The Final Entry

I returned from my grand Pacific Crest Trail adventure a month ago, and things have been different. I spent thousands of hours hiking through unimaginable beauty and mundane shrubbery, crossing raging mountain streams and ascending mountain ranges, greeting every sunrise and marveling at the perfect expanse of the star-splattered sky…

I spent a lot of that time thinking. Ended up reevaluating quite a few of my priorities in life, and discovering why I do what it is that I do. Fear not — I have no plans to join either a monastery or 10-tattoos-minimum heavy metal band. Nonetheless, there will be changes.

In many ways, this blog was always a vanity project, a way to brag to the world while also dispensing some advice. (Fairly good advice, I hope, but still.) It is more than a little ironic that despite all that, I haven’t even managed to convince someone very close to me to open a damn retirement account in all that time. Heh.

In the long run, this blog would either devolve into another sad collection of “reuse your ziploc bags!” posts, and that would just be sad. Conversely, there’s the option of organizing (and maintaining) a giant social media outreach effort, with all those TikToks and youtubes and what have you, and that never sounded like fun to me. There is no book deal in this blog’s future, no pot of gold of at the end.

More importantly, though, I no longer need the validation I once had from being a bona fide personal finance blogger. Happiness comes from within, not without.