It's been a while since my last post, and a lot has happened since then. I've hit my one-year truckiversary, surpassed $15,000 in monopoly money savings, and paid off the remainder of my student loans. Expect posts for these things in the coming weeks. As for my absence: I've been dedicating the majority of my free time to building an app for a small nonprofit to help Syrian refugees apply for scholarships. I like to think it's a worthy enough cause to excuse my tardiness and general inability to produce new blog content. Oh, and my laptop unceremoniously died on me. With that out of the way, onwards to the (lean) meat of the post.

I don't know at what point in history we thought it would be cool to start picking up heavy objects for fun. I'd imagine it'd have been pretty recently, it's not like you could stroll into a Chipotle 2,000 years ago after a sweaty, Beyoncé-fueled workout* and replenish all those burnt calories with a double chicken and guac burrito bowl. We live in a brave new world.

Regardless of when lifting and exercise for the sake of exercise became a thing, we're fortunate enough to enjoy the privilege today. I frequently allude to how I take part in the fun: via a modified version of Jim Wendler's 5/3/1 program. That seems like a good starting point for this post, so let's do that.

The Basics

The 5/3/1 is a pretty standard strength-training routine, recommended to me by my good friend (and source of inspiration) Pat K., who wasn't too far off from setting a state record at a recent powerlifting tournament. I'll be channeling his knowledge and advice for pretty much the entirety of this post.

Anyway, the most important thing to know about the 5/3/1 is the concept of a training max (henceforth referred to as TM), which is a baseline amount of weight you'll use for each exercise. To calculate your TM for an exercise, take 90% of your one-rep max. If you don't know what your one-rep max is, use the formula:

weight × (1 + reps / 30).

As an example, if I bench-pressed 195 pounds for 7 repetitions, my estimated one-rep max would be:

195 × (1 + 7/30) = 240.5 pounds

and my TM would be:

240.5 × 90% ≈ 215 pounds

To start a 5/3/1 routine, you calculate your TM for overhead press, parallel squat, bench press, and deadlift, and then the workout is as follows:

A plus sign (+) after a number means "at least this many reps, but ideally you should continue the set until you reach fatigue". In turn, "fatigue" means "the point where your body has failed you and you're a sopping pile of ATP-depleted, lactic acid-filled muscle tissue on the gym floor." Week 4 is called a deload week, and is for recovery, basically a vacation for your muscles. I skip this most cycles, I've only actually ever felt the need to deload once or twice after particularly heavy weeks.

The Warm ups mentioned above are three sets you should do before each day's routine. Those sets are 40% x 5, 50% x 5, and 60% x 3 respectively, and help your muscles get ready for handling the heavier weight you're about to subject them to. They're super important unless you enjoy being irreparably injured.

The Routine

The table above constitutes the core lifts of the 5/3/1 workout. The other main component of a 5/3/1 is the assistance work, which consists of all the supplementary exercises you do after you've done the core work, to add more exercise volume and build complementary muscles. My whole routine (leaving off the warm-up sets for brevity) looks something like:

Monday - Military Press

• Military Press - Standard 5/3/1
• Rear Delt Raise 15 lbs × Failure
• Cable Upright Row 30 lbs × Failure
  Pat's suggestion was dumbbell upright rows with 25 lb weights, but my wrists don't appreciate that.
• Bench 60% × 8 × 5 sets
• Pullups Body Weight × 8 × 5 sets
  I do body weight pullups because I don't have a weight vest/belt available to me. Try to keep a constant rest time between sets, and go until failure on the final set.
• DB Row 6 to 12 reps × 5 sets
  Start with an amount of weight where failure occurs in 6 to 12 reps, and decrease weight with each set, trying to keep yourself in the 6 to 12 rep range. I start with 75 pounds and work my way down in 5 pound intervals from there.

Tuesday - Parallel Squat

Start each squat day with the following:

• Cardio 10 minutes
  If you're like me and legitimately useless at jogging, this usually means 10 minutes of walking. Take longer strides, to start loosening up your legs.
• Foam Roll Legs and lower back
  If you've never foam rolled before, it's really relaxing. It's also a great way to limber up before/recover after a workout.
• Dynamic Stretches
  Pat recommends DeFranco's Agile 8
• Squat 45 lbs × 8 reps
  A standard Olympic barbell weighs ~45 lbs.

Week 1

• Squat 65% × 5
• Squat 75% × 5
• Squat 85% × 5 × 5 sets
  Go to failure on the last set

Week 2

• Squat 70% × 3
• Squat 90% × 3
• Squat 95% × 3
• Squat 100% × 3
• Squat 105% × 3
  Keep adding 5% until you can't do three full reps

Week 3

• Squat 75% × 5
• Squat 85% × 3
• Squat 95% × Failure
• Squat 85% × Failure
• Squat 75% × Failure

End each squat day with the following:

• Glute Ham Raises Body Weight × 8-12
• Core work and lower back extensions
  I like to do oblique twists ("Wood Choppers"), bicycle kicks, and stability ball roll-ins, but feel free to pick your own proverbial poisons.
• More Foam Rolling
  Still legs and lower back
• Static Stretches
  I also like to use an inversion table at the end of my squat days, but I haven't seen those at other gyms.

Thursday - Bench Press

Week 1

• Bench 65% × 5
• Bench 75% × 5
• Bench 85% × 5+
• Bench 75% × Failure
  This is a dropset, meaning you don't take a rest between the 85% set and this one.

Week 2

• Bench 70% × 5
• Bench 80% × 5
• Bench 90% × 5+
• Bench 80% × Failure
  This is not a dropset, rest after the previous set.

End bench days on Week 1 and Week 2 with the following:

• Press 60% × 8 × 4 sets
  Try to minimize rests here, and time them so that you ideally reach failure on the final set.
• Rear Delt Raise 15 lbs × Failure
• Weighted Dips Body Weight × Failure
• Cable Upright Row 30 lbs × Failure

Week 3

Start and end your workout with the following warm ups:

• External Rotation 10 lbs × 10 reps
• Internal Rotation 10 lbs × 10 reps

And the rest of the day's routine is:

• Bench 160 lbs x 3 x 10 sets
  Keep the rests between 60-90 seconds. Add 5 lbs to the 160 lb base every cycle until you can't do the full 10 sets with 60-90 second rest times.

Friday - Deadlift

• Deadlift- Standard 5/3/1
• Squat 50% × 8 × 5 sets
• DB Row Failure in 4-8 reps × 2 sets
• DB Row Failure in 4-10 reps × 2 sets
• DB Row Failure in 6-12 reps × 2 sets
  Decrease weight with each set of rows.
• Pullups Body Weight × Fatigue × 4 sets
  Pat suggests switching up the grip for each set and trying narrow/wide/overhand/underhand pullups.

Going Big

Since the beginning of this vehicular voyage, I've always considered it a benefit how I'm forced to be consistent in my routine. But up until recently, I didn't really have anything tangible to show for it. I mentioned I was going for a combined lift (bench, squat, deadlift) of 850 pounds, and a few weeks ago, I decided I was ready to put the rubber to the proverbial road and go for it. So I took a week off from my normal routine and replaced each day with an attempt to see how much weight I could ^safely lift ^{with proper form}. For that week, I ate more, slept more, stretched more, and generally did things that would put me in tip-top lifting shape. In the end, I managed the following:

Bench - 225 pounds
Squat - 295 pounds
Deadlift - 365 pounds

...for a total of 885 pounds, pleasantly past my target. It's a shame though, because much like our base 10 number system makes $10,000 appealing, it also makes 300 pounds appealing, which I was just shy of with my squat weight. Though at 5' 10" and 170 pounds, I'm happy with those numbers. Happy is different than content though, and naturally, my next goal is 900, then ^{maybe eventually} 1,000 pounds. The graph at the top is promising too, with its general upward trajectory (the fluctuations are likely because of the structure of the cycles, diet, and my sometimes non-optimal sleep schedule.)

But Why?

But Brandon, getting out of bed early in the morning and picking things up sounds awful, why would you do that to yourself?

Even if we ignore the benefits of morning exercise, the positive effects of exercise on the brain, and the link between exercise and happiness, there are still a couple of functional reasons. Firstly, there's just less going on at 5:30 in the morning, meaning that I'm way less likely to scare the ever-loving Hell out of some poor passerby when I throw open the back gate and crawl out of my tomb in the twilight. Even though I've learned to not care about people seeing me go about my truckly affairs, I'd prefer to not cause any heart-attacks.

Another big thing is that to me, progress is happiness. I plan on dedicating a whole post to it in the future, so in brief: I'm at my happiest when I'm improving at something, and with exercise it's easy to see and quantify that you're legitimately changing for the better.

The last reason I do it is simple: where else would I shower? I, like most people, prefer to go into work not looking like I just rolled out of the back of a truck. The gym has showers, and that's where I get my daily dose of post-workout de-truckification.

You could totally skip the workout and just use the shower though, duh.

I mean technically, yeah, but it just doesn't work like that on a personal level. I can't just traipse past a room full of equipment and motivated, fit human beings on my way to the showers. No, that right there is more than enough guilt and motivation (mostly guilt) to make that 2 hour pit stop in the weight room.

*Seriously though, Lemonade is a jam.

Looking at a list of unanswered questions people have sent me, I couldn't find a single reasonable thread that united any of them, save the fact that they all concern my truckly ways. They're all pretty much orthogonal in the N-dimensional space that truck questions occupy. Let's get to them.

What does your family think of your living situation?

I've kinda been doing my own thing since I was 15 or 16, and my family sort of accepts that I'll probably figure out something that works for me. That said, they naturally thought I was insane (and still likely do) when I told them about my truck idea, well over a year ago at this point. The more I explained it to them, the more I was able to convince them that I had some semblance of an idea what I was doing, for better or worse. So in short: they probably think I'm crazy, but they're impressed I haven't managed to burn the truck to the ground yet and/or get myself Very Arrested™.

What are the worst and best parts of living in your truck?

The best part is knowing that I'm building the future I want for myself. The worst part is probably not being able to cook. Not that I was good at cooking before, but I did definitely enjoy whipping up a meal for myself every once in a while. I hijacked a friend's kitchen (thanks Pragya!) to cook a Thanksgiving turkey, but I'm fairly confident that was the last time I attempted any comprehensive culinary conquest. Oh, and not being able to have any pets is also pretty sad, I'd most definitely have a canine companion if I was living in a more conventional location.

What do you do for ventilation?

As a consequence of having a rear gate that locks from the outside, I've always had to keep the door open a crack to avoid being locked in. That's provided sufficient ventilation thus far, though I also just had the sunroof installed in the back of the truck, both to provide some ambient lighting and have a more appropriate ventilation solution. Ventilation wasn't really a problem before, but the closer the source of ventilation is to where you're actually breathing, the better.

Why do you blur people's faces out in photos?

The first time was because I was (and still am) completely unaware of what the legal climate surrounding truck parties looks like, and I guess I'd also like to protect the privacy of my friends and family if at all possible. Plus, it lets me dust off my (extremely limited) Photoshop skills once in a while.

How's El Nino working out?

Initially, pretty poorly. Between the leak, and the impressively loud symphony of rain drops on a thin metal roof, the fairly frequent rain was less than friendly. But between patching up the hole and judiciously applying marine sealant to any location that looked like it might betray me at the first sign of water, the truck is in much better shape these days. I can relax and enjoy the occasional drizzle outside my office window without worrying I'm going to come home to a truck-cuzzi.

If I wanted to live in a truck, would you guide me through it, like buying the truck, insurance, and all that legal stuff?

I'd like to think I've covered most of that stuff on here, but definitely shoot me a question or email if you come up with anything I missed. I'm always happy to help people convert to the dark side get setup with a simpler, more efficient lifestyle.

Do you have a plan for when you contract a debilitating case of viral gastroenteritis?

I kinda do. My primary plan is to rely on my good health, nutrition, exercise, and sleep schedule to prevent debilitating cases of viral gastroenteritis in the first place. But if I were to find myself involuntarily returning the contents of my stomach with regular frequency, I'd probably take off work and grab a hotel room for a few days to sleep it off. Luckily, I get sick pretty infrequently and haven't had to resort to the suite life just yet. Fingers crossed.

Truthfully, I've been doing a pretty awful job at keeping you guys updated with what I'm actually doing, truckwise. The last time I even showed off the interior in all its shanty glory was almost a year ago. In the intervening interval since my last Home Improvement update, I've completed a few fairly large truck projects. By "large", I don't mean anything that requires any real technical competence, but certainly larger than fixing the hole or doing arts and crafts.

Insulation

Hold up, didn't you spend a whole post talking about how you didn't need to insulate the truck? What gives?

Okay okay, you caught me. I know I said it didn't make sense to insulate the truck, because it wouldn't be effective and I can just bundle up when I need to, but curiosity got the better of me after the idea was planted in my head. You might remember that I fixed the hole in the truck after receiving wonderfully detailed instructions by a pseudonymous Nancy (still from PK Safety). Well, as it turns out, Nancy also had some well-formulated ideas on how I could insulate the truck. After a modest amount of research, I decided, "What the hell, let's give it a go," and on nothing more than a whim, I started tearing apart the walls.

The next step was to line the walls with insulation — Nancy suggested 3/4" rigid EPS foam sheathing. From there, the process is measure, cut, foam seal around the edges, and tape into place. Given that I had to cut about seven 2' x 7' rectangles for each of the two sides, it should have taken a few hours if I was even remotely competent with this type of stuff. But no, instead of a casual few hours of finagling the new fixtures into place, installing insulation became a four month, on-again-off-again affair that kept my truck looking like a war zone for the duration.

How could this have possibly taken you four months?

Naturally, it wasn't four months of constant work, I was only working on it on weekends for the most part, and even then, some weekends I couldn't convince myself I wanted to work on it for more than half an hour or so. The biggest deterrent/problem I encountered was a lack of space. While I have way more than enough (arguably too much) space for simply living and existing, that ceases to be true when I'm trying to cut 4' by 8' sheets of insulation and move around my bed and dresser to access different parts of the wall. So I had to work in sections, e.g. move everything to the back right corner to work on the front left. It basically felt like a giant game of this:

Another hysterical complication (which the borderline-prophetic Nancy had warned me about), is that every time you cut into these foam panels with a switchblade, you leave a trail of little styrofoam beads in its wake. So with each and every slice, all ~46 of them, the truck would essentially become a giant snow globe, and even the gentlest of breezes would spin a snowstorm into existence. Not wanting to litter the outside world with these onslaughts of artificial dandruff, I put a plank of wood across the entrance and swept the tiny nuisances away into a trash bag after every few cuts.

The Final Result

When all was said and done, it didn't look all that bad. I mean sure, it looks like I live in a hobo's spaceship with the shiny tinfoil coating, but at this point we're all painfully aware of how little I care about aesthetics.

I haven't actually noticed if the truck retains heat any better (or worse) since adding the insulation, it hasn't been cold (or hot) enough to tell. In any case, it was certainly a learning experience, and a great exercise in what I can do with the truck if I'm feeling particularly bored inspired.

Skylight!

Yeah yeah, I know it's technically called a "sunroof", but this is my home and I'll call it whatever I gosh-darn/damn-well please. Anyway, way back when I first got the truck, I mentioned the possibility of getting a skylight. Cutting gaping holes in the truck is well-outside my truck-modification comfort zone though, so I opted to bring in the professionals over at Happy Vans, who did the wonderful job pictured at the top. I've noticed far better air circulation/ventilation over the past few weeks, and it's nice waking up to a truck-full of sunshine on the weekends. The eventual goal is to cut a door between the cab and the back, so that I can actually lock the rear gate at night instead of keeping it cracked open and "locked" with vice grips. Happy Vans will probably be the ones doing that particular project as well.

Bike Rack (Redux)

This post is already long enough, and I've already spoken on what goes into building a truck-bike-rack, so here's a not-so-pretty picture of the reassembled bike rack:

*Or Elsa, if you're more about that Frozen life.

This post is less about the "trucks" and more about the "tax-advantaged accounts", which hopefully won't offend too many sensibilities. I just figured it's been a while since I last forayed in my financials, and the several ensuing months have seen some modifications to the plan. The biggest of these modifications is that I added a new tool to my early retirement arsenal: the Mega Backdoor Roth.

The Mega Backdoor what?

The Mega Backdoor Roth. I'm no CPA or CFP, or any other fancy three-letter money-managing acronym for that matter, so check here or the other two links above for a more thorough, accurate explanation. The gist of it is that the IRS overall limit on contributions to retirement accounts is $53,000, meaning you can contribute to more than just a 401k. I've mentioned in the past that I'm putting the maximum $18,000 into my 401k, and I'm being matched an additional $9,000 by my employer. That leaves $53,000 - ($18,000 + $9,000) = $26,000 to contribute to other tax-advantaged accounts. Income limits stop me from contributing directly to a Roth IRA, and even if I could, the max contribution via that regulatory avenue is $5,500. Thus, the process for getting that $26,000 into a Roth IRA is as follows:

1. You add a paycheck deduction to contribute after-tax money to a 401k.* This doesn't actually sound all the useful, and on its own it really isn't. You're being taxed on the money before you put it in, and since it's a 401k, you'll be taxed on it when you take it out, so it functions like a non-tax-advantaged contribution at this point. The real magic happens in the next step.
2. Every time a paycheck contribution comes in, you roll the after-tax portion over into an out-of-plan Roth IRA.** At this point, you pay taxes on the capital gains you've earned on the contribution, which should be on the order of zero dollars and zero cents since it's only been sitting in there a day or two and the stock market isn't some magical money-printing machine, at least for a plebeian like me.
3. Wait for the rollover to go through and clear, then invest it in whatever funds tickle your fancy.

The benefit of doing this is that, because it's a Roth IRA, you don't pay taxes when you take it out. The caveat is that, because this is a Roth IRA, you can't take the money out until you're 59.5 years old, barring a few exceptions like for buying a first home. You can however take out the principal whenever you want, if you find yourself in a pinch. This isn't something I was utilizing last year, partly because my paycheck would have been negative and partly because I had no idea how any of this worked. Luckily, I was clued in by a friend (thanks Mike!), and I've since received a bunch of comments/e-mails with similar tidbits of information. Unfortunately, the backdoor Roth isn't available in everyone's plan (your plan needs to support after-tax 401k contributions, among other things), and Vanguard didn't even support it except over the phone until last year.

Deductions Redux

Grab a glass of water, because this post is about to get even drier, as we dive into the wonderful and exciting world of paycheck deductions. I've made a few tweaks since last time, because now my contributions are spread out over the full year instead of the six months I worked last year. Doing some hardcore basic algebra:

• 401k - In my infinite wisdom, I forgot to update my 401k contribution from the $1,200/paycheck I was doing last year, and continued to not realize it for a few pay cycles, so my contribution per paycheck is now ($18,000 - $1,200 * 2)/24 = $650/paycheck.
• HSA - My employer still puts $800 into my HSA each year and an additional $200 when I get my physical, so my contribution there is ($3,350 - ($800 + $200))/26 = $90.38/paycheck.
• Roth IRA - I didn't pull my act together and figure out the backdoor Roth stuff until after my first few paychecks of the year, so I'm currently contributing $26,000/24 = $1,083/paycheck.

After all is said and done, my take-home pay is ~$2,000 a month. In the Bay Area, that would hardly cover rent and basic livings expenses…if I had them. It's a nice reminder that my lifestyle really is accelerating my ability to build the future I want, at no (or maybe even a negative) cost to my happiness. I truly am fortunate to be in the position I am.

Balancing the Books

Okay, so we've crunched the numbers and know how much money is going into these accounts, but what happens once it gets there? Well it's at the mercy of the stock market, of course. I'm no day-trader, so the daily/seemingly arbitrary fluctuations in stocks and funds don't have any real impact on me. I'm it it for the long haul, and I'd like to think that the intrinsic value of the companies represented by the funds I invest in will increase over the course of the next ten years. So for now, the change in my investments doesn't mean much to me. That said, I've been doing this eight months or so at this point, which has been enough time to see some small gains. My brokerage account, which I was putting more into before I started utilizing the backdoor Roth, currently has unrealized gains (because I haven't cashed out yet) of ~$350. The Roth IRA, which I've only been contributing to this year, has unrealized gains of ~$200. According to Health Equity, my HSA investments have appreciated 4.2%, which is ~$200 of growth. In the same period of time, my student loans (which are paid ahead until 2019 and I've been more or less ignoring), have only accrued about ~$226 in interest, so the investments are indeed worth paying off the loans ever so slightly more slowly.

Aside from having to roll over the after-tax 401k money into the Roth IRA, my finances are pretty much on auto-pilot. All of the aforementioned accounts are set to reinvest the dividends as they come in, so those earnings will keep compounding as I put in more money and time goes on. This is nice because it means that I don't even have to think about investing or worry about too much money accumulating in my checking account and fighting in a losing battle with inflation (not that that's actually something to "worry" about anyway).

Talking to an actual CFP

One lovely feature of my employer's plan is that we can schedule appointments with a Vanguard Certified Financial Planner. This is great because my background in finance consists entirely of a handful of Google searches and I occasionally worry I have no idea what I'm doing. I'd consider this to be a problem because I'm throwing 90% of my money (and thus time) into what might as well be a black hole of legislation and taxation, with the expectation that my sacrificial offerings will magically generate financial independence ten years from now. So on Friday (aka yesterday) at 7:45 am, I spoke with a pleasant chap named Bob, who pored over my finances and listened to my early retirement goals. After some thoughtful consideration, he gave me a few pointers.

The gist of the conversation was that my current strategy (maxing out the 401k, HSA, and Roth IRA) is good, though as my total investment grows, he'd like to see more investments in small/medium cap businesses and some international funds. Once my stock grant vests (and subsequently sells) sometime next month, I'll be grabbing some combination of VTIAX, VTI, and VO. Bob also suggested converting some (10-20%) of my investments to California Intermediate-Term Tax-Exempt Fund Admiral Shares as I near my early retirement date, which seems pretty reasonable to me. After a discussion about my travel plans, he voiced some concern about my ability to get/pay for health insurance while travelling internationally, though after a bit of research it appears I can actually use my HSA to fund that, which is a nice touch. Having some reassurance from a Professional Adult™ that my future plans are feasible and not totally insane definitely upped my confidence regarding this whole ill-defined "growing up" thing.

*On Vanguard's website, you can change your deductions by going to Employer plans > Manage my money > Change my paycheck deduction.

**On Vanguard's website, you can do this by going to Employer plans > Manage my money > Manage my loans and withdrawals > Withdrawal

Yeah yeah, I know, the first day of Spring was one two three four days ago, these posts don't write themselves (though with enough imagination, time, and Markov chains, they kinda could).

This probably isn't apparent for those of you in New England at the moment, but today is the first day of Spring. Well…it is in the United States at least, I don't actually know how other countries/hemispheres do seasons. Climatic differences aside, I found myself doing a bit of spring cleaning earlier today, before I even realized that the Vernal equinox was upon us.

But Brandon, what could you possibly have to clean or get rid of? You own like three things.

When I first started out, this was definitely true. The truck had fairly humble beginnings, it was legitimately just a bed, a dresser, and a coat rack dumped into the back of a moving van. But between Home Improvement projects and a few new hobbies, I've actually accumulated a non-negligible amount of stuff. Looking around the truck, I'm currently the owner of about 5% of the products Home Depot sells, plus motorcycling gear to go along with my non-existent motorcycle, bicycling gear to go along with my actually-existent bicycle, about 72 ft² of insulation left over from a home improvement project I've been working on for 5 months, like 96 ft of lumber that I need to get rid of, and a whole assortment of other random doodads.

To my eyes, refreshed by a relaxing week of visiting friends in Tampa, all of this looked pretty ridiculous. I mean, it's always looked a little ridiculous, but it was looking particularly ridiculous today. Wasn't one of the goals of this whole thing to reduce the amount of random stuff I had? Didn't I value the simplicity of not being inundated with random objects? Shouldn't living in such a small place have forced me to think more carefully about what things I owned? I tried to think back to when I bought each of the things I was now staring at, strewn across the truck floor and haphazardly tossed into heaps and bins.

The majority of the stuff could be traced back to some work I'd been doing on the truck: a drill here, a few rolls of paper towels there, some duck duct tape off to the side, an unopened box or two of sound-dampening foam. Going back to the slowly boiling frog analogy I'm apparently pretty fond of, the slow creep of stuff into my life hadn't really set off any alarms, and I didn't notice until I'd already filled my living space up with it. Just to be clear, we aren't talking about Hoarders-level clutter here, but definitely more than I was comfortable with. So I took a hard look at it all, and there were two major areas of improvement I came up with.

Organization

In this post, I talked about how simply "defragmenting" could do wonders for the amount of available space you had. Too bad I wasn't drinking my own Kool Aid, because a lot of my clutter problems could/can be remedied with a little bit of organization. Between hanging up my motorcycle and bicycle helmets, organizing my tool drawer, and cutting the (now dismantled) wooden railings down to a more reasonable size, there are a lot of small gains I can make here. Even just making things more or less accessible based on how often I use them could be a great exercise in streamlining my life. Really all I need is an uneventful Sunday morning, some nice weather, and a good playlist.

Needs versus "Needs"

Streamlining my life is a great first step, but if my goal truly is simplicity, I won't find it just by shoving extra things into the cracks and crevices of my life. I need to actually get down to the bare essentials. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that figuring out what I genuinely need is kinda hard. Like my tools for example, I definitely wouldn't have been able to rebuild my bike rack without a screwdriver or drill, but does that mean that I need them? Far more often than not, they're just taking up precious space in the back of my truck (and the back of my mind). So it looks like the tools will have to stay in this nebulous gray area of necessity for now. What I really need is a tool library, but it looks like the nearest one is nearly two hours away, in Berkeley.

Fortunately, I did find at least one area of my life ripe for simplifying: my wardrobe. Tell me if this sounds even remotely familiar: somewhere in your house/apartment/truck there is a swath of clothes that don't fit you right, or have fallen out of style, or were gifted to you, or you just don't like all that much for one reason or another, and they've taken up the executive role of "Dust Collector". Unpacking my bag from my Tampa trip, I noticed I wear more or less the same set of ~fifteen (collared/gym/t-) shirts and three pairs of pants every week, making this probably the lowest-hanging fruit in my latest crusade.

So, with no plans on my plate on a drizzly Sunday afternoon, I dug through the depths of my drawers, cleansed my coat rack, and took a quick trip down to Goodwill. In typical fashion, I completely forgot to get a donation receipt, meaning I won't be reminded of my spring cleaning when doing this years tax returns in eleven or so months. Regardless, I still get to benefit from a slightly lighter life.

The Takeaway

More and more often, I've noticed that my posts end with some sort of faux-philosophical epiphany, where I wander upon some not quite revelatory insight about my own life and dress it up as meaningful exposition. I don't think that's happening this time around, for better or for worse. I don't have any sweeping proclamations about simplicity, necessity, and happiness, or how any of the three relate to each other.

Just kidding, I totally do.

In the end, balancing simplicity and necessity is a personal preference. Someone who has fewer needs can, almost by definition, live a simpler life. Whether that equates to happiness, well that's another personal preference and question all together. For me though? I'm a simple man, with simple pleasures. I don't enjoy being busy. I enjoy creating fulfilling work to do, but having too many things going on in my life only dilutes how much of myself I'm able to put into each one. So unless some divine inspiration strikes and tells me otherwise, I'll build my memories without accessories and find felicity in simplicity.