54 posts tagged with "personal"

We bought our electric car in April 2022. It's a Škoda Enyaq iV 80. Its battery has 77 KWh of usable capacity, and its range varies from less than 300 km (at 125 km/h on the highway, fully loaded, on the coldest day of the winter) to 500 km or more (driving alone in the city with mild weather). (Yes, it changes that much.)

I reckon we paid a premium of around €10,000 over a comparable small SUV with a combustion engine. My back-of-the-envelope calculation back then suggested that cheaper fuel, simpler maintenance, free parking in (and free access to) many city centres (definitely Madrid), and lower ownership taxes would cancel out the extra cost after seven years or so. Perhaps that was still an optimistic estimate because it ignored the higher depreciation of electric vehicles in the second-hand market (batteries, which are the critical component and the most expensive one, degrade significantly over time).

Importantly, this is our only car. (I still think that is one car too many, but with two adults working and two small kids, it seems impossible not to own one.)

(More than) half of the year is over already, and I thought I should update you on my new year's resolutions for 2025.

Put some pressure on me!

Two years ago I realised for the first time that I end up making the “right” moves in life, but often I make those changes later than the average of my peers.

Owning a house, investing money, getting married, having kids… It's not that I fail at those projects, or shun those life decisions: it's just that sometimes I get to those places a few years later than would be desirable — judging with the benefit (and the bias) of hindsight.

That was stating the obvious, I guess. Of course you want to start earning money earlier rather than later. Of course you want to travel soon, so that you'll have more time to visit more places in your life. You'll probably end up marrying and having kids (like most people do), so why postpone it unnecessarily? And yet, for me, strangely, that was a novel realisation.

Armed with that silly “insight”, in 2023 I noted that

“now that I've spotted a trend in my life trajectory, it should be ‘easy’ for me to course-correct. […] That means making an effort to identify the next life goals, and acting quicker to get there. And so I have been wondering:
What are people my age starting to do now?
What will they be doing in a few years' time?”

It's strange that someone who loves books as much as I do reads only 7–15 books a year. There are two reasons for that.

The first reason won't surprise you: like virtually everybody else in the world, my attention span and my ability to focus on reading have diminished in the last two decades or so, as a side-effect of constant screen exposure. I'm not too concerned about this, though, because at least I keep on reading. Not only that: about half of my reads are difficult, stuffy, old books — and often on paper, where there are few distractions available. (In contrast, many people nowadays seem to read non-fiction only, or contemporary literature only. Some of my fellow nerds read mostly — or only — technical books, articles, or blog posts. And there are even people who seem unable to read text for more than two minutes unless it's displayed on a bright, colourful piece of glass.) But even I don't seem to be able to read for hours on end like I used to in my youth. On my ~2h30′ flights to and from Frankfurt, I usually read most of the time, but not all the time. I manage to read for around one and a half hours or so, and then get distracted by my phone — like everybody around me.

Inspired by my friend Fidel, I'm publicly sharing some of my resolutions for the new year.

This (turn of the) year I have not thought much about this nor made an actual list, unlike some other years. But certainly there are a few concrete goals in my head, some of which I already mentioned on my recap of 2024.

Here go some of the goals I can divulge, hoping to put some social pressure on myself.

The year comes to an end in a few hours, and some of the digital services and apps that I use on a daily basis started nudging me as early as one month ago about my various stats and achievements throughout 2024, with the hope that I'd boost them on social media. I'm old school and prefer blogs to walled gardens, and since I have not been writing here much as of late, I thought I'd use those stats as a way to recap my year.

So here go four apps I use a lot, and my “achievements” on them during the year — in increasing order of importance to me.

This epiphany popped into my mind a few days ago, and has been in my head since:

I am mostly happy with the things I've done in my life so far,
but I was late to many of those things.

[31 Oct – 6 Nov; unfinished draft that I published months later]

Indignant toot of the week:

[24–30 Oct; unfinished draft that I published months later]

Toot of the week:

[17–23 Oct; unfinished draft that I published months later]

The thread of the week started with this very simple idea: