Yeah, for the most part. I’m working towards my dreams and they feel within reach even though I know the path there is both long and arduous. It will require a lot of me, but that is more due to what my dreams are than any circumstances around me.

How it happened is of course a hard question to answer. In some ways, perhaps many ways, dumb luck, I met my wife in an unlikely place and she has built me up brick by brick over many years by now. Without her it’s hard to imagine I’d, we’d, be in such a good place all around.

But that isn’t really helpful, focusing on the parts I had no and have no control over. If we instead look only on my actions I think there are a few but more importantly a few key insights that helped me:

Actions:

• Fake it till you make it. Confidence is all important in our society, if you don’t have it naturally then you need to fake it. Over time it becomes second nature.

• Take care of yourself, first. Like they say in the preflight security rundown, put on your own mask first before you attempt to help others.

• Take responsibility for your own well being. Related to the one above but this is more on the emotional level, while external factors will of course impact your well being you don’t have direct control over them. You can’t expect anyone else you make you feel good/well so you need to shoulder that burden.

Insights:

• You rely on society and it relies on you: while work sucks and is often times completely meaningless and seemingly detrimental to the world from a long term macro perspective it’s still the case that your dream life involves amenities and comforts that require people to work. And you can’t expect that of others unless you yourself put in the same effort.

• You aren’t in control and you never truly will be: while this might be a hard pill to swallow you need to make peace with the fact that you could get cancer the day you reach your ultimate goal and that’s just part of this reality. You can only impact your actions and improve your chances, you can’t guarantee shit. Celebrate your victories no matter the source of them and learn from your own mistakes but don’t let external circumstances crush you.

• Life just isn’t far: relates to the above. Some people smoke and drink and do copious amounts of drugs are still wildly successful and rich and live to 100. Some work their asses off, are the nicest people ever, live clean and healthy and then die in cancer in their 30s with two young children left behind. Dwelling on this solves nothing. It’s just a part of our reality and isn’t really meaningfully changed or impacted by politics.

Those are my two cents

My recommendation falls squarely on the Omada series from TP-Link. It’s their SMB (small-medium business) offering and its very wallet friendly for what it is. Though WiFi 7 stuff is of course not cheap if you want the bleeding edge. I suggest going with the EAP6 series with WiFi 6E. No need to buy the physical controller, instead DIY a router with opnsense or pfsense and the Omada software for managing the APs is what I recommend. You of course need a switch with PoE like TL-SG2008P. PoE is a game changer for making wiring up the APs easy, and I do recommend wiring them because then you don’t need to think about having a strong signal between the APs.

Criteria being stability mainly, all consumer stuff is much more prone to the occasional drop and just plain wonky ness. Another criteria being upgrade path, the Omada stuff can easily be sold when you upgrade because they retain value pretty well (and you can find them used to start with as well). They also don’t ship with the bloat consumer devices come with. With features you don’t need and router+AP combo is fine if you’re in a single room apartment but it doesn’t scale to a multiroom setup well. I’ve used Asus “AI-mesh” and you really waste more money than you save in my experience.

I live pretty darn rural nowadays. Used to live in a biggish city. Didn’t dislike it, it has its upsides like people have pointed out. And I could afford it, even a largeish house if I would’ve wanted. But the prospect of being effectively turned into a modern day slave by virtue of having to have a well paying job to afford mortgage and over all higher cost of living associated with big city life it just didn’t feel appealing. So we bought an old farm in the boonies instead for less than we sold the apartment for. Pretty much no neighbors. 20.000 SQ meters of land, some goats and hens. It’s pretty tranquil and peaceful. Still work a stressful IT job that pays well but being able to just stroll through a 100 year old forest by walking out the door does wonders for stress management I feel. Sure the commute sucks when I do need to be at the office but it’s a small price to pay and it has meant that I actually take the time to read quite a few books per year during said commute.

Not burnout in the adult, working sense no I don’t think so. That would be quite worrying and likely not actually caused by school / college.

School tired, absolutely. Generally speaking, in the adult world motivation is a nice to have, the need to have is discipline. Discipline does not care in the slightest if you want to do something or if you’re motivated to do it. Discipline is doing it no matter what because that is what you’ve decided that you will do.

The source of discipline is your parents, objectively they failed. Not out of malice mind you, just from not knowing that this was something they had to do. Since you did your schoolwork, a typical source of contention where a parent needs to instill discipline in their child, they didn’t identify that they needed to find some other way to teach you. Be it housework, training/exercise or hell even taking care of one self if you’re the “workaholic” type that needs to use discipline to force themselves to have fun and relax.

Now of course that train has sailed. So you need to teach yourself. Which is not easy but you’ll succeed. I find it helpful to think of discipline as something you get more of the more you use it. So start small, decide on something small that you should/need to do but struggle with. Maybe it’s brushing your teeth EVERY night or getting out of bed when the alarm rings or running laundry every weekend. Something, and then doing that until it’s either completely automated or you’ve got enough control over it that you know you’ll always be able to quickly force yourself to do it. Then move on to bigger fish. Perhaps it’s spending one hour (a specific hour helps, like 6-7 pm) doing schoolwork. Doesn’t even matter if you don’t even have schoolwork to do, just read course material again or look into an upcoming course. It needs to be mandatory, something you don’t allow yourself to ever cheat on.

Further never ever reward yourself with NOT doing a task like studying/training etc. Instead reward yourself with other things. A piece of candy at the most basic, an hour of watching TV/playing games or whatever other activities you want to do, that you don’t need discipline to do.

I hope this is helpful. Take care of yourself, you got this!

The only power consumers have is voting with your wallet. Which in this case if this is important for you you need to cancel else they’ll let it be and then later down the road they’ll push even further. Also this is what always happens when a company gets big and think/know they can get away with it.

The only power consumers have is voting with your wallet. Which in this case if this is important for you you need to cancel else they’ll let it be and then later down the road they’ll push even further. Also this is what always happens when a company gets big and think/know they can get away with it.

It checks if the water is really truly out so opening the hatch is safe (as in no water coming out causing water damage). And for that it waits a time so the water has time to gather in the bottom.