A few months ago, I was moving through Mr. Money Mustache's website and noticed that his family was featured in the book Equally Shared Parenting: Rewriting the Rules for a New Generation of Parents by Marc and Amy Vachon. Of course, I ordered it right away, always interested in new ideas and especially if either Mr. Money Mustache or Cal Newport are involved. The book sat on my shelf for awhile due to other things going on, but I finally got around to it over the first couple of days in May. Unfortunately, it seems like the authors and their book have sank without a trace, which is really a pity because it was a fantastic book. The short takeaway is that the book calls for a new for parenting (or simply marriage, if there are no children) that empowers both spouses with full opportunity to be involved in their children's lives. This is smart for a few reasons:
- Probably faster pace for reaching financial independence. If both partners have a part time job, or a full-time job that's slightly reworked and/or fewer hours per week, this means their income will be equal to or greater than just one spouse working.
- Both parents get time with the kids. A child has two parents, and should get both of them. Dads and Moms both bring things to the table that the kids benefit from.
- Because both parents share the load when it comes to household responsibilities, nobody's unnecessarily bogged down with housework or bottlenecked when it comes to doing things.
- Continuation plan in the event of a major change. If one spouse is fired or involved in an accident, or there's a new baby in the home and the mom is out of commission for a bit, nothing grinds to a halt because both parties share the knowledge of the house and children.
This month we also got down the air conditioners - up to 20-25kwh, but it's nice to sleep at night.
I've also spent more time figuring out quite a number of food recipes - my wife has lentil sensitivities, which is a bummer because lentils are magic. I figure that we only need to cook 10 meals per month, if each meal lasts 3 dinners total. I'm exploring a relatively even split between beef, chicken, fish, and lentil dinners. Those are all great proteins.
Last month I did a stint of handwashing everything, but that got a bit old and I wasn't sure that it wasn't introducing more friction into our day than I really want, so we went back to using the dishwasher.
I started taking cold showers this month. Not so much to save money, though not running the hot water heater is a great incentive, but because it's supposedly good for me and I'd like to be more resilient. So I started acclimating myself to cold showers, starting the shower with a trickle and gradually turning up the cold water and ending it with full blast cold water.
Recently I was exposed to the idea that I have ADHD. The little I've read so far makes a lot of sense of some of my struggles with attention, and my wife reminds me that as a kid I was actually diagnosed with it. That said, I hate having the label since it seems like everybody around me has ADHD now - it seems kind of like a fad. Of course, this really isn't fair since I don't know everyone who claims to have ADHD, and from what I know of it, it's actually quite possible that it's endemic. At any rate, I bought Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder by Gabor Maté.
A second thing I've been working through is the idea that I deal with codependence. This too makes a lot of sense of struggles I've had through the years. Facing Codependence: What It Is, Where It Comes from, How It Sabotages Our Lives by Pia Mellody was recommended to me very highly, so I have started reading it. I'll probably put my ADHD and codependency thoughts into another post as relates to the deep finance journey.
At the end of this month, which I'll plan to cover in another post in the future, my direct boss and the CEO called a meeting with me and communicated that I've not been meeting expectations for my role in a large number of areas, and if they don't see efforts to course correct toward some specific targets by June 23, we will need to discuss termination. Almost immediately, it was clear to me that these issues (which I didn't realize were problems before the meeting) stemmed from my ADHD, codependency, attempts to over-optimize my life, and moving a little too quickly into a non-conventional workweek that impacted my teammates. Suffice it to say, I made some major changes in my lifestyle and thus ended my experiments with a six-day workweek from 8-2pm entirely. But I'll save the details for another post.
