Violated

Wawi

Sat in the lounger gazing at impossibly green rice paddies framed by an electric blue sky and exotic palm trees. So tropical. So beautiful. Truly no better place on earth for morning coffee and contemplation. Where will this afternoon's ride take me? However, today's jaunt is postponed in order to pen the mind's latest gyrations.

Cognition

Valentine's Day 2026

I've been musing about intelligence lately. It's a surprisingly amorphous concept to pin down even though it's often obvious when someone has it. As a teacher, marking tests was mostly performative as it was clear which students "had it". Muh intuition rarely lettuce-doon.

It's something more than just IQ or academic credentials. It's more akin to adaptive judgement under irreducible uncertainty. Or repackaged: the ability to model reality well enough, under uncertainty (and scarcity), to increase agency over time.

CRUFC

Notice that IQ and certificates are mere proxies - just numbers and bits of paper. To increase agency requires action in the real world. An accurate internal model that fails to increase agency is indistinguishable from ignorance - the map is not the terrain.

So intelligence, at the most zoomed out, must include action - with the goal of expanding one's option set.

Agency

But it doesn't stop there because intelligence is but one piece of the agency puzzle, where agency, at the most zoomed out, is: the ability to preserve and expand causal power across unpredictable futures.

We aren't born with agency. We develop it through repeated cycles of modeling reality, acting within it, and absorbing the consequences. Agency grows when actors are allowed to experiment, bear the results of their decisions, and accumulate skills / capital / resources that expand their future option space.

Doi Luang

Building agency requires Intelligence × Discipline × Temperament × Time Horizon. Remove any one trait and it collapses. Hard to build. Easy to lose. Interestingly intelligence, under this model, is not a fixed trait but a situational capability.

Schools are great at measuring knowledge but much less comfortable cultivating agency. Sustained early retirement implies long time horizons, disciplined action, and enough causal leverage to escape the wage-slave loop - though it could be achieved with limited intelligence if the other traits are strong. In fact, I'd contend that discipline and temperament are more important than intelligence but that's another discussion.

Health (Medical)

Colon

Capital management secures time sovereignty. Health management secures the enjoyment thereof. It was with this in mind that the following were justified:

Aug 2025 ~$100: 18 blood markers checked.
Jan 2026 ~$1500: Health/Accident insurance.
Feb 2026 ~$475: Colonoscopy.

I first got piles in 1998, on HMS Victorious, 65m beneath the Atlantic. The medic didn't even look, just handed me a few sachets of orange powder: "Drink these and stop being a pussy". Over the years they'd come and go, sometimes with toilet-bleeding requiring bog-roll clenched in me crack - making every dump a humiliation ritual - will I need arse-tampon-nappy-tissue this time?

Man, it was shit. But never bad enough to see a doctor. Geordies divvent dee doctaz like. Well, in January there was way more blood than usual so I begrudgingly set off to hospital where the doc recommended "colonoscopy and hemorrhoid band ligation". Two birds one stone. $475 later and I'd lost muh virginity to a vicious-looking two meter cable.

HuaMeaKham

Fucking hell, sounds horrific. And you PAID? For trauma? WTF? What did you really buy?

Well, the colon's "normal" and me arse no longer bleeds or feels like there's a bunch of keys up there. So in posh speak:

Reduced uncertainty - colon cancer risk collapsed
Health capital preservation - reduced hemorrhoid fatigue
Future option set protected - agency preservation

Honestly, for middle aged dudes, a colonoscopy sounds way worse than it is. And I massively regret not sorting the piles earlier - a huge uptick in life quality. What was stopping me? Ignorance and fear. The classics. Low-IQ tard.

Health (Fitness)

DoiPhaChang

The home gym (every other day) + 5km strolls (daily) are ongoing:

Push ups 3 x 20
Pull ups 3 x 5
Squats 3 x 10
Hinge hips 3 x 10
Jump rope 3 x 1min

Benefits:
Best health bang-for-buck✅
Cheap (free)✅
Quick (20mins)✅
Convenient (in room)✅
Simple✅

Whereas evening strolls are an enjoyable part of the daily routine - especially at DoiPhaChang - push-ups are a different animal. The Anterior Cingulate Cortex wants to conserve historically scarce calories, and it takes the reasoning power of the Prefrontal Cortex to override that bias. And mental discipline ain't easy.

Budget

ER2@48. $25k in 3y6m

Appear to be hovering around the ~$1k/mth mark - an upwards drift (from Kampot) is to be expected with a room upgrade, health insurance and a motorbike.

$190 Room + Utils + Phone

$125 Insurance

$125 Petrol/Service

$80   Weekly Massage

So that's ~$500 on essentials before we even start. Another $500 on discretionary sounds about right. Obviously not drinking/smoking is massive - shudder to think how much I spaffed on those over the years. And being single removes another black hole. Ultimately, a lower burn rate can be thought of as an optionality amplifier, or stated mathematically:

Option Space ∝ 1 / Resource Burn

A $380 laptop in January and $475 medical bill in February were spurious bedshits that, touch wood, shouldn't happen too often. I'm also penciling in a ~$400 set of tyres later this year - so another budget-buster there.

I❤️CR

Da + Renu

The last five months have been awesome. For sure. Up there with the best times of me life. How come? I think it's because I have everything I ever wanted.

All authentic desires satisfied.

Alignment.

Doing what I want (ride)

When I want (afternoons)

Where I want (rural Chiang Rai)

I don't want anything other than for this to continue - and that's somewhere I've never been before - and I guess most humans never get to.

Sovereign (time, energy, attention, location)✅

Retirement visa - insurance✅

Baseline health✅
CBR500✅
Northern Thailand✅
Conversationally fluent - reading/writing - integrated✅

Low cost of living✅

Temperament-matching (sabai) lifestyle✅

Mekong

However, should it all get rugged (unknown unknowns), I'd happily head back to Cambo (or maybe Laos?).

Can't help but smile when contrasting this with the nervous 16yo leaving Ashington (to join the Navy) all those years ago. The key difference?

Agency.

Zero to Hero.

Aye, canny like.