Who Is The Cellar Dweller

The hope for this blog is to keep me motivated by having a place to write down the 'stuff' that I am doing or thinking about thus keeping focused and motivated along the path of simplicity.

It may be worth a quick thumbnail sketch as to how all this came about. I had worked in what is nowadays called Web/UX Development since around 1993, breaking ground in the early days of Mosaic through the dot com revolution and the full blown commercialism of the web.

In 2016 I quit. New languages were coming out on a weekly basis - mainly new flavours of the same old things, buzzwords flew like shrapnel on a battlefield and I sat thinking 'my lord what have we created'. I was working what was almost a 24/7 365 days a year job, suffering the angst of puffed up PR reps or ill informed readers of PC World Magazine. So I went and got myself a clock in clock out job at a fulfillment centre for a well known online shopping platform. Not in IT, but on the warehouse floor.

Nine years later, I am still here and loving every minute of it. Yes, it was hard to downsize my income by three quarters of that which it was, but the results in stress reduction were worth it. That was my first look at simplification.

However, in 2016 I only changed my job and a little bit of mindset. What this blog is about is documenting a revelation that I had while recovering from surgery in October 2023 and a comment my wife made, making me review a whole (new to me) way of living and future proofing my life to come.