A Brave New Life - A 6-part series on Financial Freedom

cvs · January 16, 2022, 7:42pm

The following was originally written as a series of 6 posts between January 2012 and March 2012,
by the author of BraveNewLife.com, a site that has unfortunately been defunct for quite some time now.

In the 6-part series,
the author BNL focuses on achieving financial independence,
by truly understanding what money means to him.

In the words of the author BNL,

My Early Retirement Journey
I achieved financial independence by cutting my spending to only the things that matter to me most.
We make sure to only spend money where it provides us true happiness.

As I cut my costs, I also increased my savings and investments.
Finally, in 2014, my passive investments surpassed my expenses and I was able to safely retire.

Reproducing the 6 posts in their entirety here for discussion and future reference.

Though all attempts have been made to keep the original posts as-is,
in the interest of readability, some of the obvious typos and broken links have been fixed.

Archived copies of the original posts can also be found on web.archive.org at
[part1] [part2] [part3] [part4] [part5] [part6]

NOTE1: The original author’s approach described in the following posts is highly opinionated.
Some may even consider it controversial.
What worked well for the author may not always work for everyone.
If any of the posts invoke any strong feelings, take a deep breath (and a 2-minute break) before replying .
Do keep any comments on-topic and in line with the TradingQnA community guidelines.

NOTE2: What follows is a long read. You may want to make yourself some or a .
I hope you enjoy reading this 6-post series by BraveNewLife, as much as i did.

cvs · January 16, 2022, 7:43pm

Core Principle #1: Question Everything

[Archived copy of this original post]

Part 1 – Accept that you’ve been brainwashed

That’s right! You’ve been brainwashed.
And it gets worse, you’re still being brainwashed.
Every day, more brainwashing.

And it’s coming from everywhere. It starts with marketing. The evil, vicious world of marketing. They brainwashed you into “needing” a GI Joe action set when you were a kid. They brainwashed you into paying $100,000 for a college degree in sociology where, if you use your degree, will spend decades trying to pay back (and if you don’t use your degree, then what was the point?). They brainwash you into believing and celebrating (and buying things) for holidays like Valentine’s Day, and into buying an engagement ring worth 2 months salary. Well done, De Beers!).

Marketing firms hire psychoanalysts to study human minds and learn to cater to a group’s irrational thought. In the first half of the 20th century, marketing firms convince men that a personal car was an expression of male sexuality. Now these companies could sell to the common man and not just the rich… Later, cigarette companies realized there was an untapped market because in America it was taboo for women to smoke. So they put together a strategy to convince women that smoking cigarettes was a bold statement for women’s suffrage and equality (they called them “torches of liberty”). This is brainwashing. And it works, until you start to question it.

For an eye-opener, check this out

But it’s not just profit-seeking corporations, it’s also your school teachers. They brainwashed you into thinking that your grades mattered as much as the content itself, and that college is a requirement (and sure path) to a happy and successful life.

Your bosses have brainwashed you into working hard for the company, even at the expense of your mental health and family life. There are real techniques for this. I took the classes when I temporarily got into management!

The corporate owned media has brainwashed us into believing that there is this real cultural divide between liberals and conservatives. Then they cater to our emotions and identity by hiring political pundits to yell at each other on TV. They do this because it’s easier to draw an emotional audience than it is to sell a real discussion on policy.

All of this, of course, is hogwash.

And you could get mad at all of them for brainwashing you – except that you shouldn’t, because they were all brainwashed too. There’s no one at fault, it’s the nature of civilization. We’re all just doing what we have done since the day we were born – trying to control things. What matters is that you recognize it, and reject it. And this leads to part 2 – Question Everything.

Part 2 – Question Everything

My daughter is about to turn two, and she recently started asking “Why?” Every time she does, my eyes light up with excitement! I love seeing her starting to question my authority and questioning how things work.

She’ll ask me why she shouldn’t touch my coffee (because it’s hot) and why that’s bad (because it will burn her and hurt) and she’s learning so much, so fast. In my coffee example, she just learned two important lessons.

Unfortunately, if you’re an adult, you’ve probably already stopped asking these questions. As a child, your parents might have answered your question of “why?” with “because I said so,” or “I don’t know, that’s just how it works.” At school, your teachers may have told you to save your questions for the end of the lecture, never to return to the question. At your job when you ask “why?”, you’re probably told “because that’s how things work around here,” or “that’s just how we’ve always done it, ” or once again, “because I said so.” So eventually, and slowly, you stopped asking.

Asking “why” is the key to leading a deliberate life, because it answers how or why things are the way they are. Once you know this, you can make your own educated decision on how you want to proceed. The courage to keep asking “why?” is critical to a continued education, to being open to change, and to making smart decisions.

The sad truth is that if you don’t get good at questioning everything, you won’t be mentally prepared for an early retirement. With no ability to continue your education and to explore, you’ll simply grow bored and return to work because it’s better than nothing. Or you might develop some unhealthy vice, which most likely is even worse.

So question everything and don’t stop there. Encourage your kids, your family, your friends, your employees and your employers to do the same. Some people will hate you for it, others will love you. But I assure you that it will make you a happier, wiser, and more interesting person.

Question why you should or shouldn’t do something. Question why you believe something to be true. Question whether you are spending your time wisely reading this site, or other sites.

An Empty Cup

“My friend, drop all your preconceived and fixed ideas and be neutral.
Do you know why this cup is useful? Because it is empty.” – Bruce Lee

Your mind is a cup of water, and it’s filled with preconceived ideas. Unfortunately, too many of these ideas are not your own. And you can’t fill the glass with new ideas until you empty it of the old.

But once you accept that you have been brainwashed and conditioned from outside entities, and once you commit to questioning everything – you will have an empty cup, a blank slate. And then it will be ready to be filled with the things truly important to you. You’ll then be ready for the remaining 5 principles.

The Blank Slate

Next, in the remaining 5 principles we’ll begin filling it out,
and updating this visual to show how each additional principle complements and supports the others.

cvs · January 16, 2022, 7:45pm

Core Principle #2: Reject Lifestyle Inflation

[Archived copy of this original post]

Part 1 – Rejecting Lifestyle Inflation

College life is a simple life. Living in a single small room with a roommate. Biking to class. Getting books from the library. Cutting costs wherever you can to save up for beer money (which never amounted to much since there were no good paying jobs available). Sounds rough, right?

Except that it wasn’t rough. It was a great time. Every day was a day spent with friends. The simple things like a free concert, a sunny afternoon playing ultimate Frisbee, and a cheap keg of Bud Light were all you needed for a perfect day.

Then you graduated and decided you needed new clothes, a nice car, and a loan for a house because that’s what people do. You bought an iPad to go with your Macbook and iPhone because mobility is key. You got a gym membership to stay healthy, and you always schedule some nights out at a good restaurants to stay social.

This is called lifestyle inflation. It starts when you graduate and get your first good job, and it continues when you get your first raise. Eventually you get promoted so you decide you should move out to a nicer neighborhood farther from work, but that’s OK because now you have a pool and 3189 square feet of space for all your stuff.

But now you don’t have enough stuff, so you have to go to pottery barn and “get more stuff”.

You get where I’m going with this?

But the thing is, this is all avoidable.
These are all choices you get to make for yourself.
Just remember principle #1: Question Everything.

If you’ve already succumbed to lifestyle inflation: that’s OK. I did too. It’s not a life sentence to working a job you hate for things you don’t want. The entire description above was me, literally (including the 3189 sq ft house with pool in a fancy neighborhood). But then I found a way out. I created my own lifestyle deflation. I downsized my house, moved close to work, sold my car, got rid of the money-sucking pool, and much more. And life got better. Way better. Now that I’ve seen the inflated life and the simple life, I know that there’s no going back.

Part 2 – Sometimes it’s not easy

This is more of a warning than anything else. Sometimes rejecting lifestyle inflation is hard. Sometimes it’s not fun to stand out as the guy who ride’s his bike to work, doesn’t go out to eat for lunch regularly, and lives in a small house near work rather than in the nicer neighborhoods 15 miles north.

And if it were all about frugality and rejecting lifestyle inflation, it would be nearly impossible to do this – and definitely not worth it.

This is when you have to remember that the core principles are ingredients in a recipe for what I like to call the brave new life. They will complement each other and support each other, and when placed together they will make a wonderful dish.

Rejecting one of the core principles puts the dish at risk. Taking one principle and saying “this one is too hard,” or “this one’s not for me” is like baking a cake and saying “sugar is bad for me, so I’m not going to use it in my cake.” That would not be a very good cake!

The Blank Slate

The blank slate is beginning to fill in.

It still has a long way to go over the next 4 core principles.
Soon, we will watch the slate be filled in with principles and goals that support each other harmoniously.

cvs · January 16, 2022, 7:46pm

Core Principle #3: Frugality, Self-Sufficiency, and Sustainability

[Archived copy of this original post]

There is a deep and important correlation between frugality, self-sufficiency, and sustainability. Recognizing this relationship is critical to the brave new life philosophy. There are hundreds of books and blogs on each, but rarely do you see the three tied together. The inter-relation between them is why I chose to make them a single core principle.

It’s very important to tie them together. Bind them in unison, let one support the other and become a philosophy. Some life decisions are hard when you only consider one, but become very easy and obvious when all 3 support the same decision. And it’s quite often that all 3 do support a single decision.

Part 1 – Frugality

Frugality, for most people, is a means to an end. For some (those not seeking a brave new life) it’s a way to save money on stuff so you can just spend it somewhere else.

Hey, if I cut coupons and stop drinking that daily $4 vanilla mocha latte with soy milk I can save up for a Carribean cruise (because I deserve it!).

This is not the frugality I’m talking about.

For the BNL type, frugality is a means to an end to achieve financial freedom. Financial freedom buys you freedom from doing things you would rather not, like sitting in a cubicle on a beautiful sunny day. A financially free person can make personal decisions that make them happy and satisfied.

Part 2 – Self Sufficiency

Self-sufficiency is the state of not requiring outside help in order to survive. But by “self-sufficiency,” I don’t mean that you need to move out to Walden pond, chop wood, and eat only what you hunt or gather. (Although this does sound like a nice week-long getaway). Instead, the self-sufficiency I’m proposing is a group state that consists of your family, friends, and local community.

There are two ways to increase your self-sufficiciency:

1. Increase knowledge across each area of your life

Increasing knowledge can be accomplished by using books, the internet, friends’ knowledge, and experimentation. Since making the decision to become more self-sufficient, I’ve used all 4 of these in the past year. I read books about private money lending, and attend a free seminars in order to learn to make money independent of a job. I had a neighbor teach me how to tune-up my bike, which I had never done before. I used an website to learn how to diagnose my broken furnace, and a youtube video to figure out how to replace my busted furnace ignitor. All of these things have led to an increased knowledge base and further self-sufficiency. This increased knowledge is addictive, it becomes fun to do things yourself. In each of the examples I just gave, I also saved quite a bit of money – connecting us back to frugality.

Now let’s explore this form of self-sufficiency with a hypothetical example. It’s below freezing outside, snowing, and your furnace breaks. (This isn’t that hypothetical, it happened to me 2 months ago). You could call an expert to come in, but the fees will be $200, they can’t come until Monday (it’s Saturday), and the temperature in your house is dropping 3 degrees per hour. So you have to book a hotel for 2 days, pack up the kids, and leave. Total cost is $400, two sleepless nights in a cramped hotel room with 2 kids, and no knowledge gained.

Alternatively, you could get on the internet and start diagnosing the problem. You figure out that your furnace doesn’t have a pilot light, instead it uses a silicon carbide ignitor – and you see that it’s not igniting. According to the vast knowledge of the internet, this means it’s either not getting the voltage input it needs, or it’s gone bad. So you get out your voltmeter and measure the voltage, which looks fine. You get back on the internet, learn that your particular ignitor costs just $25 at a local HVAC store, and can be replaced in minutes. Total cost: $25, 2 hours of labor/research, 2 good nights of sleep, new knowledge about how your furnace works, and a little bit of self-sufficiency pride.

2. Decrease complexity and quantity of what you need and want

The second method to increase self-sufficiency is to decrease the complexity and quantity of what you need and own. For example, why have a toaster that will eventually break when instead you could use the broiler in your oven? The toaster is just one more thing that can break. Why have a complex and loud toy for your kids when they are equally as happy with play dough, crayons, and some paper? Why have 2 cars when you can have 1 car and a bicycle? Once again, in each of the examples above you not only increase self-sufficiency, but you also increase frugality.

Let’s again explore a hypothetical example. Let’s say you own a Ferrari and your Ferrari breaks down. This is a complex vehicle with a lot of foreign parts that have to be ordered by a high-charging specialist. This is not self-sufficient.

Now let’s say you own a Ford Focus and your Focus brakes down. You may not know how to fix it, but you probably have a neighbor or buddy that can help get you started. That would be self-sufficient. Or perhaps you don’t have anyone that knows how, but there are 10 mechanics within 5 miles that can easily service the car. This is at least getting closer to self-sufficiency, and you did it by having a less complex product to achieve your transportation needs.

Now let’s say that you decide to move to a place closer to work, and buy a nice bike. But your bike brakes down, the chain pops. Even if you’ve never repaired or replaced a chain before, you are one YouTube video, 20 minutes of labor, and a $7 tool away from fixing it. This is self-sufficiency.

Once you start embracing self-sufficiency, you realize that simple, mechanical tools are preferred over complex ones. A bike is preferred over a car. A manual powered reel lawnmower is preferred over a self-propelled gas powered mower (which is still preferred over a riding tractor). A toaster is just one more thing that can break.

A final advantage of self-sufficiency is that it saves money, reducing your time to financial freedom and retirement, which then gives your even more time to be self-sufficient. It’s a wonderful positive feedback loop.

Part 3 – Sustainability

The Iroquois tribe had what they called the Great Law of the Iroquois, and it’s now referred to as Seven Generation Sustainability. Basically, it goes like this: “Do what you believe will benefit your children seven generations down the road.” This is how I define sustainability.

Example: Planting a tree is good, cutting one down to make a parking lot is bad. Patching a hole in your bike tire is good, buying a new one is bad.

Taking this philosophy is a huge burden, but an important one. The unsustainable lifestyles common in the industrialized world means that each unsustainable act you do, you are taking away from your children and grandchildren. When we run out of oil, when we pollute the water, when we use finite resources for our own pleasure, we are literally taking away from them.*

When we talk about frugality, we are referring to the reduction of spending. Sometimes this gets hard, even for me. Sometimes I want to drive to the store when I know I could walk or bike. Sometimes I want to buy a new laptop, when my current one works OK. Sometimes it’s simply not enough to be frugal to stay on track for an early retirement – and in those cases you need a commitment to sustainability to help you through.

When I think about driving to the store, I think about the Great Law of the Iroquois. And I think, will burning up more oil (something that will most likely be gone in 7 generations) be good or bad for my children, and their children, and so on? Or would it be better for me to save that limited energy for them, while also improving my health?

Will it be better for my childrens’ childrens’ children if I patch this bicycle tube, or should I pull more resources out of the ground to manufacture a new one?

It’s amazing how in-line frugality, self-sufficiency and sustainability are once you start putting these things together. This tight connection is why you see a few common themes on books and websites like mine (ERE, MMM, etc).

Biking instead of driving
Learning to cook healthy and simple foods from scratch (beans, rice, etc), rather than processed foods
Fixing things instead of buying new things

All three of these examples are acts of frugality, self-sufficiency, and sustainability. (Note: they all happen to be healthier too, which is a common by-product).

The Blank Slate

Now your slate is filling out.

You’ll now notice that the pieces are starting to assemble, and that the support each other.

So far, we have three sources of happiness -

An active/healthy mind
Financial freedom,
A Healthy conscience.

Financial freedom is directly and indirectly supported by the 4 contributing principles -

the rejection of lifestyle inflation
frugality
self-sufficiency
a sustainable lifestyle.

cvs · January 16, 2022, 7:46pm

Core Principle #4: Nurture Your Relationships

[Archived copy of this original post]

Here’s an excerpt from an article I read recently:

I am a hospice chaplain. I visit people who are dying – in their homes, in hospitals, in nursing homes. And if you were to ask me the same question: What do people who are sick and dying talk about with the chaplain? I, without hesitation or uncertainty, would give you the same answer: Mostly, they talk about their families: about their mothers and fathers, their sons and daughters.

They talk about the love they felt, and the love they gave. Often they talk about love they did not receive, or the love they did not know how to offer, the love they withheld, or maybe never felt for the ones they should have loved unconditionally.

They talk about how they learned what love is, and what it is not. And sometimes, when they are actively dying, fluid gurgling in their throats, they reach their hands out to things I cannot see and they call out to their parents: Mama, Daddy, Mother.

…

We don’t live our lives in our heads, in theology and theories. We live our lives in our families: the families we are born into, the families we create, the families we make through the people we choose as friends.

This is where we create our lives, this is where we find meaning, this is where our purpose becomes clear.

On your deathbed, you won’t be thinking about work or money or some social cause. You’ll be thinking about your family and friends. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to spend those last hours in regret.

The brave new life is all about achieving a peaceful and joyful state of mind, and having good relationships is a requirement to achieve this. Because of this, it’s important to not only enjoy your relationships, but also to actively nurture them. Just as a garden won’t flourish without proper nourishment, neither will your relationships.

There are many ways to nurture a relationship, but I think there are a few fundamental ways that will work regardless of the type of relationship. Whether it’s your parents, spouse, kids, boss, friend or neighbor – these 8 methods will always make your relationship stronger:

Use open and honest communication
Be flexible and willing to compromise
Be reliable
Offer emotional support
Make situations more fun
Be quick to offer forgiveness and to ask for forgiveness
Admit your mistakes
Respect the person

Just as frugality, self-sufficiency, and the other core principles each require deliberate effort, so does nurturing your relationships. It’s important to look at each relationship that you value, and reflect on whether you are properly nurturing it. Be honest with yourself about it.

And the benefits of having good relationships aren’t limited to just the satisfaction of having good friends and family. Much like the other core principles, nourishing and having good relationships intertwines with the other principles of the brave new life. Having good friends and family that you can rely on (and who can rely on you) is a widening of your self-sufficient community (Remember Core Principle #3 ?). Need a baby-sitter? There’s no need to pay, you can just have your neighbor watch your kids tonight, and you can do the same for her tomorrow night. Your car AC isn’t working? There’s no reason to pay $100 for an anonymous mechanic to add refrigerant, your buddy knows how to do it and he’ll do it for a 6-pack of beer. I’d surely prefer sharing beers in the driveway with a buddy over paying $100 to sit in the mechanics lobby. This is communal self-sufficiency at it’s best!

Conveniently, as you become more self-sufficient you’ll also be able to help your friends with things they are not yet self-sufficient at. This, of course, will further strengthen that relationship. Thus, a positive feedback loop is built.

The Blank Slate

As we continue with this series, we’ll see that positive and reliable relationships will further support future core principles. For now, let’s take a look at how the brave new life is coming together.

cvs · January 16, 2022, 7:47pm

Core Principle #5: Understand The Marginal Utility of Money

[Archived copy of this original post]

The Marginal Utility Of Money

I’m here today to show you that money does not correlate linearly with happiness (not even close), and that recognizing this fact can be a powerful tool. In order to understand this, you simply need to consider the marginal utility of money. Understanding the concept of marginal utility is nothing complicated, but it’s something the average person seldom considers.

Marginal utility of money is the amount of value (happiness) gained from an increase amount of money available to you. This value changes depending on how much you already have stashed away. Put another way, the value I get from saving an extra dollar means a lot more than to a billionaire.

Since the goal of the brave new life is peace of mind and joyfulness, let’s go ahead and look at the completely non-scientific correlation between money earned and saved and the joy it brings.

Everybody’s chart is different, but it will look something like this:

Point A is the point in which you have enough for the basic necessities of life: food, water, and shelter. Since you’re reading this post on a computer, I’ll assume you already have food, water, and shelter available to you. And since you already have these, you already have access to most of the joy that money can buy. That’s an important thing to understand – you already have most of the joy that money will ever buy for you.

Point B is the point at which you have enough for more of the luxuries we have in the modern world like a safe home of your own with heating and cooling, a car, higher education, and maybe a homemade bread maker. Once again, it’s up to you to define what you consider Point B.

Point C is financial independence. As you can see, it’s not that much higher than B on the happiness chart, and your overall joy will never rise significantly higher due to an increase in spending. And if your happiness won’t rise significantly higher by spending money, then why trade your valuable time to collect more of it?

OK, I get it. So now what?

Understanding the marginal utility of money is important for two reasons.

1. It forces you to realize that there’s a diminishing return in earning money.

Many people assume more money is always better, and they allow the potential for more money to be a carrot on a stick. They just keep pursuing it, never pausing to reflect on what they’re really after. It starts out with working a few hours of overtime, then 80 hours a week including weekend. Then they’re telling you how to dress. Next thing you know you’re 80 pounds overweight, divorced, and watching the news alone in the Marriot Suite’s at 6am on a Thursday, getting ready for a big sales pitch.

But once you recognize the marginal utility of money, and compare that to the marginal utility of your time, you can consciously decide to turn down money in order to gain more time – thereby regaining control of your life.

Picture the chart above, but replace “Money” with “Free Time.” The relationship between joy and free time exists, and the curve will look very similar.

I picture happiness as a cumulative thing, so in order to maximize overall happiness, you want to find the right balance between earning money and creating free time. This consideration, I suspect, is what drove MMM’s decision to retire at 30 and the reason I’ll be retiring soon at 35. Since I’m already on the flat area of the Money/Joy chart, I have very little to gain trading my time for money. Instead, I’ll achieve far more happiness by quitting my full-time job, freeing up time to spend playing with my kids and teaching them.

Here’s a real life example: I have a pretty good job, work with great people, and in general I don’t mind doing it for 20-30 hours per week (which is what I usually put in these days). But my company has this really rigid format for bonuses where they lay out specific tasks that you must do in order to get portions of your quarterly bonus. And one of the tasks this quarter is asinine. It has nothing to do with my job, and adds no value to me or the company. I despised the idea of doing it…

A basic time/money financial analysis shows that it’s about 10 hours of work for $800 worth of bonus. Not a bad return on time. But I’m past point C on the chart above, so now if I factor in my marginal utility of money, I recognize that $800 has a negligible effect on my overall happiness. I’d rather have those 10 hours to play outside with my kids, read a book, or throwing rocks at a tree. At least then I’ll be satisfied in knowing that I’m not selling my time for something I don’t support.

2. You can redefine your own marginal utility of money

The second benefit of understanding your own marginal utility of money allows you to redefine it. If you just avoid thinking about it, the evil marketing companies will be glad to define it for you. They prey on people that don’t deliberately define their value of money, but Mustacheans are too smart for that! Marketing firms would have you believe that Point A requires a car, a big mortgage, eating out at least twice per week, and obviously cable TV (so they can keep talking to you!). But now that you’ve been made aware of the real value of the money you’re earning and spending, you get to control how you define points A, B and C. Personally, I’ve been to some villages and slums in India, and there I saw what I define as point A and what I would consider below point A. These conditions don’t exist in the US and most other developed countries, which is a good thing.

Now that you realize that YOU get to define your points A, B and C – you can literally tweak your happiness. Seriously, it really works! Over the past 18 months, I’ve made serious changes to my life. I’ve downsized my house, sold my car, changed jobs (taking a lower income), moved across the country, and overall simplified my family’s life. And while I’m much happier now, I have to admit that the single biggest change to my happiness came when I redefined points B and C. I greatly reduced what I considered luxuries, and what it takes to be financially independent.

You guys are lucky, because by reading MMM you are already slowly having your definitions of points A, B and C reduced in needs and wants. But it’s not enough to sit back and let MMM and the rest of this community define these things for you, no more so than letting a marketing team define it for you. Everyone is different, and you have to deliberately define your own personal needs and wants along the Money/Happiness chart. Besides, it’s a fun exercise. And if you have a spouse or older kids, bring them into the discussion too.

Conclusion

Let’s revisit the basic concept of this post to wrap things up. Here are the key points.

The value of each dollar you make depends on how much money you already have.
If you already have “enough” then it’s not worth much at all when it comes to happiness
You can define your personal value of an additional dollar.
Once you have “enough” you can free up your valuable time to do things you enjoy.
This might be in the form of switching from full-time to part-time work, the ability to turn down crappy work for a few extra bucks, or an early retirement.
You will never have enough money to retire if you let TV commercials define your needs and wants.

The Blank Slate

Warning: If you haven’t read the previous posts in this series, this chart may look a bit confusing and overly complicated.

As seen in the chart above, the idea of understanding and defining your marginal utility of money has two direct paths to happiness.

First, it allows you to more quickly achieve financial independence by giving you the opportunity to define how much money you really need.
Second, because you will be less likely to do work just for money.
It frees up your time to do things you truly enjoy.

cvs · January 16, 2022, 7:48pm

Core Principle #6: This Is Water

[Archived copy of this original post]

The Brave New Life is about awareness – awareness of your self, awareness of your environment, and awareness of your thoughts. It’s about living a deliberate life, making deliberate decisions, and having deliberate thoughts. I could go on and on about it, but I decided to let someone else do the talking.

David Foster Wallace was a philosopher, a novelist, and a genius. Below, I’ve created a video (actually it’s 2 parts) featuring a commencement speech given by Wallace in 2005, 3 years before his death. In just 23 minutes, Wallace was able to define and describe a concept that took me 33 years to figure out for myself.

This isn’t your standard commencement speech filled with excitement and mindless optimism. That’s not to say it’s not an optimistic message, because it is… but it’s also a humbling, sobering and realistic message about adult life. In his words, it’s “about LIFE before death” filled with awareness and consciousness. It’s about deliberately deciding not only what you spend your time thinking about, but also how you think about it. No amount of knowledge can replace your ability to actually think.

I didn’t attend my own commencement, I was in too much of a hurry to start my life (or so I thought). But had I been in attendance for this speech, I know I would not have appreciated it. I probably would have left disappointed, because I was too young and too foolish to hear the capital-T truth that David Foster Wallace shares in his speech.

This is the most important of the core principles because it is the rich soil that allows the other principles to grow. I’ve listened to this speech a dozen times over the past few months, and each time I do, I learn some new insight from Wallace that I hadn’t previously caught – and hadn’t considered on my own. The video is 23 minutes long, I hope you’ll watch the entire video and enjoy it as much as I did.

This Is Water - David Foster Wallace - Part 1

This Is Water - David Foster Wallace - Part 2

This concludes the 6-part series on Financial Freedom by BNL (BraveNewLife).
I hope you enjoyed reading this 6-post series by BraveNewLife, as much as i did.

Archived copies of the original posts can also be found on web.archive.org at
[part1] [part2] [part3] [part4] [part5] [part6]

MarginCaller · January 17, 2022, 4:14am

Excellent post, loved reading each part. Have some of the principles down, a few to go.

Anikethan · January 17, 2022, 9:53am

very good post and personally relatable.

another valueable resource on this line , watch it