All right, Jesse, what do we have as our first question here? We got some good questions here. First is from Fork in the Road. I'm currently working in higher education administration at Aurora University. My lifestyle is slow and I have a lot of free time, which I enjoy. However, my income is quite low.

Many of my peers with similar degrees have moved on to data science or software engineering, live in big cities and have fast-paced lives. They are definitely pros and cons of both lifestyles and I don't really see a good way of choosing. Well first of all, I think data scientists, I think fast-paced lives.

They're just slinging hundreds, cocaine all hours of the night, pulling up in their Kawasaki Ninja motorcycles, slapping five. The data scientists do it in the standard deviation. I don't know, I'm trying to think what's on their shirts. I'm pretty clever. So here's what I'm doing here, Jesse. This is an inversion, right?

So we were talking about people who are working too much and wondering how they can maybe make that more sustainable. Let's invert that with this question. Someone who's not working enough or not working that much at all and wondering if they should be working more, but how do they do that in a way that's not going to overwhelm them?

So how do they find that? How do they get to that mean we're looking for? They're coming out from another direction, but trying to end up in that same place, having the right level of work. So as long time listeners know, my standard answer to any of these, should I change my job questions usually comes back to lifestyle centric career planning.

I say, look, you should have this clear vision of your ideal lifestyle, all aspects of your life, not just work. It should be tangible. You can smell it, taste it, see it, feel it. And then you figure out how do I work backwards from that to make it happen, given whatever opportunities, skills, existing career capital I have in place.

And then you sort of build a reasonable plan to get closer to that vision. This question brings a another element into that discussion, which I think is important, which is the notion of an income floor. All right. So lifestyles and lifestyle centric career planning are abstracted away from details of this is your particular job.

This is your particular income. But we cannot abstract income completely out of these discussions because if your income is below a certain level, there are issues that could arise that will destabilize any aspirational lifestyle goal. There's a stress generation factor that happens. If you feel like you don't have enough discretionary income to handle the things that come up in the normal course of life, it is a constant source of stress.

It doesn't matter if, yeah, but I, my house nearby this rural university has a nice yard and it's scenic. And if you're worried about money all the time, that stress is going to outweigh that. Also if discretionary income is low enough, so many of the different options you have for actually investing in and fulfilling visions for different areas of your life are going to be cut off to you.

I just, I don't, I can't take this time off. I can't afford to do this. I, I don't have the money to buy the mountain bike for my dream of mountain biking. So there's something that I call the income floor, which is important. And that's where you take, and I'm using this term discretionary income.

What I really mean by that is your income after fixed expenses. So now we're trying to normalize for like how much does your house cost? You know how much, uh, you have to pay tuition for private school for your kids because of where you live, that's the best option, et cetera.

So that the money you have leftover, if that's below a certain floor, which you can conceptually figure out, then a particular lifestyle plan, we can think of as being unsustainable. So it's like, you want to say, here's my lifestyle vision. How do I using my existing opportunities and skills and options, how do I get closer to this lifestyle while staying above my income floor?

And we want to throw that into the discussion here, fork in the road, because you said my income is also quite low. So this is actually gonna be the crux of what you do next is figuring out does low quite low mean below your income floor. That's another bit of planning you have to do.

How much money would you need after you pay for your housing expenses, et cetera? How much discretionary income do you think you would need to feel non-stressed and like you have interesting options and the various things that matter for you in your life. If in your current job, you're below that, getting above that income floor is a necessary component of your lifestyle vision that you're trying to move towards.

Now you might find that you're already above it. Yeah, you don't make a ton of money, but where you live is cheap and it's fine. Good benefits. You're not really worried about calamitous, whatever health occurrences. So you might be fine, or you might feel that you're close to it, but everything else about your lifestyle where you live is good.

Well, that's fine. You don't have to close an income gap and you can make a plan to do that. I want to move up to this next level in the administration. I'm going to do this thing on the side because I have a data science background and I'm going to do some side work and we can easily push that above.

Or you're going to have to make a change and say, you know what? I'm well below it. There's nothing I can really do here to get above it. So I'm going to have to make a change. So the income floor I think is really important. If you do make a change, I want to assure you that there is a middle ground between being the administrator in the rural university and big city, fast paced, cliched data scientists doing Coke off the stomach of a stripper vision that we all have of you data scientists.

There is an in-between ground. And how do you access that? What is the map you use to find the in-between ground? It's again, it's this lifestyle center, career planning augmented with the income floor. If you have software engineering skills, if you have data science skills, you can figure out, okay, I don't need to make all of this money.

I need to get above this floor. Oh, you know what? I could go to Boise and work at the tech sector there that's burgeoning. And this is actually a pretty reasonable job, but it gives me above that floor and it still has some of the aspect I like of rural living over here.

I mean, you have a lot of options is what I'm saying. There might be remote work options. Well, I could take this remote work job or I could do contract work. And you know what? If I had five clients doing contract work, I'm above the floor, but I could live wherever I wanted, but the income is better.

You have a lot of options. And this is why I always come back to working backwards from your vision is because that's what allows you to navigate the territory of options. Without that, we fall back on cliches. We fall back on extremes. Without that sort of guidance, we think I either become a lawyer or I become a teacher, right?

That's a very standard Ivy League graduate thing. Or you think I either move to the big city to be a software engineer and I have to somehow like afford to live in the Bay Area or I have to stay in a very low income administrator job in this rural county.

We think about extremes. We think about cliches. If we don't have a specific compass to navigate us through that territory. So lifestyle vision, career planning with an income floor as a non-negotiable component of wherever you end up, I think you have many more options than you think. You have many more knobs to turn with the degree you have to build that lifestyle than you might at first imagine.

Mr. Money Mustache sent out an email kind of like moving or he was visited San Francisco and talked about some of those issues. What was his, he came away from visiting San Francisco saying, "The lifestyle here is so expensive. Why would you live here?" Or he came away saying, "I'm moving to San Francisco." He came away saying he did some research and he's like, "There's still a lot of cool things you can do in the city.

The food is actually not that much more expensive if you buy it in a grocery store." He goes, "There's a lot of free places you can go." And he took pictures of him in the parks and certain places and walking around not paying for gas, that sort of thing.

Here's my, I'm going to give a deep poll here for like really long time denizens of online culture, especially old blog culture. I'm talking early 2000s here. This reminds me of it. Leo Babuda, Zen Habits. Do you know Zen Habits? No. So this was really, he helped kick off this.

So there's this online minimalism movement that really kicked off pre-social media. So these were, when I was getting started, these sites like Zen Habits were a couple years ahead of me. In fact, Leo of Zen Habits actually had a program where you could sign up and he would mentor you as an early blogger.

He mentored me for a while and gave me some advice. So I remember being in grad school at MIT in the early 2000s, like 2005, 2006, reading Zen Habits. This is when the minimalists got started a little later, but, and this was also the time of becoming minimalist. And I don't remember all of them.

They all had minimalism in the name, basically. Courtney Carver, I'm trying to think of the different names. Anyways, it was this whole movement about simplifying. And it really was, I wrote about this in my quiet quoting piece for the New Yorker a couple weeks ago about, briefly I mentioned for the millennials like us, this minimalism movement that arose after 9/11 during the financial crisis of 2008, that whole first decade of the 2000s was really millennials trying to grapple with work and life.

And it's, it's, it's when we were moving away from follow your passion, we were the first generation raised on that. They're trying to figure out how do I put work to work on behalf of what I want my life to be. Right. But anyways, Leo was one of the original guys.

And he, through Zen Habits was about simplifying your life, slowing down. And he, he lived in Guam, six kids, was in debt and was out of shape and smoking or whatever. And through Zen Habits, he began chronicling, he got in better shape. He stopped smoking, built up this audience and wrote a guide.

I forgot even what it was called, but like a PDF guide and started selling it. And that did really well by 2005 standards, right? Like today, when you think about someone doing well, we're like, oh, that's great. Like Jordan Harbinger signed a $5 million podcast deal. This was more like, man, I made $70,000 or something.

Right. But he paid off all of his debts. And he was, what made me think about this story based on what you're talking about, is they moved to San Francisco. All his six kids, he quit his job. He could make just enough off of this and they lived really cheaply.

So it reminds me exactly what Mr. Money Mustache was talking about. He wanted to live somewhere interesting. So they moved to a row house in San Francisco. They homeschooled their kids and just went to the parks and to the ocean and just walked around and just loved, their whole life was built around just being in an interesting place.

So it made me think about that. He was living cheap and made a really cool life. So he's like, if we're going to live cheap, we want to live somewhere that's fascinating. Zen Habits, that guy was awesome. You would read that and you would just be like, man, I got to simplify my life.

A good movement. All the older, I have listeners out there who know what I'm talking about, but that was a cool little cool period of in our culture that then morphed in the fire culture into Mr. Money Mustache. Right. So fire was the, um, fire was the followup to the online minimalism movement.

So fire was more like a geeky version of that. So the minimalism movement had, you know, like the minimalist and Leo and Courtney and Joshua Becker. And these guys were, they're kind of cool. It was kind of, they're cooler guys, right? Like we're going to just hike with our backpack and, and like live simply.

And Josh and Ryan moved to a cabin for a while. And then we got the new version, which Mr. Money Mustache helped kick off. And now it was more geeks who are like, I've got my spreadsheet tells me that if I get a 3.6 return post-tax on my, you know, SEP IRA, I'm going to be able to retire.

So then there was like this kind of geek version of it, but it was all the same idea. And then the fire movement kind of got shut down because I mean, it's still around, but they got super shamed. Right. So then they got super shamed of like, you guys all are privileged and this and that, and they all got worried about it.

And so a lot of them kind of disappeared and I don't know what's going to come next, but that's a whole other conversation. .