A life update, almost three months into early retirement

Welcome back! I have now officially been “retired” from my full-time corporate job for almost three months. That time has flown by! I’m going to save some of my more messy ideas until I can process and get more distance from the newness of this thing. But I want to at least make some observations, in the hopes that it gives you a window into what it feels like to retire at 35, and hopefully some ideas you can take away regardless of where you’re at on your journey.

But first a quick life update on Heather.

Heather wrote a wonderful CaringBridge post that goes into a lot more detail, but I’ll share the quick version. Last week, Heather had a follow-up hysteroscopy after her first one in January (which I wrote about in my first newsletter) showed significant scarring and lack of blood flow, leading to about half of her uterus being “necrotic”. Not what you want, to say the least.

Last week’s procedure resulted in good (but not great) news. They saw much better blood flow, which they described as “50% better” and are no longer using the word “necrotic”. But there’s still major scarring from the last hysteroscopy, which needs to be resolved before fertility is an option. So they’re trying some new techniques to avoid scarring, and we will actually be traveling to New Orleans next month so that Heather can see one of the country’s leading experts on Asherman syndrome, who also is the only doctor in the country that has access to a recently FDA-approved device that helps with this exact issue. So we’re crossing our fingers.

But you know who’s not taking “cross your fingers” for an answer? Heather is, that’s who. She has been sacrificing her time, burning so much energy, and inflicting serious pain to try anything that has even a chance of increasing blood flow to make fertility possible. Big piles of supplements, lots of (brutal) hormones, twice a week acupuncture, even a sketchy-looking stick that you light up like a cigar and then nearly burn your wrists with ¹. I couldn’t be more proud of her, and no matter what the outcome, she has done everything within her control to tilt the odds.

Thank you to everyone who has reached out, prayed, sent well wishes, and everything else — you are all the best, and we are so grateful for all the support.

So like I said, it’s been almost three months of early retirement now. And “What do you do all day?” is the question I’ve heard most often. It’s a good question!

Here’s the challenge, which is not even slightly unique to me: I have had structure provided to me by a job or school for almost every single weekday since I was 5 years old. Because of summer jobs, even school summer breaks haven’t been a thing since I was 14 years old.

Said another way, someone else has been defining every single day’s schedule for my last two decades of life 😱

And now that I’m free of the endless task list, meeting schedule, and 15+ OKRs that I’m supposed to make progress on, I get to decide how I give my days structure. And I’ll be honest, I’m struggling to do this well. Which kinda sucks to admit. But it makes sense! I have no experience doing this. And just like anything else where I have zero experience, I’m going to be bad at it at first.

As I was thinking about how to define my own day for literally the first time in my adult life, I landed on a few key principles I wanted to follow:

Okay, so those are the main principles. Let’s walk through how I’ve built structure to help me try to live up to them.

The day after I found out I was getting laid off, I turned off my alarm. And I haven’t turned it on since, except for a few exceptions when I chose to wake up early for a workout on days that were packed with other stuff.

Now, let’s be clear. We have two toddlers. Ain’t no such thing as sleeping in. But at least I’m either waking up on my own or via taking a cough to the face / knee to the stomach from a tiny human (iykyk). No more 5:30am alarms to drag myself out of bed to beat traffic into the office.

Honestly, I hadn’t really thought about this when I was contemplating retirement. But it’s one of the coolest benefits. Actually letting your body get through its sleep cycles (at least on the non-kid-interrupted nights) and wake up naturally is amazing, and my overall sleep the last 3 months has been markedly better.

Maybe my favorite part of being retired is getting uninterrupted time with the kids in the morning. In the before times, I was spending two to three days in the office, which meant I was already gone by the time they woke up.

And even on days when I was around, I had so much latent stress. People were messaging me. I’d glance at my email and know that I had 30 things to respond to. Even on the days I carved out time for preschool dropoff, feeling back-to-back-to-back meetings staring me down made me feel rushed and irritable.

Only now do I realize how much that impacted my level of presence with the kids. And increasingly I’m trying to put my phone in the other room and make these 2 hours totally focused. That combination has made mornings so much more peaceful and fulfilling.

I used to do preschool dropoff one or two days a week, but since I retired that has flipped. Obviously Heather still wants to do this sometimes, but I can now be the “default” parent to take things on any time she has a busy day. And I love that I can take care of this without rushing back home for a meeting. In fact…

I work out every single weekday for about an hour. Usually that means a trip to the Crunch Fitness that’s 5 minutes away. It has tons of equipment, great vibes, and a sauna that has been life-changing (and the evidence of health benefits from saunas is pretty compelling).

I’ve also used this time to run, and I plan to actually properly train for the Peachtree Road Race this year, whereas I’ve sort of just gotten in shape and ran when I could the eight prior times I’ve participated. I set a PR last year, which I’m hoping I can beat this year.

Once I finish my workout, I shower and get ready for the day, then eat for the first time of the day around 11am. I’ve done intermittent fasting for years, but it’s wayyyy easier to pull off when I have control over my days like this. Like saunas, the evidence for the health benefits of intermittent fasting is very compelling, and I’m excited to see the results of doing it really consistently.

The upshot: I already feel so much stronger and less stressed than I did while I was working. And my health data very clearly shows it. I have a Garmin watch that tracks Heart Rate Variability (HRV), which is a good indicator of cardiovascular health and overall fitness and stress load. My 7-day average and baselines have been ticking steadily upward (higher is better for HRV) pretty consistently, and I’ll be interested if this trend continues.

I’ve tried to keep these two hours sacred for myself. It’s when I go heads-down on writing, coding, business planning, home projects, taking care of family admin, or whatever else is on the to-do list.

In my next newsletter I plan to do a deep dive of what I’ve been focused on, but here’s a quick rundown of what’s been keeping me busy:

Afternoons are flexible. Two days a week I am on preschool pickup and post-school childcare duty, which is amazing solo time with the kids that I never got when I was working. And we still have after-school help from our part-time nanny 3 days a week. We contemplated making a change once I was laid off. But we decided to stay the course because she is wonderful, we didn’t want to change things up on her suddenly, and frankly I was excited about having childcare help so that I could have more than two hours per day of time to explore business ideas, hobbies, or whatever else. I’m really thankful that we made this choice, as I think the extra time has helped me mentally as I figure out what life looks like post-corporate life.

This is mostly unchanged from before, though I’m never coming home late from the office, stuck in my home office on a long 5pm meeting, or whatever else. And once we get the kids down, I’m not stressed about needing to log back on to finish all the work that I couldn’t do while I was in meetings all day.

Oddly, I have stayed up late on my computer many times the last couple of months. But that’s to work on the projects I’m super excited about and can’t stop thinking about. I legitimately can’t remember the last time I’ve had the feeling of wanting to work late, and it’s pretty exhilarating (until the kids wake us up at 6:30am after I stayed up until 1:30pm coding…so I’m trying to be a bit more disciplined).

Okay, let’s get out of here. But first, a few recommendations from the past couple months. Please reply or comment to share any of your own!

The other night, Heather randomly suggested we play chess. I reluctantly agreed, and what followed was probably one of the worst chess performances you will ever see. But I was completely hooked — I love how chess forces strategic thinking and strains the edges of your mental capabilities. I’m now using Claude to teach me how to get better, but it’ll be a long road, since I’ve essentially never played before. If you play and want to embarrass your opponent, please hit me up!

I’m officially in my History Dad era, so I’ve been reading Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln and it’s amazing. It’s remarkably well-researched and really drops you into a world that is just vastly different than the one we live in today. But it’s an era that bred some of the smartest, most courageous leaders the world has ever known, and I’m learning a lot about leadership and bravery.

Last time I mentioned that Project Hail Mary is one of my favorite books of all time and that I was extremely excited about the movie. Well, it turns out the movie was incredible. So if you haven’t gone out to see it yet, it’s still in theaters and 100% deserves the theater experience.

Thank you for reading!

Sincerely,

Brandon