.
Yeah. We're a social species. And so we've got to figure that out, you know, even if it's not built into our nine to five.
Right. Right. I used to say that the consumer culture grows on breaking bonds. You know, if you have a marriage, you've got one washing machine, one refrigerator, you know, one dishwasher, you know, one stove, you get divorced and suddenly the number of appliances needed to live a life is doubled. You get divorced and oh, there's another house you need.
So every time a bond, a human bond is broken, you have trained yourself to seek something that costs money usually to replace that.
And, you know, I mean, even unto finding another partner, I don't know how other people have been joined online dating. I've just, you know, but it's almost like a marketplace. Yeah. It's not natural. You haven't like met people. And it's hard to meet people through natural means.
I mean, I think there's like I've been to quite a few gatherings where fire people get together. And I think it's that's part of it. That's part of building the face to face community. And once you've been in like a camp mustache or campfire or something like that, you have a network of people you could go visit, you know, and every time you kind of run around and go visit people.
I knew this was years ago, but I knew some people who were thinking about forming their own village of fire people, you know. So I think the instinct is there. It's just overwritten, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Why the Buddhists say, you know, painted cakes do not nourish. So anyway, that's some thoughts on that one.
Yeah, those events are really popular. And I think it's because of what you're saying, right? It feels really different to connect with someone in that way. You've touched on consumerism a bit. And I wonder how spending money has changed for you in the last decade. Well, when I was representing your money, your life, and trying to prove that it was a perfectly wonderful way of life, mostly because I wanted people, I wanted us to
stop over consumption. You know, that was my secret goal was to, you know, bust consumerism. So I kept myself at a level of consumption that was very limited. I also lived communally. And so you can save a lot of money if you, you know, share the heating of a house, you share meals, you both buy, you know, so there was many ways that my life was way less expensive.
than it was after I had cancer and I restarted my life, lived alone. So one of the things I've had to do is train myself to be less frugal and also to forgive myself for making buying mistakes. We can all relate to that. Exactly. And to, like, I've been very DIY, you know, just doing everything myself. And, um,
Last year, actually the year before last, I discovered this company called Rhodes Scholar, which is a theoretically over 50 travel adventure company. And I did a six-day whitewater rafting trip with them. And I had a ball. Oh. And I probably spent...
twice or three times what I would have spent had I, you know, had to find the company, if I had to designed everything myself. Yeah. And so, yeah, okay. Okay, Vicki, you know, like just let other people figure it out for you and pay the surcharge, you know, and it's a reasonably priced travel company. So things like that.
I've had a lot of delayed inner processing, a lot of inner growing up and healing wounds to do that came from my younger life. And I just overwrote them because I had, you know, places to go and things to do and people to meet and, you know, things to accomplish. And so there has been quite a bit of remedial work, if you will, on
self-examination and I have spent money on that. And now I would have never done that in the past. So I've invested some of the surplus in teachers who have really accelerated my path and held up mirrors that I would have never held up to myself.
And in the past, it would have been an indulgence. You know, and I will say, you know, it's like this is the payoff of a lifelong frugality is you actually have enough money to
I used to joke that I'm going to die and they're going to find a million dollars in my mattress because there's stories about a woman taking an ironing and that she was a millionaire. So she wouldn't spend. So it's balancing. This is a difficult thing, balancing the safety of money to see you through to the end. I used to say I want to die with a dime in my pocket, but not a day later.
In other words, I wanted to spend down everything. But that's not possible because you may outlive your money. So how do you do this? How do you balance? But I'm pretty much aware of what surplus I have, what the monopoly money is in my life. And I spend it every year. My basic nut keeps pumping out, but the surplus I spend. I bought a house recently.
12 years ago. And, you know, I just plunked a lot of money into just owning a house that was on the market for a long time because it had some problems with it. So I did fix it up. And it's been like, I had a refrigerator where I had to arrange things on different shelves because I
Some places, the refrigerator would freeze my vegetables. And I thought, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And I bought myself a new fridge. And it was like, oh, God, I got a new fridge. And these may seem like such normal purchases. So I guess maybe there's a message here, which is that when you get older, even if you're not decrepit, even if your mind is working perfectly fine,
You really want more ease and the kind of things that you could do in your 30s, like, you know, live in a 10 by 10 room, you know, with five roommates and your bicycle hanging off the roof ceiling so that you can save, you know, 90 percent of your income. You know, that's sort of you can keep doing that, but it's actually a degradation of life.
So there is a way in which, and this is back to like supporting yourself when you're in your 80s and beyond. There is a way that you realize that I might not have, I might be, you know, upright, I'm walking, but I might not have the, my body might not have the will to do the things that I've done when I'm younger. And it's not just so go ye forth and, you know, climb Mount Everest.
which you might do while you have a really great body. But it's also just sort of forgiving yourself in advance for the fact that you are going to not have the oomph that you had and that you're going to spend more money.
So I'm very, very glad I have this. And what I did with my house, which is a very fire thing, is it's a split entry house, very, very typical box. And on the ground floor is a family room and a garage. And so I converted both into studio apartments.
So like I get income from, I said, I want my house to be a site of production, not a site of consumption. So, you know, and that's a fire thing to do. You know, you buy a duplex, you live on one side and you pay your mortgage with the other.
So my habits of maximizing return on investments, like I bought one of the first hybrid cars. It was a little Honda Insight. And I had that for, I don't know, 15 years. But, you know, when it was really on its last legs and I wanted to, I bought an all electric car because I'm an early adopter of all things that might save the planet. So I had that Insight thing.
And I rented it on the QT. You know, somebody moved here and they needed a car for three months. Well, you know, so I I'm clever in that way to be able to mobilize what I have.
into income. I don't know if I'm answering your question. I'm just thinking about how my spending has changed. Yeah, I know a few people who are recently retired in their 60s and who really struggle with spending money now. And I mean, I think this is common no matter what age, if you've been frugal. And
And I hear you saying like, yeah, that was hard for me. And that was something that I needed to kind of reassess and think about in a different way. Can you speak to how you did that? Like, was it just a matter of time or was it really working on changing your thinking? It was definitely changing my thinking. It was watching my mind. It was an embarrassing mind. Yeah.
I mean, I would buy something that felt like a treat. Maybe it was $4. And then I would not buy something that I wanted that was $4 in order to make up for it. Nobody was counting. My mind was doing it. I called it cash register consciousness. I think the biggest recommendation is to develop another stream of passive income.
whether it's renting my car or converting parts of my house. And even that, I felt like I have a pile of money and I'm taking it off the top. And so if I have to not take too much off the top because I have no inflow or I have a fixed inflow and I could overspend and then I don't have as much of
of my stored wealth to throw off money. And so I recently, you know, I've always, I've done everything pretty much for free, although I stumbled into, you know, being an author of a bestselling book, which was great. And I recently thought, you know, I need, I need to convince my, my mind that I can earn money at this point in my life.
And the fact of the matter is, is that I have a super popular blog on Substack that I haven't monetized because I didn't want to. I just wanted readers. But I thought, no, you can do that. You can do some coaching and, you know, classes and stuff like that. You could ask for money.
So it's made a difference for me, you know, not so much. I mean, I've gotten a little bit of money from it, but it made a difference in the psychology of I can still earn if I need to. If I spend down some of that pile, I have this other income. And then, you know, when you get a lot older, you can do a reverse mortgage if you plan to stay in your house. You know, so there's, if you have...
tangible wealth, which I have, I have this house and I bought a rental house and
When there was like a little dip in the market and I just, I just snatched up a house. It was incredibly well-priced. And I have great renters and they do repairs. And I lowered their rent because it was like, what? You're doing that? And we have such a great relationship. The stove died and they bought a new stove. Like, really? So I could definitely raise their rent year by year.
the maximum amount and harvest more money from that investment. But that's a nice relational investment. You know, we're partners in well-being. Yeah. Yeah. So I've since living here, I've created more avenues of passive income, not totally passive because I have to maintain the objects that
You know, if you retire when you're 60 and you've been in the fire community, so you've been forced to be like creative, you know, because I think fire is very creative. You can do that. You can create a passive income. And the empowerment that comes from that is really, I found it made a difference.
Yeah, I think this is a counterintuitive answer, right? Where I said, well, how do you learn to spend money and feel okay about it? And you spoke to, well, what's underneath that anxiety? Like, why is it hard to spend? And can you address that? So it's not, oh, I can just start to feel better about spending, but I can start to find my strength. Like I can start to think about all of the resources that I can bring to this if the time comes.
And that knowledge, even if you don't end up starting a business or you don't end up making extra money, can influence how you feel about spending money. Right. Because this doesn't have to be the last dollar I ever earn. I still have the ability to make money. Yeah. Yeah.
Used to call it pin money. And it's a different activity from having developed the habit of making money and you can't really, you know, your identity gets a big ding if you're not making money because you identify with your income. That's different. Yeah. Yeah. You're asking questions that I have to be thoughtful about. Yeah. I mean, it was really hard, you know, when I moved here, you know, this is, as I said, it's what's called a NORC, naturally occurring retirement community.
And I moved into a village with a lot of homeowners who had considerably more wealth than I did. It was hard at first to even socialize, you know. Let's go out to lunch. Okay. And I order the cup of soup, you know, and they order, you know, the pile of mussels, and then they say, let's split the bill. Oh, no. So it's so many layers. It's, you know, identity, self-respect, everything.
Respect of others. And I think the other thing I'm cultivating is a sense of abundance. And abundance doesn't mean there's always more money where that came from, but that the world is...
Yeah, that there's so much abundance in nature and in love and other people and spirituality and in gratitude. And, you know, I mean, when you go on to abundance, it's not like, ooh, that costs too much money. I have to save it. It's that, wow, I get to have enough money to buy the plate of mussels if I want to, you know. So it's an abundance attitude, and it hasn't –
It served me well, you know, that's another thing I guess we have to adapt. You know, we've had a frugality attitude in order to get to FI and then you cross over and you need an abundance attitude to,
of there's so much pleasure. There's so much to see and do. There's just air to breathe. It's just getting up in the morning and just thinking, what amazing thing is going to happen today? I wonder if there'll be birds coming to the bird feeder. It's not like, oh God, my refrigerator's in the fritz or something. So maybe that's a part of the shift from being an earner to being
retired, is to develop an abundance attitude that isn't about making another million. Really understanding what enough is and how big enough is. Yeah, yeah, right, right, right, right. Yeah. So enoughness in the accumulation phase is like, it takes a lot of attention to like, oh, yeah, that bite of food was just right. Right.
And this bite of food was more than enough. So I'm going to stop. And that's a beautiful attention to sufficiency. But there's a built-in sufficiency in the world because nature is, it's a self-generating, self-nourishing, self-replenishing world that we live in.
And even if you are in this society, not part of the 1% or the 10%, there's still so much to enjoy. Yeah. So in pleasure, that's another part of it is, you know, maybe you've been into self-denial in order to get to FI, right?
But what would it be like to just to focus on the pleasure of existence? That's really focus of mine. You know, I think that the more I shed the identities and the fears, et cetera, the freer my mind is. And I think that's where I'm headed in this coming of aging, as I call my blog.
There is a sort of a vast ocean out beyond all the restrictions, you know, all the shoals and the reefs and all that dangerous passage out of the harbor. There's something beautiful out there. And it's not just heaven after you die. It's something else that I'm just discovering what it is. Yeah, that's so beautiful.
I think what I hear you saying is that you've gotten really good at putting your attention on things as you've gotten older and that you have really put your attention on your inner life. And like, how can I make connections and how can I really be a part of this community? And that giving attention to those things has brought such meaning and richness to your life.
I can tell you're a very intentional person. And I wonder if this careful attention, like if there's anything that has been hard to put your attention on as you've gotten older.
Well, death for one. Well, the big one. I mean, I don't want to think about that. You know, I know for a fact that I will die. Yeah. But my mind will not go there. Yeah. I was going to say you're ahead of so many of us because we don't think we will. Well, you know.
That's part of what I realized, you know, my come to Jesus moment of turning 78 and realizing I'm in the part of my life where death is, you know, like I'm not in the part of life where death is later. So, yeah. Yeah.
There's plenty I don't want to put my attention on. But intention is pleasure for me. It's not duty. And, you know, the pandemic gave me time to learn the craft of writing. I mean, I've written, written, written, written, but I was more like an activist, more like a warrior, like I'm writing things to convince other people.
And in this period of time, I've had just the joy and pleasure of learning the craft of storytelling and telling stories from my life. And I just get up in the morning and I sit down. I have a writing group from seven to eight. So that puts me in the chair and I just love it, you know? And a lot of people my age or, you know, someplace in here start to do memoir. And it's not just...
It's not like writing your autobiography, you know, maybe selling three copies to your family or something. It's that process of self-reflection. It's that process of making something out of the material of your life. Yeah. And it's a big activity of this period of time is self-reflection, however you do it. Yeah. I mean, would I like to have some...
Rich person with a boat, sail me around the world? Sure. You know, are there pleasures that, you know, if I had more money, I might do? What about this? I guess this is kind of related to the death question. But one thing that maybe I had not expected, so I'm 46 now. And in the last few years, I have started to feel like
urgency that I have not felt before, right? About really coming to grips with, hey, if I'm going to do such and such thing, it has to fit in in these years ahead. And there aren't endless years ahead. And so that's not, that sounds like wisdom. That sounds good, but it's not good. It's like panic, right? It's like, it's very difficult feeling for me to sort of work with.
And a worry I have is that that urgency is going to be heightened every year. And I wonder if you have ever had that experience or what that's like for you now. Do you feel kind of that urgency? I don't feel urgency. No.
But I do at this point, I feel like if old dreams are going to get realized, it's now. So it's more like priority than urgency. Even when you just say that word, it calms me down a little. Even just saying like, okay, think about your priorities. Right. And that feels like a manageable thing. Like, oh, yeah, we can make choices about what we care about the most.
Yeah, I mean, isn't that what we do all our, you know, the whole FIRE path is a path of choices. You know, what's most important to me now and in the future? What's going to bring me the most happiness? What's going to be most important? And I think it's difficult sometimes.
They call it a midlife crisis. I didn't have that, but I think that is the moment. It's sort of about your age. At least they talk about it for men. I don't know about women. For women, it probably happens earlier when they realize that they're not going to ovulate forever.
Where it's like, okay, you know, 20 years ago, I thought the world was my oyster. I had every option. You know, the future was just full and free. But this is the point where you realize limitation. And there are choices that you made in the past that probably are just like, that's how I spent my 20s. That's how I spent my 30s. That's it. That's how I did it. You know, there's an acceptance of finitude. Right.
So it's a focus on what's important. And I feel for myself that pretty much I've done that well. Like in my 60s and 70s, I've been so creative.
you know, I was like socially creative. I started all sorts of projects. I'd like, I had a podcast, you know, it's like anything I wanted to do. I just felt like, okay, I can do that. And now I think there's maybe one or two more big things. I have a book that I wrote years ago that never got published. And, you know, it just sits there yammering, you know, and I always wanted to do a solo show and I'm now doing, you know, I'm now underway. And yeah,
Yeah, I've done a lot of work reconciling with my family. I don't feel like... I've done a lot of work on that, you know, for several years. Just this coming of aging thing is like, oh, the people I left in the dust, the people who cared about me that I didn't care about, the people I...
I cross and I didn't think I was crossing them. I just thought that I was doing what I wanted to do. You know, that's big work. So I feel like I've done a lot of that. And this solo show came up recently. I thought, if I'm going to do it, it's going to happen, you know, because I might not even be able to memorize the script later. So.
I don't know. I sort of feel like life is, it's an unfolding, you know, like something comes and I give myself to it. I recognize, okay, this is on my path and I give myself to it, whether it's inner work or something on the outer. And then in giving myself to it, somehow or another, I complete that bubble of desire, you know, and then I get to the edge of it.
And it's in the past and it's done. And then I have a faith that the next thing that is mine to do, whether it's inner work or outer work, will present itself. You know, I feel like life is sort of like an endless packages that I'm opening on Christmas. Not quite. You know, I'm not that conscious. I'm not that liberated, but.
Something like that. And so I don't know after this solo show, I don't know. You know, I can imagine if I do it well, that I could take it on the road. I mean, that would be amazing. You know, there's all these conferences on gerontology, you know, there's lots of old people, there's lots of old boomers, you know, so it's sort of like another whole possibility of meaning making that is here now.
Yeah, I just, I don't know that you're asking questions that I don't have pat answers to. But yeah, we're going to die and we're all going to die incomplete. There's going to be unlived parts of ourselves. And then, you know, when you think about it, 100 years from now, this world is going to be populated with a whole different set of people.
And it's not us. You know, when you're younger and you come into life, you think, ah, this is our world. I own the joint. And then you realize, oh, yeah. So that's a reckoning. I've worked on that reckoning that indeed, I will not be around. Indeed, in 100 years from now, there will probably be no trace of me in the visible world.
There'll be just, you know, a few bones in the ground, but all of my importance or whatever it's been, it's all gone. You know, I can leave, you know, beautiful legacy. I can like, I could put my name on the building and then,
Somebody will come along and rename it. So it's like we're gone. I'll be gone. Yeah. I mean, you talk about another way that people do the thing that I was describing earlier where it's like, oh, well, when I think about getting old, I think about what an awesome, fit, beautiful old person I'm going to be. And I think there's another thing we do, which is when we talk about our legacy, we're
Or like, here's what I'm going to leave behind. And that's wonderful. That's wonderful. But it also allows us to not maybe confront some of the stuff that we're talking about, which is, hey, that building that has your name on, maybe it will get renamed. Maybe it won't. But it's crumbling to the ground at some point, right? Like at some point, it's gone. And that understanding that can help us to love our life more. Yeah.
I agree. I mean, you know, I read once that monks were sent to sleep in graveyards to really start to get that. Yeah. Yeah. I've known, I've known people who spend an awful lot of time on their will, you know, as their legacy, like who gets what piece of money or property and then a falling out happens and they have to rewrite their will or, you know, the organizations I'm going to give money to, you know,
I don't know. It just, now I haven't had children, so I don't have that focus on my, something from my, with my biology living on. But so, yeah, it's a task. It's a task. And we don't know. That's the other thing is you do not know. You do not know. I have a friend, you know, this is the time. I mean, I have a friend who's
now into deep dementia. And she was funny. She was a writer, you know, it's like, it's, it's impossible to think about that. She's lost that capacity. I have several friends who have Parkinson's, you know, who are really, they're doing their best, but I have more and more friends who've died, you know? So there's also sort of a natural process of,
of more and more people dying. And so you start to understand that you're part of that flow. And I didn't have a lot of experience of people dying when I was young. We can be really shielded from that too. And we can shield ourselves until I think a certain stage of life, and then that doesn't really work anymore. Right, right.
So, yeah, it's like it's adulting at a massive scale, you know, maturation. Adulting is maybe what you do in your 20s when you realize your parents aren't paying for you anymore. But maturation is this part of life where you realize that, you know, there are limits, that there are things that you may never be able to fix that you did in the past, that your time is short, that your control over resources or people is limited.
You know, I mean, I live in an earthquake zone. You know, this whole town could fall into the water. So, you know, we do our best to have guarantees, but there are no guarantees. And that's why you have to be really good at making new friends. Because your generation is falling off the edge.
Well, let's go ahead and wrap up. Vicki, thank you so much for being willing to have this conversation and to answer with some real answers. And let's end with you giving some advice to me. Thank you.
And, you know, I really appreciated at the beginning how you said, when I was 60, I thought a lot about how I could take care of the me that was 80. And so if we go back even farther, how do you think I, as a 46-year-old person, how do you think I can take care of 80-year-old me now? Oh, right. I was just thinking 65-year-old person. Well, I would say...
It's not a bucket list, but I would say my 50s were the most powerful time in my life.
I really, I wielded power, you know, in my own way. You know, I had the book, I traveled the world. I hobnobbed with, you know, leaders. I had something to say. And I see your 50s is like when you see a sailboat with a big spinnaker, you know, this big ballooned out sail in the front. That's what I feel like your 50s are. So I would say just go.
Whatever it is that you want to embody in this life, you know, whatever you're passionate about, whatever you want to taste, feel, you know, whatever difference you want to make, whatever it is that's there for you. It's not a question of, you know, scarcity. There's a scarcity of time. So get on it. It's like use these years, especially for women, you know, because for women, you know,
Being powerful when we're younger is there are barriers to that. And I don't know if you're partnered or if you have children, but, you know, very often the child rearing part by your 50s is pretty much done. You can obsess about it all you want, but you don't need to. For me, that part of my life was overwhelming.
So exciting. And I was looking at it as a little wild. I started three big things all at once because I didn't really know better, and I had a big appetite. I had a big appetite for the kind of experiences that I wanted to have, which was making a difference in the world. And I had the social credibility, and I had the...
You know, I had all of that. So that's what I would recommend. Just like go for it in your 50s. And I'm not talking about a bucket list about, you know, you should go to the Taj Mahal unless you want to. I mean, if you've always wanted to be a biologist, you know, and study rare plants in the Amazon, this is the time. If you always wanted to go back and get a master's, this is the time. If there's some...
unlived part of yourself, this is the time to live it. That's what I would say. Love that. Okay, we will put in the show notes, Vicki's book and her blog. Check her out. She's wonderful. And thank you again. Yeah. And my podcast. And your podcast. Yep. Bye y'all.
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