A few weeks ago on a Sunday morning I woke DJ out of his teenage weekend slumber to drag him along to pick up some scapes. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but as we headed out to the garlic farm he asked me: “What are scapes anyway?” This led to a fun discussion about how garlic grows, what scapes are, and why I was driving out to a farm to pick up three pounds of them. In the end, we had a great father/son experience, as silly as it sounds, just talking about garlic and how to cook it plus a walk through the farmers fields. Add another experience to the memory bank.
Adding memories is a major theme of the recent book Die with Zero by Bill Perkins. The book seems to be all the rage this year — seemingly every week I see someone else mention it. The author has been on so many of the podcasts I listen to including those as diverse as The Drive with Peter Attia and All The Hacks. I’d highly encourage anyone to read the book. The net of it is that experiences you can recall from your memory have the most value as you age. That once you hit your 70’s or 80’s or beyond these memories are far more valuable than whatever nest egg you may have (and at that age may have a hard time spending).
Another major concept of the book is that there are some things that naturally fit in certain parts of your life. If you miss the stage when an experience can be had, you will never get it back. For example, you spend something like 90% of all the time you will ever spend with your child happens before they turn 18. Or… as we age we loose the physical ability to enjoy or even do certain activities — long hikes, climbing Machu Picchu, and eventually even sitting on a long plane ride to some foreign country.
So as we plan for our next great adventure, and I come to the realization that saving for retirement since we were 21 means we really don’t need to continue to work and accumulate, I’ve started thinking a lot more about where certain activities fit in the decades of our lives and what else to do with DJ before he inevitably marches off on his own.
We’ve started trying to organize the experiences we would like to have at various times in the decades ahead in our Experience by Age Bucket page — something we hope to use as a placeholder for ideas as well as the things we’ve already done.
If you haven’t read the book yet, be sure to get it from the library, or if you must, buy a physical copy. Worst case listen to Net Fulfillment over Net Worth with Bill Perkins on All The Hacks.
P.S. Header image credit goes entirely to Bill Perkins and Die With Zero. For the original see https://twitter.com/DieWithZero/status/1194303398004350976