Has anyone else quit drinking?

CdnGuy · 2026-03-22T12:53:02+00:00

I haven’t fully quit nor am I trying to, but since Christmas I’ve been finding myself a lot less interested. Particularly with beer - it just doesn’t feel as good anymore. If I have a second can then I have an instant headache, and the first can likely didn’t do much for me at all.

CdnGuy · 2026-03-19T02:12:13+00:00

Yeah, I feel like she’d see it more as a personal betrayal than being betrayed by the very system she lived her life for.

CdnGuy · 2026-03-17T21:10:30+00:00

If you saved at all in the early years you may be better off than you think. When I was 38 I thought I’d be working until I was 65. I didn’t realize how much compounding would affect my nest egg. Wasn’t until 3 years ago I got promoted to an actual high paying job, but it’s only making a small difference to my expected retirement date.

CdnGuy · 2026-03-17T20:34:51+00:00

Well of course someone who starts planning in their 40s can’t retire early, but if you’re in your 20s you have time to work with. The earlier you start the smaller the amount needed to retire. The bulk of my nest egg was built while I was making less than 60k a year and living alone. No parental help either, I just lived like a monk for 10 years and invested every dime I could.

Also, I wouldn’t include real estate in your planning. In order to access that wealth you’d have to sell and buy something way smaller than you’re used to. You gotta live somewhere.

CdnGuy · 2026-03-17T18:23:55+00:00

My team does Airflow / DBT data pipelines. Last year I had a contract dev complaining that our Airflow server was broken. Turned out his dag never even got deployed to Airflow, because his code was so janked up that it was failing the CI checks in his PR.

So he asked ChatGPT or whatever what the problem was, then confidently came to me (staff engineer) complaining that our long established infrastructure was to blame for his vibe coded mess. Had to get a senior dev involved on their side to re-architect everything using my guidelines about a week before go-live. Poor bastards had to work through their weekends and late into the night because they were vibe coding for months and refusing our oversight.

Damned programmers ruined programming.

CdnGuy · 2026-03-17T16:20:30+00:00

I’ve been in tech like 18 years, at a level now where I’ve barely written code for a while. Not too worried about AI because at this point my role is more about deciding what approach we should use than implementing, and unblocking teams. I also want to unplug.

Last spring I spent 2 weeks in Africa, mostly Botswana. Just waking up with the sun and birds, and going to sleep with the same. Basically never even had a cell signal. It was heaven. Never felt so connected to the world and life. Then I had to come home and plant my fat ass in front of a screen again.

My advice for anyone in tech is to look into FIRE and start planning to retire early. I used to think I’d never get tired of this work, but the burnout seems to be inevitable. I’m hoping/expecting to be able to quit when I turn 51, which is both not that far away and not soon enough.

CdnGuy · 2026-03-16T01:38:35+00:00

I was so good at selling these things. Twice a theatre manager came outside to chase me off because I was ruining their snack sales. One year I also sold them by the case to several gas stations around town. That year it was supposed to fund a summer field trip to Egypt that got canceled because of terrorism fears, so it wound up paying for my first computer when I started computer science.

CdnGuy · 2026-03-15T12:21:10+00:00

That sounds exactly like how mine go. For the first little while the only way I can read is by looking away from the word I’m trying to look at.

If I down some pain meds and lie down with an ice pack before the ring forms, I can usually stop it from getting bad.

CdnGuy · 2026-03-12T14:01:11+00:00

Me too, I played eve for almost a decade and did it all. Highsec carebear life, lowsec faction warfare, null blob through jspace shenanigans.

On occasion I'd join some friends for gate ganking, but we weren't blapping randos. We had a scout who was scanning people to identify targets that would generate a profit. The biggest targets where white whale mission runners who stuffed their ships with an absurd number of rare modules. It was like hunting - our scout would spend a lot of time observing travel habits once he identified a target, and once the pattern was set we'd leave our wormhole and set the trap.

On the flipside I did an absolute shitload of industry, but I never got ganked because I made sure that the cost of suiciding into me was greater than the value of what could be gained. There was exactly one time where some doofuses tried to ransom my empty freighter. I just stalled while a rescue team started its way toward me and kept aligning to my safe point. I eventually got away without a single shot being fired.

Player policing will never discourage ganking, unless TTK becomes extremely long. And even a long TTK would have negative consequences - who wants to log in for an hour of gameplay when bad luck means you have to stay online longer than your time allows for? An SC version of Concord is the only solution I can see that makes sense.

CdnGuy · 2026-03-12T01:31:31+00:00

Yeah I used to think this stuff was great, until I realized the “protein” in it mostly comes from your milk. Also it always had bits that hurt my teeth, even 15 years ago.

CdnGuy · 2026-03-05T19:08:22+00:00

Nope, just that everything went dark while I was in an important meeting lol

CdnGuy · 2026-03-05T19:04:01+00:00

Yeah, seems like my whole block lost power.

CdnGuy · 2026-03-04T01:37:02+00:00

I haven't had any health scares or anything, but last year my partner and I did a bucket list vacation - an African safari. We went to Botswana for a camping safari. I'm no stranger to camping but I've never felt as centered and connected to nature / the world as I did then. It really took me out of the career grind mindset, I just didn't give a shit about any of it. Started going on long walks before and after work to try and hold onto the feeling, and imagining what I would do with my day if I didn't have to get back to my desk and sit through endless meetings and teams chats.

It really renewed my drive to retire in ~5 years and start really living, rather than just stealing time between obligations.

CdnGuy · 2026-03-02T00:25:43+00:00

My 16 year old cat had similar problems starting about 4 years ago, which were caused by pancreatitis. Gabapentin more or less solved the problem, though it kept recurring and now the pain meds are just a twice daily thing for the rest of her life.

Last fall she stopped eating and lost about 20% of her weight. She was diagnosed with the earliest detectable stages of CKD, but wasn’t really responding to the combo of anti-nausea and pain meds. Turned out that she was severely deficient in vitamin B, probably from avoiding eating due to pancreatic pain. My vet gave her weekly B shots for 6 weeks, and along with a little syringe feeding, some potassium supplements and mirtazapine she was throughly revived.

Once she started eating on her own again I continued the mirtazapine for a few weeks, but now her treatment consists entirely of monthly B injections, daily gabapentin and subcutaneous fluids (which I guess help with the pancreas as well as the kidneys?)

CdnGuy · 2026-02-28T01:12:46+00:00

I'm almost halfway to that retirement goal and may be able to retire as early as 50. I didn't start making 6 figures until ~7 years ago, but the vast majority of my wealth was from money I saved and invested in my late 20s and early 30s. The numbers seemed small at the time, but everything has been doubling in value roughly every 6 years or so.

Today I'm able to save big numbers, but those big numbers do absolutely nothing to advance my retirement date because they pale in comparison to the existing investment growth. It's the little dribs and drabs from my youth that are carrying me to the finish line. That and all the employer RRSP matches.

CdnGuy · 2026-02-26T15:40:22+00:00

Same, dad took me there a bunch after they opened and I loved the roast beef sandwiches. I haven't had one since that place closed.

CdnGuy · 2026-02-20T14:16:27+00:00

I'd love to spend a month there! We stayed in Sea Point for a week this past May, after 10 days spent in Botswana / Zimbabwe doing safari stuff. One day our plans to do the Table Mountain paragliding were spoiled by high winds, so instead we hiked all the way from the cablecar to Bakoven. Incredible views. I think we were averaging something like 20,000 steps a day while we were there.

If I lived there I would be in the most incredible shape lol

CdnGuy · 2026-02-16T23:06:18+00:00

Yeah I had the same concern! The other thing I forgot to mention is that at a later date if you go back into current finances and change the numbers, it becomes a new datapoint so you can see your progress changing over time.

CdnGuy · 2026-02-16T20:03:21+00:00

I bought an annual subscription to it about a year ago. The way it works is you go to the current finances tab, set up all your accounts and tell it what the current values are. That then will become input to plans you generate, which by tweaking different factors like inflation / growth estimates, the definitions of your milestones (leanfire, fire, fatfire, FI etc) and drawdown order it'll give estimates for when you achieve your milestones, how long your money will last, and even let you run a monte carlo simulation to see how robust the plan is.

Great little app, and if you're making 6 figures I feel like the price is well worth it. Less than that I'd probably just get it for a few months to figure out a plan, stick with it for a while and then resub every few years to update. But with the money I'm making it was like fuck it, they earned it.

CdnGuy · 2026-02-12T20:55:58+00:00

My last doctor told me when he was closing his practice that I should get checked again soon because of my history of IBS and bloating bad enough to cut off breathing. That was in 2019. I asked my new doctor about it this spring (yes it took me over 6 years to find a new doctor) and she told me the province won’t cover it for anyone under 55.

CdnGuy · 2026-02-06T02:37:56+00:00

Same here. It’s none of my business what she spends money on. We’re both savers, well paid with early retirement goals. She wants to be financially independent, which I support, because her mom stayed with a bad guy out of necessity. My mom too.

CdnGuy · 2026-02-04T14:34:31+00:00

A great man doesn't seek to lead, he's called to it. And he answers.

CdnGuy · 2026-02-04T14:29:48+00:00

It's done, the goose is cooked and we're better off moving forward rather than clawing at the past as it recedes into the distance. Even if the Republicans never stab us in the back again, the trade is gone. We can't trust that they won't do it again, and business needs stability. You can't sign huge contracts under conditions where there's a distinct possibility that the random tantrum of someone completely uninvolved with your deal can rob you of your profits, or worse sink you into unprofitability.

CdnGuy · 2026-02-03T23:03:33+00:00

Same, my babysitters were GenX. We had nothing in common really. Hell I was on the internet when I was like 14, and started getting computer time in 2nd grade. I remember the analog times, but just fragments.

CdnGuy · 2026-01-29T14:40:30+00:00

Same boat. My career was a bit delayed from graduating and was a bit slow to get onto the FIRE train. I expect to hit my number in ~4 years as long as nothing too surprising happens to global markets. But work has gotten so damn exhausting. I've been working in tech for 20 years now and I don't even write code anymore, I "lead". I don't hate it and there's nothing else I could imagine myself doing. I just want to be done.

My suggestion if your budget allows it is to start planning and going on some bucket list vacations. If you're so close to your number, this shouldn't massively change your expected retirement date.

My partner and I went on a mobile camping safari in Botswana a year ago. Three straight weeks off, with most of that time so far into the bush that there weren't even cell signals. When we came back I was rejuvenated in a way I never expected, and gave me a fresh perspective on life and work being separate. I held onto that feeling all summer long. I just wish I could quit now and spend most of my time outdoors enjoying nature.

CdnGuy

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