We’re less than a full month into the new year. Did you make any resolutions? If so, how’re they doing?

If you’ve already broken your New Year’s resolution, don’t be too hard on yourself. It turns out that the odds were stacked against you. A study in 2007 by Richard Wisemen from the University of Bristol showed that 88% of people who make New Year resolutions fail to keep them.

Those are pretty dismal numbers when you consider it. A lot of people break their resolutions and feel depressed. But as the Japanese proverb says “Fall 7 times, stand up 8″. So, how can you salvage your new year’s resolutions?

1. Remember why you made the resolution: It came from somewhere. So take a moment and try to reconnect with the original impulse. Life distracts us, so try to focus past the distractions and find what you had desired.
2. Discard the resolutions that don’t come from you: Too often we resolve to do the things we think we should do, rather than the things we want to do. When you have no personal attachment to your resolutions, it’s a lot easier to break them.
3. Reschedule your New Year: January is actually a bad time to start many resolutions. If we take weight loss as our example: gyms are more crowded than ever before, and the weather isn’t always friendly towards going outside and exercising. If any of these things are impacting your resolutions, why not wait until the spring? Good resolutions are a challenge, but there’s no reason that you shouldn’t stack the odds in your favor.
4. Redefine your resolution: Try taking your goal and breaking it into smaller increments. For example, if you want to lose 36 pounds in the year, instead set yourself a more achievable goal of 3 pounds per month. This gives you a number of smaller goals that you can achieve and celebrate, helping you build momentum and retain your focus, even as you move towards achieving your larger overall resolution.
5. Make use of your support network: We live in a world more connected than ever before. This means that supportive friends are as close as the smart phone in your pocket or the nearest computer. By sharing your resolutions with your support network, you gain people to help you when you’re struggling and who can celebrate with you while you succeed.
6. If at first you don’t succeed…: We get too focused on failure. If you could change your behaviour without any problems then you wouldn’t need to make resolutions in the first place. If we learn from our mistakes, then we give ourselves a far better toolkit for long-term success than we would if we had succeeded without any problems or challenges.

Guest post by Alex Conde of Searching for Happy, a blog about the simple search for happiness we all face. His series of Happiness Experiments study some of the popular theories on finding happiness.

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This is more or less the way you need to approach spending if you’re in debt, or eating if you’re trying to lose weight, or getting over a bad habit of any kind. It may seem like an oversimplification but that’s what it is. Your mind is an amazing tool (but also a dangerous one) but you are its master.

photo credit: Sugar Pond

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One of the problems I have with writing here at brip blap tends to be the question of “what to write?” I’ve never made this a blog that covers the subjects that many personal finance blogs cover: what credit card should I get? Should I invest in an IRA or a Roth IRA? I don’t think anyone who reads this blog is looking for the answer to this type of question. You’ve probably already formed your own opinions on that and there’s no need for me to add to that internal discussion. There are many other, better blogs looking at the details of picking the best high yield savings account. I wish I was one of them – those are lucrative subjects – but it’s not to my interest and I don’t really want to write about those topics. Not that there’s anything wrong with writing on those subjects – there’s a place in this world for writing for money, just like there is a place for working for money. People who can write well AND write for money are blessed (I’m looking at you, Stephen King and John Grisham).

So when I think of what to write, I think “what should I write that (a) entertains me and (b) entertains others and (c) might be profitable.” C is a distant consideration. I leave C to guest writers and sponsored posts. B is much more important. I do like it when people enjoy my writing and comment on it. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t, I think. So I do write to that. But I’ve realized over the last year that A is the most important by far, especially in combination with B. Why? Because of Facebook and various other social media.

Many bloggers like the “sense of community” and “feedback” they get while writing, but I felt this sense and this feed much more back in 2007 before Facebook and Twitter took hold. I don’t feel it much today.  Today real conversation doesn’t take place on blogs, or on websites – it takes place on Facebook or Twitter or a few other key social media sites. I used to share links heavily on this blog, but whereas a few years ago this was the first place I’d share them, now I’m more likely to share those links on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or other networks. I’m more likely to engage with commentators on Facebook than I am even on my own site, because of course I spend time on Facebook, not here on brip blap. I participate in forums rather than on individual blogs. I’d argue that even the huge blogs – the Lifehackers, the Consumerists, etc. – aren’t really able to hold onto “regulars” anymore. I read many blogs, but I seldom comment on them. I might share links from them, and comment on them – but it’s going to be on a social network.

So the movement of content has created a question: where should content live? I like having brip blap as its own independent website. But is that the future of sites like mine? Or will they eventually move to Facebook, or some other social platform, where most of the readers and “likers” are already engaged and focused? I think they will. My blog exists in Facebook already, for example. You can read it in Facebook, comment on it in Facebook and never leave Facebook. That’s fine. If I integrate my personal account with my brip blap page at some point, you’ll see a wild flood of extra content – my “brain dump,” so to speak – appear. A lot of my content has moved to social networking. I’m posting my thoughts bit by bit rather than in long drawn-out posts like this one. It’s probably the future. There will be long-form writers forever, of course, but many people are transitioning to a short-form style of reading that won’t want to read 700+ word articles.

I’ve shifted my reading over the past 5 years. I still read books – but on a Kindle, that promotes “disposable reading” (I give up on books rapidly if I don’t like them). I don’t read blogs as much as I used to (my RSS reader accumulates them for search if necessary). I don’t write as much here because I spend a lot of time writing elsewhere – emails, Facebook, Twitter, forums, etc. Content is constantly being produced by people like me and you, but it’s shifting and changing. After a brief “golden age” of people scattering across the web looking for content we’re again reconsolidating. It’s neither good nor bad – it just is. Content is moving to where the readers are.

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When I first started looking at this, it cost anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 to die in New Jersey (note that I said “to die”, not “to kill someone” – we weren’t all captains in crime families in the Garden State where I used to live, although we did have our fair share and even some favorite sons).  I haven’t done the same calculation for Florida, but I work on the (possibly naive) assumption that Florida should be cheaper.

Nobody wants to confront their own mortality, of course. My guess is that it’s probably right down there with cleaning septic tanks and reading children’s toy assembly guides on everyone’s list of least favorite things to do. But you have to stop and think about it for a second if you have a family – and even if you don’t.

If you are single, you may not have life insurance. If you are married, you may not even have started working on this yet. If you are married with children and don’t have life insurance, you need to go talk to an agent rather than reading this post. But life insurance may not always cover all of the costs, and you may leave behind a huge financial hit to your loved ones if you haven’t prepared properly. There is nothing more grim than planning your own funeral down to the last detail… except leaving your loved ones to do it for you. Think about a few of these things:

1. Burial? Cremation? A flaming ship pushed out to sea, Viking-style? You have to make your wishes known. You may assume that you’ll be buried in the family plot or have your ashes scattered to the winds, but have you told anyone about that? Can you imagine leaving that decision up to someone else, particularly in a moment of grief?

2. Taking care of the costs should not be a concern for your survivors. Can you imagine being a spouse or a parent or a child and trying to talk to a funeral director while doubled over in grief? Is that going to be a time that they need to be making decisions about money? Make sure that you take care of picking out a casket, or a mausoleum, or an urn or whatever it is you will need – but don’t leave that decision to your survivors.

3. Have money set aside as “go to hell” money. Make sure that you have an emergency fund well-funded or a separate account altogether (a “disaster fund” maybe) so that nobody has to worry about going to work or taking care of flying relatives into town – those details should be taken care of without worrying about the cost.

A confession – I haven’t been as diligent about doing these as I should have. I know I should, since I have a good example in the family. My grandfather had taken care of every single detail of his funeral 30 years before he died, to ensure that when he did absolutely no pressure to determine anything would fall on my grandmother. It was a brave thing to confront his mortality at such a young age (in his 40s) and certainly made a world of difference for all of us when he passed. He had expressed all of his preferences, leaving almost nothing to the imagination.

So just remember “worrying about death expenses” as item #675 on your list of a thousand things you need to plan for but haven’t yet.

(photo credit: robin.elaine )

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Years ago, on a weekend visit, I spoke to a friend of mine from a Middle Eastern country while our family was visiting with his family. We spoke over a huge pile of Legos and the Bert-n-Ernie Garage and a full set of Thomas the Tank Engine trains (although, in all fairness, most were gifts).  He was reminiscing about how he grew up with practically no toys:  he and his brothers made toys out of wire and twine and cans and sticks.  I spoke about my childhood – less simple, but still free for the most part of electronic gadgets.  We watched a Euro 2008 match on satellite TV while we spoke, drank German beer and checked other sports score on my high-speed Internet laptop.  Then my friend lamented the fact that while his mother had managed to support his whole family and grandparents on one salary, it just wasn’t possible anymore.

It is. Take out the imported beer, the satellite TV, the piles of children’s toys, the second car, the computers, the high-speed internet, and so on and it is.  It’s amazing how within the span of one generation we’ve added so many “extras” – but at the same time Americans are now working harder than any other industrialized nation, even more than the infamously hard-working Japanese.  I may exempt the Internet from this equation, simply because what I pay for access – a $600 Toshiba laptop and a high-speed cable connection – are worth it in terms of information and learning and entertainment.  Other than that, though, we have added so much to our lives that we’ve lost sight of the fact that we don’t need most of it.

Yet at the same time America is unbearably wealthy by global standards. We have calories (not good ones, but calories nonetheless) available in almost unlimited supply for almost no real cost – Americans spend less of their salary on food than any other nation in the world.  You can buy enough Cinnamon Toast Crunch to feed a family of four for a day for $10.  Even the poorest people in America can afford television; and despite the recent increase in gas prices, we still have some of the cheapest gas in the world and almost no-one is too poor to afford a car.

I don’t automatically assume that “having things” makes anyone unhappy, any more than I assume having things DOES make someone happy. Americans are uniquely blessed with a regulatory environment that is still wide-open by global standards, and the remnants of an entrepreneurial spirit that lives on despite 50 years of creep in governmental control.  Yet at the same time a gap has opened up that shows that the materialistic society has limits.  I have made no statistical studies, but I have so many acquaintances who are loaded down with material goods who are desperately unhappy and apprehensive about the future that it seems to be a trend.  I’m not exaggerating, either – these people have possessions that would have convinced me, in my youth, that they were multimillionaires.  So progress has been made in the material world, but something – somewhere – was lost.

I don’t know what the answer is, because the Internet and cable/satellite TV and clever toys and gadgets like MP3 players have not seemed (and that’s the key word) to be EVIL. I enjoy my Blackberry, a lot.  Could I live without it?  Of course.  Does it enrich my life?  It sure did yesterday, when I listened to a fascinating interview on it, showed my kids a music video they loved and found an address I needed.  But is it part of a slow trickle of gadgets-for-money-for-time that have robbed me of the deliberate life?  That’s something each of us, in the wee hours, have to decide for ourselves.

photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik

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You can’t unscramble an egg.

Think about it. It can’t be done. You can freeze liquid water, then heat it and turn it to gas and back to water, but you can’t unscramble an egg. It just won’t unscramble. Hit it with gamma rays, do whatever you want and it won’t unscramble.

The same principle applies to finance. If you spend an hour of your life earning $20, then you spend that $20 on a CD, it’s gone. Your life is gone. If you spend two hours getting a listing ready on eBay and you make a profit of $1.34 selling a CD, that time is gone, too. Was it worth that $1.34? Was the initial purchase of the CD worth $20?  That time is gone, and that egg can’t be unscrambled.  The money out – unless you spent it on something that will return to you like education, or an investment – is money gone.  In the cosmic sense, it has been scrambled.

Your time works the same way, too.  Every time you watch TV, for example, you lose a piece of your life. Whether it’s worth it or not is up to you.  I’ve seen many movies that inspired me, or made me laugh.  That might have been a good use of my time.  Everyone needs to relax and be entertained from time to time, but you do have to choose how to spend your life.  I know it may sound like an obsessive focus on money, but that is time you could have been working on your education, or coming up with money-saving ideas, or studying investments.  Watching an episode of Gilligan’s Island for the third time is not what Benjamin Franklin would have done.

Tony Robbins has a good bit about watching reruns of programs: he says we have two driving forces in our life, the desire for surprise and the desire for consistency, which are constantly at war. We want to watch a funny TV show for the second time because we know it’s funny; but we also hope something new will happen or we’ll see something we missed before. The chances of both of those desires being met decreases each time you see the same show in reruns. As he says, if you ever watch any TV show or movie more than once – get a life.  And trust me, I do this all the time. I have seen The Matrix and The Russia House so many times I can practically recite them – but I do know it’s time wasted.  This tendency to watch movies multiple times is one of the main reasons my family cut the cord.

So the next time you think about buying that CD or wasting time “making money” on eBay or seeing “that great episode where Gilligan breaks the Professor’s coconut-powered radio” just ask yourself if you really want to scramble that egg. Time is short, and it always – always – moves forward.

photo credit: swanksalot

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(me, in St. Petersburg, circa 1997)

Learning an “exotic” foreign language, and how it changed my life.

If you read this blog, you probably know that I’m a Russophile. I lived in Moscow for several years, I can read/write/speak Russian fairly comfortably and my wife is Russian. Even more:  I have been interested in Russian long before I “knew” Russian or Russia.  Key the computer geek theme music: I mentioned that I was a finalist in the International Science Fair: I wrote, in Basic on a Tandy Color Computer with a cassette-tape drive, a very primitive artificial intelligence program that reliably translated English into Russian, grammatically correct. I even had to develop the Cyrillic font. I did all of this after buying a Russian grammar book at a public library for $.10 and using it to set it up – I didn’t know Russian at all.  Pat, pat, pat on the back, Steve.  Score one for geeky computer boy.  The US Army liked my program, gave me a commendation and took the code.  What happened with it after that, I dunno.

Anyway, after the ISF my interest in Russian waned. I always joke that my ancestry is German with a little German mixed in. Even though the Original Blap Ancestor ventured to the new world in the 16th century, my paternal ancestors clung to German ways and traditions and language. And I mean they clung. To the best of my knowledge, my dad was probably part of the first generation of Blaps to speak English at home rather than German. So in high school and college I had a strong motivation to take German, and I did.  I loved it.  I had a great teacher, and I spent a summer semester in Germany as an exchange student.  To this day I speak, read and understand German quite well.

But I always liked foreign languages in general. I took French and Latin as well and decided in my sophomore year that Japanese would be a good challenge. Keep in mind that this was the mid-80s: Japan appeared to be well on its way to becoming the dominant economic power of the 21st century. We know now, in retrospect, that Japan’s economy tripped and stumbled and has never really recovered, and China and India are now careening past it, but at the time it seemed that Japan might become an economic superpower at a minimum and THE economic superpower if everything fell right.

I decided to take Japanese. It was a new course at the University of Mississippi, where I went to school (yes, we had Japanese courses in Mississippi) – only one class was offered. So on registration day I woke up and strolled over to the registrar only to find that it had filled up in minutes and no slots were available. I was disappointed, but I still wanted to take a language. I thought Spanish might be useful, but boring (I didn’t care for French when I learned it – romance languages don’t appeal to me). I skipped through the catalog until I saw Russian and remembered my little project at the ISF four years earlier. And best of all, it was at 10 am so I could sleep late – back in college I had yet to discover the benefits of waking up early.

Russian was fantastic. The teacher was a guy straight out of PhD school, passionate about the subject and the culture. He invited his students to his home, showed us Russian movies, introduced us to actual Russians (quite the novelty in the Deep South in the 80s, let me tell you – we were in the midst of the cold war and that was amazing) and managed to get Russian food. I loved the intellectual challenge of the language – a different alphabet but more importantly a language completely removed from the European languages’ interrelationships.

So why was this a good financial move? I’ve already mentioned it in 8 steps to a six figure career, but here it is in a nutshell: it gives you instant credibility as a smart person (deserved or not). Employers and contacts and almost everyone I meet expresses shock that I can speak Russian, read it and write it. I don’t think it demonstrates much intelligence, personally. Language acquisition is more of an inborn skill, I think. But I do think that learning Russian demonstrated some intellectual curiosity and the fact that I stuck with it indicates some intellectual discipline. I have benefited hugely in my career from knowing Russian. It meant that I was plucked out of obscurity as a junior staff member of a Big 6 (now 4) accounting firm and hurled into the middle of the mid-90s Russian economic explosion. It opened up opportunities I would never have had as just another staff person.

But that’s not the biggest part of it. Without developing my Russian skills I wouldn’t have met, pursued and married my wife. Maybe if I had taken Japanese I would have lived in Japan, developed a fondness for all things Japanese. Hard to say. But I do know that the decision to learn Russian set in motion the life process that brought me to where I am today: with a wife who is focused on the same things I am, personally and financially. So that’s actually the single biggest reason why that was a great financial move.

So what was your best move?

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The lesson which the kids will learn is that large, flat and wide boats float better with pennies in them than small, narrow and steep boats.  I read about this game in my mom’s blog – she’s a gifted teacher for young kids and presents them with these challenges that are appropriate for young kids.  I’d argue most older people would struggle with this challenge, too.

When I was substitute teaching as a gifted teacher back in college*, I executed a plan laid out by the teacher (who, coincidentally, was my mom):  here’s an egg, here’s a lot of paper, let’s go to the second story and construct a device that will get the egg to the ground without breaking.  It’s a tough challenge!  But kids managed to do it every year.

You can give anyone a challenge.  As a kid, it’s easy to rise to it – everything is new and you WANT, desperately, to overcome.  You’re going to apply yourself and overcome it, because you’re excited to learn, to challenge, to overcome.  I think most of lose that feeling over the years.  A challenge becomes an irritant, not a possibility.  You just want things to go away instead of wanting to beat them.  I know I do from time to time.

But life is full of challenges, and to live life fully you have to attack those challenges with the assumption they are solvable.  Otherwise, you’re just going to take the path of least resistance and end up disappointed and frustrated.  Build a great aluminum boat, and watch it float.

*I was a substitute junior high teacher throughout college and a college instructor for 3 years – I fully intended to be a teacher, and I’ve taught hundreds of hours of classroom time.  So I say I was “a teacher” although I was simply an itinerant member of the profession.

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Here’s how I’ll define it.  All of us know the guy who claims to be Mr. Nontechy-guy.  “I just can’t manage a computer,” he guffaws.  “My kids have to turn it on for me!  I don’t know how to text, so forget these smartphones!”  This guy is proud to be tech-illiterate.

And we all know the woman who just gets flustered when dealing with all the buttons and sites and likes, oh my.  She could figure it out but she gets overwhelmed in a minute or two.  She doesn’t like dealing with all the emails!  the Facebooks!

Finally, we all also know the outlier.  The great-grandmother who’s active on Facebook.  The business exec who is a master of Excel.  The mom who runs multiple blogs.

What’s the difference?  I think people who experienced significant life changes at an early age become far more adept at embracing new technologies – and new ways of thinking in general – than people who locked into a lifestyle early in life.  Think of immigrants.  According to “The Millionaire Next Door ” I learned an astonishing statistic – the ethnic group with the highest likelihood of becoming first-generation immigrant millionaires was ex-Soviet Russians.  Think about that.  People from a non-capitalist society with no cultural commonalities with America are the ethnic group most likely to become millionaires in America.  Why?  I’ll make my nonscientific claim that it’s because of REATA.

If you’re expected at an early age to keep up with rapid changes in technology (and with life in general) I think you’re more likely to learn the skill of acquiring new tech skills than someone who slowly acquires those skills.  That may sound obvious, but it’s not.  Think of a child who learns how to program at an early age.  I did.  I got a Tandy computer at age 10.  There were no games.  I learned BASIC and coded my own games:  my favorite was a game where you headed up a rock band and made strategic decisions to tour or record an album – making the right choice gained fans, the wrong choice lost them.  Now think of a child who wasn’t exposed to computers early, but got a job as an accountant circa 1994 when computers started infiltrating the workplace, and the groundwork for Skynet was laid down.  That person might work just as intensely with computer, but never would have been forced to engage in the steep learning curve of a child desperate to make a fun game out of nothing.

I see it as an adult:  executives or ex-execs claim not to know Excel and chuckle about their lack of tech skills.  Would you chuckle along with someone who never learned to drive?  Cook?  Manage their finances?  No.  People who have to learn early on to self-educate and self-manage are going to have far greater success later in life.  I bet that great-grandmother who’s on Facebook probably had to take care of her two little sisters while mom worked the farm and dad was fighting in World War I.  I bet the business exec who mastered Excel had a bad setback early in his career when he couldn’t get something done and gritted his teeth and learned how to do what needed to be done.  I bet the mom who mastered blogging felt like she had to get a story out and learned what to do.  The people who didn’t were the people who early on learned to adapt only when pushed to the brink.  Or maybe they never learned.

As we age, the temptation to rest on our mental laurels increases.  I am well-read, so I ease off on reading challenging new works.  I am tech-savvy, but for years I resisted learning to text, because it’s fine to get by on “calling” (that’s the thing you do with your phone and your voice, kids).  I know how to work with Excel, so there’s no need to learn how to work with XML.  It can go on and on.

But I think once you’ve learned to adapt to new systems – and if you learn this skill early on – you’re going to have an advantage over others in life, and this advantage will be massive.  It’s fine to be an expert in one area, and hammer away at it.  Then again, there’s a trite old saying – no less true for being trite – which says that “the only constant is change.”  People who don’t learn early in their lives to adapt to change are eventually going to hit that brick wall.  Would you hire someone who doesn’t know how to do something a 20-year old can do effortlessly?  By that, I mean, would you hire an accountant who scoffs at Excel or QuickBooks and says “hey, ledger paper’s worked well for me, kiddo!”  No, I don’t think you would.  I think adaptability – regardless of what you’re adapting TO – is a skill in an of itself, and the lack of adaptability is a major problem.  How do you avoid that?  Learn something new – and just start today.

photo  Some rights reserved by MiromiTintas

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I have to admit that I’m puzzled by the internet from time to time.  I’m no novice – I’ve been online since the headset-inserted-into-the-modem-receiver-with-the-screechy-noise days, but sometimes the craziness of it all amazes me.  I started getting some hits for ‘brip’ and found out that brip is a reference to a snowboard move:

brip

1. brip

Shredding a turn on a snowboard or skies. Also accomplishing anything in general, but usually only exuberant things.
I bripped that mountain.
You sure bripped that RBV.
Cherish the Brip.

2. brip
To bong rip, or rip the bong.

To inhale smoked marijuana from a water pipe.

brip!

The third definition was pretty negative, so I’ll leave it out for self-serving purposes (it was #3: to lie, but it was overwhelming voted down, so I’ll dismiss it as a hater).

I liked that first definition. I know the urban dictionary has nothing to do with my writing, but I have to say I’m fairly pleased to see ‘brip’ – as in brip blap – associated with such a positive term as laid out in #1. And hey, #2 is not all bad, either.

So go out and brip it!  I love the idea that a word that I associate so closely with myself now could be a positive term.  Go brip it!  I think I’ll work it into my daily speech now, and you should too – not just for my sake or my site’s, but because that’s a great definition for a great word:  ”accomplishing anything in general, but usually only exuberant things.”  That’s great- accomplish exuberant things:  brip them!

Photo  Some rights reserved by alexindigo

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I don’t often blog about the business of blogging, but a conversation with a friend of mine and the reading of a blog post covering the same topic prompted me to share my opinion on building a successful blog. More specifically, the first step that is universal to all successful blogs: the author chose to start blogging.

It may seem like a trivial step, but it’s not. I know that many people have asked me for advice on writing (as it relates to blogging, mostly) and I’ve seen three different results: (a) they never start writing themselves; (b) they start writing but quickly give up when they realize how difficult it is to create content; or (c) they start writing, develop the habit of writing and succeed.

Now, the level of success may be quite different. I feel brip blap is moderately successful. I have a decent amount of traffic, subscribers, Twitter followers and Facebook fans. I am certainly no Get Rich Slowly or Zen Habits.  But fine.  But I did start, and because of that I have a certain level of “cred” according to Google and the other “gods of search”.

This principle applies to much of life.  Just start.  If you want to learn guitar, the one unavoidable step is to start learning – buy a guitar or get lessons or at least watch videos of people playing.  Just wishing for the skill won’t make it happen.

I’m guilty of doing this.  I’ve aspired to many skills and simply failed to take a first step to achieve them.  On the other hand, I’ve made good stabs at starting some projects and simply decided after that initial go that I didn’t care, after all.  But that’s an important distinction.  I always suspected I’d be good at consulting, and I tried it, and I was.  I’ve always suspected I’d be good at writing, and I (flatter myself that I) am.  On the other hand, I love appearing on radio and podcasts as a guest, but I’ve never tried doing my own.

Try everything.  As the parent of two young kids I repeat this mantra in terms of food all the time, but it’s easy to forget to apply it to yourself as you grow older.  Make time to try new things and not to assume that you’ve reached the limits of your growth.  It’s an easy trap to fall into, and I don’t think anyone has to fall into that trap, because the opportunities for learning are so limitless.  Expand your life.

photo  Some rights reserved by @boetter

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As we near 9-11′s 10th anniversary…

After you read this post (or before, it’s up to you) read the first article I wrote about 9-11 here… dark day.

The two most recent articles I’ve written:

• dark days behind us, brighter days ahead
• and once again, forced to reflect on that day

Last year I didn’t even write anything.  The 9th anniversary didn’t seem that special, I guess, or I was busy with life and after a few years it’s easier to forget than remember.  But now it’s 10 years.  It’s funny how humans have such an attachment to dates, anniversaries and numbers.  Some numbers are very well-known for their significance – 13 is unlucky, 3.1415926536 is pi.  But the number 2.1 means something very specific to me that I don’t share with anyone.  Some anniversaries are personal – weddings, birthdays … and some are universal like 9-11.  Everyone knows what you are referring to when you mention 9-11.

Or do they?  I wonder if we’ll remember what that meant to the world, to America, to New York, to Manhattan, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania in 100 years.  Do we remember today?  Have 10 years of the war on terror avenged that day?  Maybe, in a small way.  Have 10 years of the war on terror hurt our standing in the world?  Are the people behind the attacks better off?  Are we?  Is anyone?

I am a student of history.  I’ve read histories of the Russian Revolution over and over and I’ve been obsessed at times with (American) Civil War history, the Founding Fathers and the military history of the Battle of Stalingrad.  History is big, though.  Events that were earth-shattering when they took place become footnotes in the history of the world.  Remember Archduke Ferdinand? No checking Google.  Do you know what Beslan was?  Or Agincourt?  Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

But I’ve said this before on this blog and elsewhere, 9-11 was the great tragic event of MY life so far.  Maybe the two Space Shuttle disasters come close in emotional impact, but probably not.  This was the tragedy of my life, and although I understand in the scope of human history – for example, the tsunami of 2004 or the Holocaust or any number of tragedies – it was a small thing, it was the one I felt most intensely.  I left New York two plus years ago, but I think a small part of me died and stayed behind there 10 years ago.  It was the naïve part of me.  It was the part of me that was excited to come to the most interesting city on Earth, found out I loved it and then had a group of animals masquerading as humans (and they were – no doubt about it) attack it.

I saw the city and the world come together in love and then wrench apart in hate and never recover.  I don’t know what this event will look like in 100 years or 1000.  I won’t know, I’ll be gone.  Barring some increase in the average lifespan my children won’t, either.  I only know that 10 years after 9-11, I remember this:  I watched out the window of office on the 34th floor of a Manhattan highrise as the first and then the second tower fell with my own eyes.  I called my parents and said everything would be OK, while in my mind I was really saying goodbye, because I didn’t know.  I promised whatever else happened to find my little brother who lived in downtown Manhattan.  I walked out on the street to sirens and jet fighters.  That night the air was full of dust and fear of the unknown.  I doubt I’ll forget, even if history does.

Picture by me.

PS And as I’ve mentioned before, volunteering to help load Salvation Army relief trucks in downtown Manhattan in the following days was the only thing that kept me from curling up into a fetal position.  Support the Salvation Army, those men and women were working until they were passing out on their feet (literally).  They did good work without any intent of recognition or reward.

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Minimalism and frugality* have been hot topics since the financial crisis of 2008 dropped the US into a deep recession, a shallow recovery and now apparently the beginnings of a second recession. As I’ve read about the minimalist, frugal lifestyle and thought about my own childhood, I’ve wondered about whether the ability to achieve a simpler lifestyle is more influenced by the times in which you live versus your own desires, regardless of the times? In medieval Europe, people lived a simple lifestyle, for example. In the future, I am sure in 2085 there will still be people living in cabins in Montana without Smellovision or AI robots whose lives will still be far less simple than ours because of the advances in technology. And just by the accident of my birth in America, my life was inevitably less simple than someone born in a remote part of Indonesia.

My childhood in the 70s USA was fairly simple. There were no answering machines/iPads/cable TV/DVRs/Starbucks/organic foods/etc. etc. to waste money on even if you had the desire. So all of the posts from people like myself who cut cable television only bring us back to the status of, well, everyone in the world, pre-1980. When Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegel and Gordon Bowker sold their coffee shops to Howard Schultz and he created what we now know as Starbucks, he didn’t create a new product, but he did create a new way to make people pay for something that used to be, for all intents, almost free (the same thing happened with bottled water). So these types of products – which are now frequently used as examples of things you can quit consuming in order to save money/become more environmentally responsible/etc. –  just weren’t on the table 30 years ago. Nobody was making a smart choice in avoiding these items; they just weren’t available. People didn’t use credit cards widely or get deeply in consumer debt because credit cards weren’t easy to obtain and once you did, few stores accepted them. The only ones that did so widely were gas stations.

My dad was in graduate school until I was 10, and my mom didn’t work. They had limited money and therefore did many frugal things: lots of vegetable gardening, only one car, simple clothes and so on. Some of that was rooted in my parents’ moderately hippie-ish lifestyle choices, and some of it was based on lessons passed down to them from their Depression-era parents, but part of it was simply the way things were – you couldn’t buy a bottle of spring water or diet Coke. You couldn’t waste money on cell phones. You didn’t need to buy organic meats because feeding animals with corn, which then requires they be pumped full of antibiotics, was not a widespread practice.

So I’ve argued with my parents and other people from earlier generations that their simplicity, frugality and more natural/organic lifestyles were often the product of the era in which they lived. Our choices are both more complex and more difficult, particularly concerning food and debt. I am glad we have some of these choices, of course – I love the internet and technology and some (but not all) of the food choices we have today that were either prohibitively expensive or simply unavailable 50 years ago. But the challenge to be simple or to live a natural lifestyle is much greater today, and finding the balance requires more knowledge and a more critical attitude (maybe even paranoia) than it did in the past.

*I know minimalism and frugality and simplicity are not all the same thing, and I often use the terms interchangeably, but let’s assume for the sake of this post that we’re talking about some vauge point in the overlapping part of a Venn diagram of the three. I’ll use the term “simple” or “simplicity” to cover all three.

 Photo  Some rights reserved by NJ..

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This is a letter I wrote to my parents, via fax, in 1996.  I thought it might be interesting to see what life was like mid-90s as an American expatriate in Russia….

First of all, let me apologize if the quality of this fax isn’t very good…the fax machine we’re using is pretty old (like most of the stuff we have over here) and doesn’t work that well.

Most of the machinery here is OK stuff, it’s just all 10 years old and heavily used.  So I hope you get this and that it’s legible and all.

The trip over was uneventful.  The KLM flight was great, and I didn’t really sleep the whole way over.  It was too crowded, and I just listened to my CD player.  We all split up in Amsterdam, and the only trouble I had was when I got to Frankfurt and the Russian customs people took a disliking to my computer.  But after a short interrogation by the guards in a little room (they X-rayed the computer, much to my disliking), I got out OK.  Customs in Moscow was a breeze, the driver got me, and took me to the Aerostar Hotel, which was like the Peabody (a famous Memphis hotel) sortof.  It had real small rooms but the lobby was great…nice restaurants, etc.  It was $250 a night, and the firm paid for it all.  But the TV had NBC, CNN, and even Country Music Television.  So that was a boring couple of days.  I slept about 16 hours the first day, and after that I just played on the computer and watched TV.  A burger and fries from room service cost $30.  So I ate sparingly, and on Saturday and Sunday I went for some long walks to the big plaza full of street vendors while the snow poured down.  It was interesting, but I got bored. Ed note:  I can’t tell you how proud I am that most of my commentary to this point related to how much television was available.  Sigh.

Like I said, I have my apartment now.  It’s a very nice one by Russian standards…it costs about $2500 a month.  It’s 3 rooms:  kitchen, living room, bedroom.  I have 2 bathrooms, one with a toilet and one with a sink and shower.  I’ve got a stove, fridge, etc.  It was prefurnished and a maid cleans up once a week, so I can’t complain.  It’s in a big building that’s about half Russians and half Americans.  It’s also only about a quarter mile from the nearest subway station (Metro Kurskaya) so that’s convenient, since they only let you use the company drivers for the first week, until you get used to the city.  I have a TV but it’s a piece of junk…old Soviet one, that only shows 6 channels (and guess what…CNN is channel 7).  It just has 6 buttons, 1 through 6, and so despite the fact that the firm is paying for the full 15 or so cable channels I don’t get CNN or MTV or NBC, which are all on Moscow cable.  Irritating, but not a big deal.  I don’t have much time to watch TV.  When I’m not working, I’m sleeping.  The constant cold seems to make me constantly sleepy.  Fortunately the bed is plenty comfortable and I brought my own pillow, so it’s fine.  The place stays warm (gas heat) and the water is hot in the shower, so I’m not complaining in the least bit.  I send my clothes (all of them) to California Cleaners which costs about $10 for a full load, which is well worth it, in my opinion.  Ed note:  Again with the TV.  And yes, being frozen all day makes you sleepy. Hence my move to Florida…

The city is pretty boring, actually.  It was horribly cold at first, almost unbearably.  For about the first 2 weeks it snowed every day, but the last week we’ve had sunshine and temperatures of 30-40 degrees, so it’s gotten a lot better.  It stinks, too.  It’s not really a bad smell, but it’s just really, really strong.  The American expatriates (expats) all call this scale.  We’ve actually had sunshine a few days, and unless the wind is blowing horribly it’s not that bad, once you get used to it.  I have to walk about a quarter mile to the subway, then I ride it for about 15 minutes, change trains, and then another 5 minutes; then it’s about a half mile to the office.  the firm has 2 offices in Moscow:  Mokovaya Ulitse, and Vtoroi Samotechny, which is where the Oil & Gas and the Banking Departments are.  Our offices are temporary, because there was a fire in our old offices; so the quarters are very primitive.  We have the third floor of this ratty old building, but once you get inside it’s not too bad.  I have carved out a corner in one of the  Russian rooms  with my own desk.  I share a pretty big room with 7 other people, mostly Russians.   The Russians are all OK.  They’re all pretty young and most of them speak great English.  I try to talk Russian when I can but it’s frustrating to try a lot of the time because they, of course, speak English better than I speak Russian.  Still, most of the time now at stores I can order stuff without looking like a total idiot.  I just couldn’t carry on a conversation with someone about accounting (but hopefully I’ll get there). Ed note:  I did get there

We eat at McDonalds on Prospekt Mir about every other day.  It’s a popular place for expats, since it’s relatively cheap (Quarter Pounder, large fries, and a coke is about 27,000 rubles, or about $6.  My other frequent haunts are Pizza Hut on Pushkin Park (across from the first McDonalds…it does $200 million in sales a year) and the American Diner, which is unique in that the food is not only decent, it’s actually really good.  It’s sortof a 50s style roadside diner…like Arnold’s in Happy Days (the TV show, y’know).  They just serve burgers and all but it’s all really good and you pay for 100% American style atmosphere…60s and 70s music…just imagine the stereotypical 50s diner and you’ve got it.  I love it…frequently here you want to escape from the absolutely unrelenting alien environment and feel like you’re at home.  Food here is incredibly expensive.  A Red Baron pizza from the supermarket is $15, for example.  A bottle of coke is $2.50.  So I usually just eat a cheese sandwich or something for dinner and load up at lunch.  Between the walking and the sparse eating (I’ve actually gone a day without eating anything just because everything here tastes  scale ) I’ve started losing some weight.  I already have to wear a belt with one suit or the pants won’t stay up.  So that’s my suggestion for a weight loss program.  Visit Russia.  Ed Note:  I’m appallled in retrospect by how much I idolized American fast food… oh well.  That was the boy coming from Memphis, I guess.

Safety is still a big concern of mine.  Instead of taking a real taxi, you just throw a hand out and cars will take you wherever.  I try not to do this when it’s avoidable.  It seems to me like that’s just begging for trouble.  I only do that if I’m just dead tired, if I’m carrying a heavy load (like dry cleaning) or it’s after 1am (that’s when they quit running, until 5 or 6, I think).   The metros are very safe, heavily policied, very clean, and very well lit.  If you don’t mind the walk, it’s not really a big deal to take them.  A token costs 1,500 rubles, or about 31 cents.  The only thing about the subways is just the horrible stinking crush you get in the morning.  That’s why I seldom get in before 9 or 10, because to leave earlier than 8:30 you end up with the massive commuter crush.  And let me tell you, it gets unbearable.  It’s bad enough when it’s just full, let alone when people are pushing and shoving for every last inch.  I even missed my stop once because I couldn’t force my way off the metro.  Here’s my route, just to let you hear the weird names:  I get on at Kurskaya Metro (next to Kurskaya Vokzal, a train station) and ride through Komsomolskaya, Prospekt Mir, and get off at Mendelevskaya.  Then I switch to the blue line on Novoslobodskaya and ride it to Tsvetnoi Boulevard, where I get off and walk about 1/2 mile to the office.  It’s about 45 minutes to an hour, depending on the volume of traffic, which can get horrible.

My apartment’s on a really heavy traffic street (called  the garden ring …it’s sortof a big ring road surrounding  Old Moscow ; it’s about 10 lanes) and I have yet to walk home, no matter how late, when there weren’t still a number of people walking around.  Plus it’s a pretty nice neighborhood, in general…it has a French supermarket, a Samsung store, a Daewoo stereo store, a couple of coffee bar places, and so on.  Most importantly, right across the street is where the rich expats live….lots of Mercedes and BMWs.  So that seems a more logical crime target if there was any.  I have yet to encounter even a whiff of crime here, yet, though.  It seems a lot safer than everything sounded.  The difference in Moscow appears to be that the closer you get to the center of the city, the safer it gets (police presence is arbitrary; they don’t patrol, they just go crusing for drunk drivers so they can beat them senseless…no joke).  So I’m one metro stop from the Kremlin (the center of the city) and my neighborhood appears to be very safe.

Work here is the same as the US.  I work 10 to 12 hours a day, which isn’t so bad.  They’re a lot less wound up here, and we joke around a lot more.  Still everyone is tense and on edge.  The Russians are all mad because the firm recently quit paying them in US dollars and started paying them in rubles, which devalue almost the second you get them.  The expats are mad because they have big lapses in expense reimbursements, so they end up carrying hotel bills for months before they’re paid.  Most of the expats here are sortof bitter.  They have a great deal (no taxes, higher pay, housing paid for up to about 6 months).   However, the work is unrelenting, and I say that even by the way it seems tough in Memphis.  The level of disorganization is incredibly high.  The Russians don’t have much of a work ethic.  They get in at 9 or 10 and leave at 5 or 6 after a one hour lunch break.  And I’ve only seen 1 Russian in here on a weekend.  Then again, most of them start at about $4000 a year, and work up to maybe $30,000.  So with 50% taxes and a cost of living 2 or 3 times that of Memphis….you decide.  It’s still a lot better than most of Russia, though.

I’ve been working on 2 banks.  The first, Big Bank 1, is just a front bank for Megabank, one of the largest in the country.  The other is Big Bank 2 in Tbilisi, Georgia.  I’m preparing the Russian and World Bank financial statements for them, which is dull work.  But it’s a change of pace, and it gives me a lot more responsibility than I had in Memphis.   I was supposed to go to Siberia to work on Big Bank 3.  We had a small office in that city in Siberia (about 20 Russians, 1 American) which got closed about a week ago, but most of them will be around still, I guess, to help with the last audit.  I’m going to go there an American guy and about four Muscovites.  We’re going to stay there about 4 weeks, then come back to Moscow and finish the audit, and my manager said I could leave then although I have discovered I have an open ended offer to stay here (up to 2 years), with a promotion to senior and good pay (keep in mind, no taxes).  I don’t think there’s much danger of that happening, although the opportunity is interesting.  I also had a good chat with a partner from Dublin who was visiting about maybe going there as borrowed labor next year.  Nonetheless, I’m going to be glad to get out of this town.  I really enjoy the new culture and I’m actually having a really good time now.  I just don’t like cities this big, and this place is huge.   This place is just waiting to explode, though.  There’s a very real and constant dread of the Chechnyans starting to attack…we had a fire at Kurskaya Metro that the Russians thought might be Chechnyans (it wasn’t).  Plus, if the Communists appear to be heading for a win, I think a great many of the the firmers here will be quitting and scatting.  They voted yesterday to reestablish the USSR in the Duma (their Congress).   Fortunately, the presidential elections aren’t until long after I leave.  Ed note:  Obviously there was a bit of paranoia at work here…and I did come back to live here for a few years after the 1996 elections, so it didn’t work out that badly.

Well, anyway, that’s the short of it for now.  I’ve settled into a routine, and I shuttle back and forth to work easily.  I like the people here, even if they’re all a little on edge, and so I’m doing OK.  The amazing thing is that despite all of the pollution and everything, my constant dry hacking cough is gone and in general I feel pretty darn good.  I thought I would be getting sick, but *knock on wood* I haven’t yet, despite temperatures below 0 Celsius daily and walking up to a mile a day out in the cold.

The trip to Siberia is temporarily off, at least until the middle of next week.  Most of the banks are required to pay up front for the hotels and plane fares because the firm, like most businesses in this country, has a cash flow problem.  The bank refused to cough it up on Friday, so I sure wasn’t going to go without any cash or anything.  I don’t want to be paying for everything like some of the expats here.  I’m not into eating expenses.  Ed note:  I did end up going to Siberia; it was a crazy experience and I’ll post some emails from my time there in the future.

So at any rate, that’s my news for now.  I will try to stay in touch and someday maybe I’ll get my email.  I may try the Microsoft Network next…they have much wider access available.  Who knows.  It’s frustrating, I’d really like to have it.

Ed note:  It’s amazing to think, today, in the world of Twitter/Facebook/email/etc. etc. that there was a time when people couldn’t keep in touch electronically, but it was a real struggle in the mid-90s in Russia to stay in touch.  My firm had semi-reliable email, and at home I had “sometime” email.  When traveling in Siberia I was able to send 140 word emails via dialup – basically Twitter by dialup to communicate.  Fun times.  But cell phones weren’t prevalent, email was spotty and therefore I had to do silly stuff like sending my parents a fax like this post …  such was life.

Ed note 2:  Take this letter for what it was worth – a young guy making his first serious foray into the outside world.  I know I sound goofy at points, but that was the way my mind worked at the time.  I’m more enlightened since then (I hope).

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