David Safar

Long time no post. But you’re used to that. I guess I’m making up for it in length. The biggest thing going on with me in the past year is my employment status.

Last time I updated, I was working for a company called CipherTrace. The time before that, in between jobs (I always like to take a year or so off between jobs if I can afford it), and the time before that, still at SugarCRM.

Now? Well, now I’m retired. At least for the time being.

CipherTrace (best place I ever worked in a number of ways) was a scrappy little crypto analytics startup that got swallowed up by finance giant Mastercard, in the bowels of which giant it only lasted a couple of years before being digested into something wholly unrecognizable and eventually meeting the same fate as everything else that one swallows. That was a painful process, but a surprisingly lucrative one, and when I recovered from the elimination experience enough to get my bearings, I assessed my finances to a level that I never had before and realized… maybe I can take more than a year off. In fact, after taking everything into account, downloading a budgeting app (since Mint died and its replacement Credit Karma is total ass, I switched to Rocket Money, which is excellent) and cutting back from the irrationally exuberant spending of a well-employed Silicon Valley techie to something more practical, I realized… do I ever have to work again?

And that’s my current status, retired punctuated with a question mark, not a period or an exclamation point. My investments are not tuned for early retirement. My personal investment style is aggressive and risk-tolerant, but I tempered this by listening to the experts about the merits of tax-advantaged retirement accounts. Consequently, I mostly hold very volatile investments which could tank dramatically but also hold great upside potential, and year 2045 target date funds locked up in retirement accounts where I can’t touch them without penalties for another decade and a half. (Stupid retirement accounts… I shoulda known, just like most parts of life, what works for most people most of the time is not right for me.) I don’t think I ever actually believed I could escape the capitalist meat grinder early, so I never considered focusing on building a bridge account (the investment account early retirees depend on to bridge the gap from actual retirement to legal retirement age). I have one, but it was never the focus and represents a relatively small percentage of my portfolio. So there are two significant risks to my retired status: my bridge account could run out before the retirement accounts come online, or my volatile investments (or the broader market) could tank. I’m retired… unless it turns out I’m not. The money will last unless it doesn’t. I can live a frugal life without working for an unspecified number of years. (It’s also possible I could be lured back to work rather than forced, but it would require exceptional circumstances.)

I’ve been trying to find the right terminology for this situation.

• Semi-retired is not correct, that implies working less, but still working some. I am working not at all.
• “I have no responsibilities here whatsoever.” – a quote from A Few Good Men, accurate, but not enlightening.
• Freelance Bum – basically my current job title (I stole it from the web comic Sluggy Freelance). Also accurate but not enlightening.
• I toyed with Schrödinger’s Retirement for a bit, because I both am and am not retired simultaneously until I observe how the next couple of decades go. Accurate, but I have to explain it every time, and not everyone will get the reference.
• I’m not “retired”, I’m “retired?”–the question mark is part of the word. Needs even more explaining.
• Sometimes I say I backed into a LeanFIRE retirement (FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early, and the LeanFIRE folks are a subset who focus on getting there sooner by aiming for a more modest standard of post-retirement living compared to other FIRE enthusiasts). I wasn’t aiming to do the FIRE thing (maybe I should have been, given my relationship with work), but I found myself in a similar situation to what the LeanFIRE folks aim for. They would get it, but again, not everyone has heard of the FIRE movement, let alone LeanFIRE.
• So I’ve pretty much settled on “indefinitely retired”, because it conveys the right tone of “maybe permanent, maybe not”.

So, that’s what’s going on with me work-wise. I was notified of my termination in March 2024, was officially off the payroll that May after a couple of months of garden leave, and realized I was possibly not just taking a break but actually retired around the beginning of this year (2025). I’m loving it. I still work on my podcast, I’m catching up on media I missed over the years because work ate my time and my motivation to do things, I’m learning about things I never had time for before, I’m working on code projects (of my own choosing, at my own pace, on my own terms), I’m picking up activities I haven’t done for years (like posting on my web site), I’m getting my house clean and getting rid of some of the too much stuff I have, I’m seeing my friends more often, etc, etc, etc. Without a job, it’s possible to have time for a life.

Schrödinger’s Retirement: 8/10, I highly recommend it. The only drawback is being uncertain whether it’s forever.

Much like the Boys from the Dwarf in series 7, this web site is back from the dead. My hosting provider went out of business in… 2019? …and I’ve just gotten around to getting set up on a new one (after a misadventure in the world of VPSes, I’ve returned to reseller hosting). As you were.

My website is now back online following a long outage precipitated by a rather nasty hacker attack and an almost-as-nasty unannounced decommissioning of the servers my web host was storing my site on. It’s good to be back online!

I’ve heard that phrase a few times, so this year I’m trying it out. I used to be a writer — not a professional writer, you understand, just in the more general sense of “a person who writes”, but I’ve been quite inconsistent with it and it no longer feels natural to me. It’s one of only two things I have enough natural talent for to actually be good at, so losing my touch troubles me. Consequently, I’ll begin 2014 by writing, beginning with this post, and intend to go on doing so. We’ll start out easy — 700 words a week, fiction or non-fiction, and as part of those 700, at least five days where I write at least 100 words — no slacking for a week and then having to do it all at once. It’s a low bar — this post is almost 150 words already. But the goal is consistency, not volume. I can raise volume later. Maybe I’ll even work my way up to doing NaNoWriMo this year (which requires around 1700 words a day every day). Also, looking back over this paragraph, I should also plan to work on using dashes less. 😛

I’m not one for resolutions, but I like to think about intentions at least, where I’d like to put my attention in the coming year. So let’s see:

• Writing
  • Consistency
  • Opinion pieces. I’m tired of limiting expression of my views to flame wars in Facebook comment threads — it’s time to be pro-active more often than re-active.
  • Income from it would be excellent. Not necessarily enough to live off of, just a little extra here and there, and if it were passive income, best of all.
• Personal relationships. Meet more new people, date more, connect with my next SO.
• Minimalism. Get rid of as much of the unneeded stuff in my house as I can to ensure there’s room for the stuff that is needed, and space to think and write and live.
• Fitness. Gettin’ old over here, my body is telling me I need to do more to maintain it. 🙁

I think that’s enough to work on for now — maybe I’ll revisit later.

How are you beginning? How do you mean to go on?

Gratitude is so venerated in our culture that it feels awkward to say that, despite my indifference to most cultural norms. Gratitude is one thing that nearly everyone agrees on, from the mainstream (check it out, there’s a whole holiday based on it in November — October if you’re Canadian), to the spiritualists who insist that gratitude is not just a noble pursuit for the sake of others, but the path to well-being for oneself, to the scientists who are publishing studies saying that the spiritualists have it right — there are measurable health benefits to the regular practice of gratitude.

And yet I despise it. The word triggers a powerful feeling of resentment that I doubt many could relate to. It’s a loaded word, evocative of someone making demands, denigrating me (and look at how the word grateful and denigrate share a good chunk of letters — though not, thankfully, a root word), and trying to guilt me into something. “Ingrate.” “You should be grateful.” It’s a moralizing word, an attempt to manipulate through shame, a word used by the powerful to attempt to gain compliance from the powerless, or, failing that, to punish them emotionally for refusing to comply.

The idea of feeling grateful makes me feel sick inside. It’s bound up with a feeling of inferiority, of lack of agency, of inability to do for oneself and neediness and dependence. The powerful may be self-reliant or even benevolent, but the powerless lack the ability, therefore they must be grateful for what is done for them.

Gratitude is a dirty word to me, an evil word, a tool of oppression.

And I’m not sure why. I can’t seem to identify any memories that would account for this visceral reaction, this immediate and instinctive hatred that wells up at the very mention of a word that, to everyone else, seems to represent something wonderful and healing, something that helps them focus on the positive and keep their heads up in hard times.

I’ve considered the words for some related concepts and they don’t have the same effect. Starting on Google with “define: grateful”, I come up with “feeling or showing an appreciation of kindness; thankful.” and “synonyms: thankful, appreciative”. No problem with any of those words. Appreciation is great, thankfulness, when appropriate, is fantastic. These emotions come from a place of equality for me, or at least a power-neutral place.

“define: appreciative” gets a little more complicated: “feeling or showing gratitude or pleasure.” Ignoring the word gratitude (or perhaps substituting thankfulness) makes this a positive thing, but check out the synonyms: “grateful for, thankful for, obliged for, indebted for, in someone’s debt for”. Ooh. Obliged. Indebted. Now you OWE someone something. Oddly, I associate those meanings with gratitude, but not with appreciation.

“define: thankful” is simple and positive: “pleased and relieved”, with synonyms “grateful, appreciative, filled with gratitude, relieved”. Again, apart from the Evil Word, nothing to balk at here.

I almost stopped there, but then went back to that word “obliged” and decided to check it out. And here’s the root of the problem: to oblige means to “make (someone) legally or morally bound to an action or course of action”. Legally or morally bound. Synonyms? “require, compel, bind, constrain, obligate, leave with no option but, force”. Heavy stuff. One moment we’re talking about being pleased and relieved, and it’s only two small steps from there to requirement, compulsion, binding, constraint, obligation, optionlessness, and force. It doesn’t get much more disempowering than that. And, for whatever reason, that’s what gratitude is for me.

I may never be able to have a positive relationship with gratitude. If you do something for me, I may be appreciative, thankful, pleased, and relieved, but I will never, ever be grateful. If asked, “what are you thankful for?”, I may happily relate a long and storied list. But if you ask me, “what are you grateful for?”, I suspect the answer will always be, “nothing, and fuck you for asking”.

This week I have been re-acquainting myself with the Tao Te Ching and exploring meditation. In this short time, meditation has already improved my mood noticeably. I look forward to seeing what it can do over a longer period.

I have also unearthed some memories, personality traits, and motivating forces that were buried under the detritus of years of living, such as the desire to write which inspired this post. I also look forward to seeing what further surprises of this nature lie in store.

Doctor Who One Word Test from Duke Skymocker on Vimeo.

This scene made a good impression impression the first time I saw it.

It appeals to me on a more practical, minimalistic level now.

I shall work on being concise.