What Do I Want? Design the Day, Not the Dream
What do I want, when I can design my life?
“Ideal life” is too vague to use
My first answer was “an ideal life.” Freedom. Health. Family. Meaning. But you can’t do anything with big words.
So I shrank it to: one ideal day. Hour by hour. A single day I’d happily live a thousand times.
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.
Wake at 4 or 5, energized
I wake at 4 or 5 a.m. A quick stretch. Then I jog.
Outside beats inside for one honest reason: I can’t quit halfway through. A mile from home, the only way back is to finish. Indoors, the couch waits three steps away. I can do it if all things are lined up, and no alternatives are available.
I’d live somewhere outdoor jogging is possible — clean air, a safe community, other joggers out at the same hour. If rain pours, I jog indoors, hopefully I can afford an indoor alternative.
The jog itself: slow for the first half. On the way back, alternate sprint and jog. Maybe 30 minutes total, then a few minutes of cool-down. Then strength — pull-ups, push-ups, the basics. (I keep my routine in an app I built: pinkelephant.space/exercise.)
Then stretch and balance, ideally all in one go — that’s why I wake early. So I join the family for breakfast.
Feed the ape body, then stop feeding it your day
I eat fresh, simple, harmless food. I cook it myself — before robots can do it all. That’s not just health; it’s the FIRE math. I’m living below my means on purpose, so no takeout, no coffee runs. The expense stays low, or the freedom disappears. I need a good grocery store nearby — another consideration to pick retirement place.
Here’s the principle under all of it: the morning is operating-system maintenance. The ape body needs sleep, movement, and food to run. Do it 100% focused and efficient, so it doesn’t eat the whole day. Then close that window. Spend the rest on the part that’s actually mine.
The rest of the day belongs to the brain
The brain makes me homo sapiens. So the back half of the day goes there. And here’s my confession: I don’t know what I’ll do with it yet. I’ll try things. I divide the day into a few kinds of time:
- Alone — meditate, or just sit quietly with my own mind. No input. Just me and my thoughts.
- With family — coach my kids, be present, love out loud, and do chores.
- With the great minds of humanity — learn philosophy, psychology, math, physics, computer science and engineering. I build a small app for each idea I want to keep: how thinking fails, how arguments hold up, what an atom really looks like, where intelligence came from. Building it is how I find out whether I understood it.
- To play — and yes, that includes some video games. Mostly the small ones I made myself.
- To build and share — write my thoughts, teach what I’m learning, build games and apps, help others. (Half the reason this blog and pinkelephant.space exist.)
What writing it down actually did
I do need housing, commute, food, and insurance running in the background. Most of all, I need time to do what I want, and freedom to not do what I don’t like. The FIRE number buys the time. But the things I’d fill the time with? I can start partially today.