Notes

What Do I Want? Design the Day, Not the Dream

June 19, 2026 · 6 min read

Here’s the trap I almost fell into. I am optimizing one number — the FIRE number, the pile big enough that I no longer have to sell my hours. But a number tells you when you can stop. It never tells you when you should. And without that second answer, you don’t stop. You just keep climbing, because climbing is the only thing you know how to do.

So I had to answer a harder question first: what do I actually want?

”Ideal life” is too vague to use

My first answer was “an ideal life.” Freedom. Health. Family. Meaning. All true, all useless. You can’t do anything with words that big. They don’t tell you what to skip, what to buy, what to cut. They’re a wish, not a plan.

So I shrank it down to something I could actually test: one ideal day. Hour by hour. If I can describe a single day I’d be happy to live a thousand times, then I know what the money is for — and I know how much is enough to buy it.

Here’s the day I wrote.

The day starts the night before

Everything good downstream depends on one thing: sleep. So the day doesn’t start when I wake up. It starts when I go to bed. I do everything I can to get to bed on time and protect a full eight hours. Miss that, and the rest of the day is already broken — no jog, no focus, no patience for my kids. Sleep is the foundation, not the leftover.

Wake at 4 or 5, energized

I wake at 4 or 5 a.m., right at the end of those eight hours, without an alarm dragging me out of a dream. (I don’t yet know whether 4 or 5 works better — that’s a thing to test, not assume.) A quick stretch. Then I jog.

Outside is better than inside, for one honest reason: I can’t quit halfway through. Once I’m a mile from home, the only way back is to finish. Indoors, the couch is always three steps away. So I’d live somewhere outdoor jogging is actually possible — clean air, a safe community, other joggers out at the same hour. If outside won’t work, I jog indoors, quietly enough not to wake the family or the neighbors.

The jog itself: slow for the first half. On the way back, alternate sprint and jog. Maybe 30 minutes total, a few minutes of cool-down at the end. Then strength — pull-ups, push-ups, the basics. (I keep my routine in an app I built: pinkelephant.space/exercise.)

Stretch and balance, ideally, all in one go. But here’s a small rule I learned about my own head: if I’m short on time, I’d rather push the stretch to before lunch than skip it and carry a nagging “to-do” around all morning. An undone task in the background quietly taxes the whole day. Better to reschedule it on purpose than leave it hanging.

If the morning routine finishes in time, I join the family for breakfast. That’s the reward for doing it fast.

Feed the ape body, then stop feeding it your day

I eat fresh, simple, harmless food. I cook it myself — at least until robots can do it for me. That’s not just health; it’s the FIRE math. I’m living below my means on purpose, so no constant takeout, no daily coffee runs. The expense has to stay low or the freedom disappears. What I do need is a good grocery store nearby — which is one reason my retirement isn’t today’s rural America. Cheap land that strands you from fresh food isn’t actually cheap.

Here’s the principle under all of it: the morning is operating-system maintenance. The ape body needs sleep, movement, and food to run. Necessary, but not the point. Do it 100% focused and efficient, so it doesn’t eat the whole day. Then close that window and spend the rest on the part that’s actually mine.

The rest of the day belongs to the brain

The thing that makes me homo sapiens and not just a clever ape is the brain. So the back half of the day goes there. And here’s my honest confession: I don’t fully know what I’ll do with it yet. For too many recent years I pointed my brain at one target — earning money. Aim it somewhere that long and it forgets how to want anything else.

So I won’t pretend I have the answer. I’ll try things. I divide the day into a few kinds of time:

Play, learn, love, coach, build. That’s the menu. I’ll cook from it until I find the dishes I actually crave.

What writing it down actually did

Here’s the part that surprised me. I started this trying to figure out how much money I need. I ended up realizing how little of the day money even touches.

Almost none of that ideal day requires being rich. Sleep is free. Jogging is free. Cooking is cheap. Reading, teaching, playing, sitting with my kids — none of it is gated behind my FIRE number. The number buys me the hours. But the things I’d fill those hours with, I can start filling them with today.

That’s the whole lesson, and it’s the opposite of what I expected to find: I spent years treating the good life as something on the far side of a finish line. Then I wrote down one ordinary day — and most of it was already within reach this morning.

So that’s the homework, for my kids and for the younger me who needed it: before you ask how much is enough, write down the day you’re buying. Be specific. Hour by hour. You’ll learn two things at once — when you’re allowed to stop, and which parts of that life you never had to wait for at all.