The Monday Read

This is my commute. Never gets old.

Jet Lag Edition

Finally got over the jet lag. I swear it is getting worse as I get older. In my 20s I barely noticed jet lag. In my 30s it took me a couple of days to get over it and I was pretty much functional.

Now at 45 it took at least a week each way, and I was operating at around 50%. Brutal.

I understand why my godfather (who used to travel everywhere and can afford to travel first class) doesn’t travel any more. Just not worth the pain for short trips.

Hoping to make it to Europe in December (waitlisted for award tickets right now) and I saw with some horror that the flight to London is now 15 hours. Yikes.

Typeshare

I’ve been doing a lot of writing on Typeshare recently as part of the Ship 30 for 30 online writing course. You can check it out here if you missed it on Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, or Facebook 😉

YouTube

Thank you for your support of the RetireJapan YouTube channel. More videos coming soon once I get rid of jet lag and clear my work backlog!

The Forum

The Forum is doing well (24,300 posts so far). Here are the latest active threads:

This week’s books

I’m still reading (and enjoying) Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts. Would like to check out the new TV show, but it’s on Apple TV, and that’s about the only streaming service we don’t have 😉

This week’s links

  1. Derek Sivers is writing a new book: Make believe
  2. This is the next thing I need to figure out: The money value of time
  3. Links within links, like nesting dolls: J-Links of Interest
  4. Damn, kind of bleak: What AI can’t write
  5. I don’t hate this plan: Kishida May Raise Corporate Taxes, Part I
  6. Always enjoy Chris’s writing: Walking (and busing) San Antonio
  7. Really disappointed with this craven, short-sighted nonsense: The administration’s very unoriginal solution to rising energy prices
  8. Things are getting better, but is this enough to overcome the challenge of climate change? Everything rests on this. Finding Progress in a Sea of Negativity
  9. I feel like I have figured some of these out, but I am not sure I could teach them: Very Important and Hard to Teach

What do you think? Anything interesting in there?

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11 Responses

  1. I feel your pain on the Jet Lag, I used to fly a lot for vacation when I was younger, and now in my mid 50:’s, its the last thing I want to do… especially flights over 8 hours…. Makes me wonder about retiring here in Japan and how difficult it will be when I am older and travelling to meet family back in Europe. At least Skype helps to a degree..

  2. My wife and I are pretty set on keeping our ‘fun’ travel within this timezone. That gives us Japan/SE Asia/New Zealand…

    Then family visits to Europe and Canada, but hopefully we can make those a bit longer (6+ weeks) so we spend less time jetlagged as a proportion of the trip.

  3. I just finished reading David Quammen’s new book Breathless, which is a terrific and objective explanation of what is known about Covid-19. Quammen is very skillful in presenting detailed science to be understandable to a general readership without dumbing the content down.

  4. I’m 55 and it usually takes me a week to feel normal after flying back to the UK. I blame it on a combination of jet lag and reverse culture shock!

    I did the 15-hour flight to London (over Canada) with JAL in July and it was actually quite pleasant. Plenty of legroom even for me. JAL longhaul is supposed to be one of the best economy classes in the world. We came back the other way (over Turkey) so ended up circumnavigating the world! Next month I’m flying back with Qatar. The journey looks a bit gruesome but it has the huge advantage of flying directly to Manchester* and avoiding the hell that is LHR.

    * MAN is not much better, but one British airport is so much better than two 🙂

        1. Ha, ha, I can’t remember the last time I actually bought an international plane ticket 😉

    2. There is a planned strike due in the next few weeks at LRH. If it goes ahead, wonder will anyone notice the difference 😉

  5. Not specifically about this column, but why…umm…is the blog now appearing as “Archives”? Thoroughly disorienting.

    1. Sorry about that. We are redoing the website, and there are lots of problems arising from the fact that I don’t know what I am doing. Should be better by the end of the year 🙂