New Year 2022, Looking Back on 2021

Over the past several years I've made a habit of using New Year's as a moment to reflect on, and take stock of, the year just finished. Recently I've posted a few retrospectives about travel. Points and elite status with airlines, hotels, and credit cards are just possessions, though, and not even very good ones at that. Now it's time for a retrospective about things that really matter, personally.

A Singular Story Continued to Define 2021

I wrote a year ago, "A Singular Story Defines 2020". I meant Coronavirus, of course. Well, Coronavirus continued to cast its long shadow over the entirety of 2021, shading pretty much every aspect of life.

For the first few months of 2021 we continued to mask up and socially distance just like 2020. We went to no movies, attended no events, visited no hair salons, etc. We minimized trips for shopping. We ate no meals indoors at restaurants. We didn't even socialize in person with friends unless it was outdoors. We took one overnight trip, in March, driving rather than flying, and sweated being around all the mask-refusing knuckle draggers in the red areas we traveled through.

Things changed a bit after April, when both of us were fully vaccinated. 'It's time to start getting back to normal!" we both thought. We began traveling again in May. But then vaccination rates leveled off as a stubborn one-third or so of the country continued steadfastly to deny the reality of Coronavirus. Being vaccinated ourselves wasn't silver-bullet protection against the disease still being spread easily by the significant proportion of unvaccinated. So still we wore masks in public and minimized time in indoors spaces. Thought at least we could visit trusted, vaccinated friends indoors again.

Life continued through a kind of twilight for most of the rest of 2021, with the virus not going away enough to call it "Getting back to normal" thanks to so many reality-denying holdouts. At least we were able to call it a "pandemic of the unvaccinated".

Then, in late 2021, a winter surge hit, and it coincided with the appearance of the more contagious Omicron strain. Suddenly even being vaccinated with a booster shot seemed not to be enough. We reeled back in our willingness to fly on airplanes— we canceled a New Year's Eve trip we'd been looking forward to for months. We even stopped going to restaurants again.

Alas, in this respect, 2021 ended almost where it began.

Jobs

My job situation continued to be pretty "Meh" in 2021. I mean, I've got a stable job... so Yay? And it pays reasonably well... so again, Yay? But my career remains stalled. And as careers are expected to advance, stalled means falling behind.

But here's the thing about my career. I'm out of fucks to give. To a large part that's because I'm close to not needing to give a fuck anymore. With our finances (see below) I think I'm at most a few years from being able to retire. Why keep struggling to get ahead when I can glide to the finish.

I find some vicarious job satisfaction through my spouse. Her career is still trending upward. She earned a titular promotion this year along with a broadening of responsibilities. Go, Hawk!

Family & Friends

Nobody died in 2021. Lest it sound like I'm damning the year with faint praise, understand that many years I've haven't been able to say that. Oh, there were some scares in 2021. Covid tore through my youngest sister's household, where 6 people (out of 8) were unvaxxed. Everyone unvaxxed got sick. Fortunately all survived. Fortunately also another sister's family, all of whom are unvaxxed against not only Coronavirus but also measles, smallpox, polio, etc. (they're anti-vaxx), didn't get sick with any life-threatening preventable disease.

Do I sound like I'm running low on fucks to give here, too? Well, if you read the news at all you know that "Compassion Fatigue" is a thing.

Finances

If there's one aspect in which 2021 was "Up and to the right" as financial types like to say, it was finances. The Standard & Poor 500 Index rose 25% in 2021. Our investments grew along with it.



Along with growing our investments through the power of market returns we continued to add a lot of new savings to our portfolio. 2021 was our biggest year yet for socking away new cash, by a significant margin. Those new savings comes from having well-paying jobs and significantly underspending our income.

Underspending doesn't mean austere living, fortunately. We don't walk to work in holey shoes or subsist on peanut butter sandwiches. We've enjoyed nice trips to New York Maine, Hawaii, and other places this year. We're thoughtful about what we splurge on and we always look to make deft use of airline and hotel points to enjoy the nicer things in life at lower cost. Oh, and we bought a new(er) car this year. It was also an exercise in enjoying the nicer things in life at lower cost.

The upshot of growing our portfolio isn't just that we can afford occasional trips and driving not-cheap cars. The upshot is that we are reaching financial independence. Pretty soon we won't have to work to afford these kind of nice things in life. We'll be able to fund them all out of the growth of our investments!

The Year Ahead

Reaching the tipping point of financial independence will be huge. It likely won't happen in 2022. But it's not far. If 2022 continues strongly "up and to the right" it could be as soon as 2023.

"But what if 2022 isn't another banner year, financially?" you might ask. Well, we're prepared for that possibility. We trust that setbacks are temporary and things will recover eventually. A bad 2022 just means our financial independence is delayed a few years, until after things recover.

We trust that the world's not literally going to fall apart. ...Though maybe after what's happened the past few years the word "trust" should be replaced with hope. Things fractured pretty badly in 2020 and 2021. Our hope for 2022 is that the world doesn't literally fall apart.

So, let's go, 2022! Don't be the year of literal Armageddon!

New Coronavirus Cases Spike to Over 1,000,000 in One Day

The Coronavirus shattered another record yesterday (Jan. 3) as more than 1,000,000 new cases were reported in the US in a single day. If you follow any kind of news you've probably already seen/heard this reported multiple times. Tuesday's tally of 1,017,376 cases nearly doubles the previous one-day record of 585,013— set just 4 days earlier, on Dec. 30. (Specific numbers sourced from The New York Times' Coronavirus in the U.S., retrieved 4 Jan 2022.)

But what does this spike mean? It turns out, as I expected, that the spike really is a spike. Here's a chart from the same NY Times page showing day-by-day rates over the past 90 days, along with the 7-day moving average:



As you can see in the chart there's a periodic up-down to the daily numbers. The low daily figures correspond to weekends and holidays; some states don't report data on those new days. The spike days tend to be Monday and days following holidays, when some states that skipped a day combine 2 or more days cases into one number.

I point out the chunkiness of the data to make it clear that "A million cases a day!!!" is not happening every day now. It's a bit of a statistical anomaly. But just because it's anomalous doesn't mean there's no cause for concern. The 7-day moving average is 486,658. That's double what it was just one week early and almost 7x the rate from two months ago. And if the surge doubles from here, 1,000,000 new cases a day will become normal. 😨

Beginning Game of Thrones

This week I started streaming Game of Thrones on HBO Max. I figure I might as well catch up with last decade! GoT originally aired 2011-2019. The last streaming series I caught up on was The Sopranos, and that began in the late 90s. I finished that one about two months ago. Hey, at least I'm moving quickly through the decades! 😂

As when I started watching The Sopranos I felt a moment of doubt, a should-I-or-shouldn't-I decision, about starting Game of Thrones. The series is over now. It's been over for over 2 years. It's no longer part of pop culture. Two years is long enough that even memes about GoT have gotten old-hat. If I watch it now it's got to be because I enjoy the show itself— and not because I enjoy the show plus being able to discuss it with friends and colleagues who are also eagerly awaiting each new episode. That's a higher bar to clear.

Another concern is the length of the series, 73 hour-long episodes. When I started The Sopranos, which was a bit longer at 86 episodes, I thought it'd take me 3 months or more to get through it. I finished faster, in just 8 weeks. Though that was because it was "us" TV; Hawk and I watched it together. As a shared activity I could devote more time to it than solo TV. GoT will be solo TV as Hawk doesn't want to watch it. So finishing this series could be a months-long engagement. Well, here I go....

Winter is Coming!