The Year Of Reading: 2023 Goals & Accomplishments

Guess what 🙂 ? This is the 500th post on this blog!!! That number is completely wild to me, but I guess that’s what happens when I do something for almost a decade. Ridiculous. Anyway, thank you for being here 🙂 . Now let’s get back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Throughout the year, I like to write down new things I’ve learned, read, watched and experienced to try and remember what each year entailed and how they differ. I then summarize all of that in my annual goals and accomplishments posts. The goal of these posts is not just to curate what I’ve been up to, but also to document how I have changed from one year to the next and how I’ve grown as a person.

I also like to give each year a theme in retrospect. This year I had a hard time deciding what the main theme was – should I call this The Year Of Movement? The Year Of Reading? The Year Of Video Games? As you can see in the title above, you know I picked Reading because I both ran and played video games less than I expected this year 🙂 .But what else did I get up to? Let’s see 🙂 .

Physical

My physical goals this year were just to keep the balance I’ve found in my previous retired year – keep sleeping well, eating keto unless I’m in a new location, and meeting new running PRs.

Food

At the beginning of the year I made a plan that had me eating keto about 2/3 of the year. Looking back at the numbers, (of course I keep track of this too 😉 ) I actually only ate keto a little less than 1/2 of the year. Oops!

This is one of the reasons I’m switching up my approach in 2024 and having a certain number of days I will go off keto instead of eating non-keto food being the default. I already started a trial run of this since I’ve been in México and it’s going really well! I want to be able to explore the new areas we’re moving to through food without having to buy new pants 🙂 .

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Exercise

My exercise goals for 2023 were to:

1. Run 1-3 times a week
2. Increase my pace
3. Increase my distance

Like everything in life, my running ebbed and flowed this year as a result of health, weather and my travel schedule but overall, I hit my goals!! I ended up running on average 2 times per week in 2023 and in November, I started running 2 miles, 3x a week and hit a new PR while doing so! 2 miles used to be something I had to psych myself up for, but now it’s my new minimum and increasing my distance seems to have increased my pace in general, which is really cool.

I also had a lot of revelations around my new running hobby, which I talked about here:

• From Hate To Love: How I Became A Runner
• Celebrating 1 Year Of Running: My Progress and Revelations
• Celebrating 2 Years Of Running: My Progress and Revelations

Sleep

My sleep this year was awesome. I rate my sleep every month and it never went below an 8/10 in 2023, which I see as a huge accomplishment since I used to be horrible at sleeping.

• From Insomnia To Sleeping Like A Baby: How I Improved My Sleep In Early Retirement

In fact, I haven’t gone below 8/10 in two years, which I attribute to getting my asthma better under control (it’s even harder to sleep if you can’t breathe properly 🙂 ). Things are looking up!

Emotional

This year was amazing emotionally. I only had one depressive episode the whole year, which is way less than in 2022 and infinitely less than when I was working. My anxiety was also at an all time low. It’s just been getting better since being retired and I’m so grateful for that 🙂 . I used to think my depression and anxiety were just an intrinsic part of myself that I would never escape from or even have a more healthy distance from, but it’s awesome to see that that’s not true. I would be happy if this trend continues in 2024.

Hobbies & Skills

I seem to keep accidentally expanding hobbies I started in retirement and accumulating other ones. I still feel like there’s not enough time in a day to do everything I want and I asked my (retired) Mom the other day how the fuck we did all of this and worked in the past. She made me realize: we didn’t 🙂 . I barely had time to read a book a month while working, let alone have entire hobbies. So once again, thank you retirement 🙂 .

Blogging

Obviously blogging was still one of my major hobbies in 2023. I will have written 52 posts by the end of 2023. Perfect for my once a week schedule 🙂 .

In addition to that, I got a lot of random opportunities thrown in my lap as a result of this blog. I go through those in the below post if you want the details.

• Cheers To Half A Decade Of A Purple Life!

This year the blog continued to be a wonderful addition to my life. I struggled with making time to write while galavanting around Australia and New Zealand at a much higher pace than I was used to with my slow travels, but I made it work. This blog has continued to evolve and reflect the things I’m thinking about, which used to be money all the time and now is more about adventure and exploring the world through new experiences.

My posts have been reflecting that by including more reviews of fancy travel hacked flights, tours and slow travel locations. Possibly as a result of this shift in topic – or possibly simply because blogging seems to be on its way out according to a few of my blogging peers – my comments section has been quieter lately. I talked about this in one of my monthly recaps with the spin that I didn’t realize I had come to rely on getting at least one comment per post to know that people (and not just bots 🙂 ) were reading my words and they weren’t floating into an abyss.

I didn’t want to be reliant on external validation when I had written this blog without it being public for years, and hadn’t realized I had come to rely on anything but the joy I get from writing it. So I was trying to grow after realizing that not receiving comments on multiple posts in a row bothered me for some reason. I’m going to do my best to not rely on that kind of feedback going forward and will continue to blog for the main reason I always have: for myself 🙂 .

I also followed a reader suggestion to add a “Like” button at the bottom of my posts (it’s after the “Share This” section and before the “Related” articles section) because readers said they don’t necessarily have something they want to comment, but that a Like button would help show there is still a human reading. All fair 🙂 .

Reviews

Another thing I’ve done this year is lean into my childhood dream of being a reviewer of many things: films, food, flights – the works 🙂 . I post all that stuff on my Instagram if you like that kind of thing, but I also had a great time sharing the food and experience reviews with Tripadvisor after a few small businesses asked me to. They understandably wanted to get more recent reviews after pandemic-related closings, so I was happy to oblige 🙂 .

I also have expanded to include these kinds of travel reviews on this blog when I feel like it:

• Review: Singapore Air First Class Suites – A $4,280 Apartment In The Sky For $26
• Review: Singapore Air First Class (JFK to FRA)  – A $15,000 Flight For $27 [Part 1]
• Review: Singapore Air First Class (FRA to SIN) – A $15,000 Flight For $27 [Part 2]
• Review: Los Arcos Snorkeling Tour in Puerto Vallarta, México
• Review: VIA Rail Canada Train – Ottawa to Montréal
• Review: Amtrak Coast Starlight Roomette – Sacramento, CA to Seattle, WA
• The Best Breweries I Visited In Sacramento, CA

I’ve also continued expanding and reviewing things besides travel:

• Review: Zenni Optical – Affordable Eyeglasses That I Love
• Review: Ethique Shampoo, Conditioner and Lotion Bars
• Amazon Lockers and Hub Locker+ Review: A Helpful Nomad Delivery Option?

Bird & Nature Identification

As you might have noticed, I’m obsessed with birds 🙂 . I went from thinking of every bird as “a bird” to recognizing some local birds by sound and being able to visually identify most types of birds by shape (even when they’re backlit)!

This year I’ve seen and identified 146 different kinds of birds across 7 US states🇺🇲 as well as, Canada🇨🇦, Singapore🇸🇬, Australia🇦🇺, New Zealand🇳🇿 and México🇲🇽! I also saw countless colorful fish and other animals. Here were my favorites:

 

 

 

My curiosity with identifying birds also extends to all of nature. When going for a walk, I stop a million times to take pictures and then look up plants and flowers that I don’t recognize (it drives my partner nuts 🙂 ). I collect information on all the new plants and animals I see in my monthly early retirement recaps, and constantly am shocked at how many things I didn’t know about our world.

To help me identify these plants, animals and stars, I use the below free apps, which I went into detail about in the post My Favorite Free Apps To Make The Most Of Nature:

• Google Lens – My favorite for identifying pictures of flora or fauna
• Merlin – My favorite for identifying bird songs (Sound ID), seeing what birds are likely in the area (Explore) and discovering birds by physical characteristics (Step by Step ID)
• Seek – A reader recommended I get this app to help identify plants and animals in Thailand and I’ve found it helpful everywhere because it just lists the most common things you’ll see in any area, which helps me keep a look out for new plants specifically
• Star Walk 2 – This is still my go-to app for astronomy identification. I love how I can just point it at the sky and it tells me exactly what I’m looking at 🙂

Finance

I think finance is definitely an official hobby at this point 😉 . And this year, I helped a few friends and family members (at their request) improve their financial lives in these ways:

• After learning that my 75 year old relative didn’t know what a 401k was, I gave them a finance deep dive and walked through what they could do to retire soon. They started investing in their 401k that day
• I helped a few people start an Ally High Yield Savings Account and start making 4.25% on their cash instead of 0.04%
• A friend that I taught about investing a few years ago reached her first $100k!
• I helped older friends of mine go from thinking they can’t ever retire to coming up with a plan for them to retire in 7 years
• I heard that a friend’s parents that I helped with their retirement account investments a few years ago grew their account by $200K since then

Travel Planning

Travel planning this year came in spurts. I meant to just “window shop” and before I knew it, it’d been 4 hours and I’d planned the following 9 months. Oops! I’m embracing this tendency though because it has been nice to have one large planning session where we make decisions for the year and then I don’t have to think about it again and can just experience the places we’re living in 🙂 .

• How I Travel Hack: A Step-By-Step Guide To How I Saved $100,000 On Flights
• How I Choose And Book My Flights: A Peek Inside A Full-Time Nomad’s Travel Planner
• How I Choose Great Airbnb Stays: A Peek Inside A Full-Time Nomad’s Travel Planner

Nomad Living

My nomad life continues to include growth and embarrassing myself per usual 🙂 . As for packing, I’m still culling what I bring with me after realizing I haven’t used a piece of clothing or technology in a few months. I’m starting to suspect that nomad packing is a constantly evolving project based on my surroundings and needs.

I also had fun listing out My Favorite Nomad Tools last year in case it helped my fellow travelers. I also seem to continue getting better at traveling all the time. The time I need to be comfortable in a new space continues to decrease 🙂 .

• My Favorite Nomad Travel Tools (Part 2)
• Lessons Learned After 2 Years Of Airbnb Nomad Life
• Nomad Tech Necessities: A Peek Inside The Bag Of A Full-Time Traveler
• Is My Nomadic Life Immune To Inflation?

Retirement

I took some time to reflect on my retirement this year in these posts:

• 3 Years Of Early Retirement: Finances, What’s Changed And What’s Next?
• I Recorded What I Did Every Hour For 3 Years Of Retirement: Here’s What Retirees Do All Day!
• That Time I Was Berated For Being More Efficient At Work

Overall my retirement is still going better than I expected in every aspect: money, productivity, fitness and health. Being retired is also a skill I’m improving one year at a time 🙂 .

Other Skills

I was going to expand on all of the skills I learned this year, but then I realized if I did that, this post would be the length of a novel, so in no particular order, here are some of the other things I learned and improved on this year:

• Notion – I started using Notion to organize my life, travels and even this blog. I was curious if it had the capacity to be more functional than the Frankenstein organization I had going on before and it’s been amazing (and free 😉 )
• Plant Care – I learned how to care for plants and got pretty good at it! I can now spot when a plant is unhappy (drooping) and give them a little water every day and monitor them so I don’t overwater them. Green thumb here I come!
• I’m still using the Loop Habits App daily. It’s a good reminder of all the things I want to do (floss, brush teeth x2, medicine etc)
• Coloring – I’ve continued to explore coloring for fun, usually birds 🙂
• Nail Painting – I’m getting pretty good at painting my own nails, but I’ve noticed that I get out of practice quickly. I gave my nails a break earlier this year because they were getting dried out and now it’s like I’m starting from 0. Oops 🙂

Community

Community Engagement

Yes I’m calling this a hobby 🙂 . I made an intentional effort to engage more with my communities this year. Whether that was joining a fandom Discord, or engaging with a new section of Instagram: I was in it this year! I joined subreddits of my favorite shows and movies, checked out book recommendation groups, and generally found more lovely parts of the internet 🙂 .

I was also able to meet more readers this year while traveling around, which has been absolutely wonderful! I sometimes forget that people are reading this blog, so it’s a nice reminder that y’all are out there and every time I meet you, it’s like finding a friend I didn’t know I had 🙂 . I’ve been able to grab a coffee 1:1 with people in:

• Massachusetts 
• New Hampshire
• California
• Washington State
• Illinois
• New York
• Montréal, Canada🇨🇦
• Singapore🇸🇬
• Sydney, Australia🇦🇺
• Auckland, New Zealand🇳🇿
• Puerto Vallarta, México🇲🇽

It’s been doubly cool to meet people in other countries that have somehow found this little blog. I also heard from a few people that they’re going to the Spanish school in Mérida that I loved and a few people that have gotten into running because of me. Absolutely wild 🙂 .

Socializing

I think I’ve been more social in 2023 than any other year on record – which maybe says something about how much of a tired hermit I was while working and obviously during the pandemic. However, I think that since I’m now retired and can recharge during the hours I would usually be working and draining my introverted reserves, I now have way more energy to engage with people.

Here’s a sampling of the social times I had this year:

• I saw family and friends around the US as well as in Australia
• I had a sleepover with We Want Guac and Kitty from Bitches Get Riches in New Hampshire
• I hung out with Angela from Tread Lightly Retire Early and Felicity from Fetching Financial Freedom in Seattle and attended a Women’s Personal Finance meet up there
• I continued my weekly virtual movie nights with my former college suitemates. We rotate who picks the film and at times just postpone the movie to talk shit instead 🙂
• I continued having weekly virtual chats with my Mom, mostly in Spanish
• I continued having a bi-weekly call with a friend and ex-colleague to hear about the latest wild shit that’s happening in the corporate world

TRAVEL

This year I traveled to the below places:

USA

• Boston, MA
• New York State
• New Hampshire
• Sacramento, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Chicago, IL
• Troy, NY

International

• Montréal, Canada🇨🇦
• Singapore🇸🇬
• Australia🇦🇺
• New Zealand🇳🇿
• Puerto Vallarta, México🇲🇽

And I had these new travel experiences (I’ve included links to my Insta reviews of them):

• Snorkeling The Great Barrier Reef
• Flying in Singapore Air Suites
• Swimming In The Marina Bay Sands Rooftop Infinity Pool
• Experiencing Singapore Air First Class
• Trying Singapore Air Business Class (Again 🙂 )
• Doing The Sydney Coastal Walk
  • Coogee Beach
  • Gordon’s Bay
  • Clovelly Beach
  • Bronte Beach
  • Tamarama Beach
  • Bondi Beach
• Seeing Baby Lambs During Spring in New Zealand
• Exploring Waitomo Caves
• Flying and Cruising Around Milford Sound
• Relaxing In An Onsen in Queenstown
• Seeing Blue Footed Boobies in México
• Exploring Los Arcos National Park in Puerto Vallarta
• Seeing The Largest Calavera Catrina In The World for Día de Muertos

This year’s travel adventures included 21 planes, 3 trains and 1 rental car as well as innumerable taxis and rideshares. Phew! It looks like a fair bit when I list it all out 🙂 . I’m excited to see where my adventures take me in 2024.

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WATCHED

So, I absolutely love film and as a result, I thought that I would be watching films constantly in retirement – that didn’t turn out to be the case. In fact, most of these films only happened because I was watching them with others, such as the weekly movie club I mentioned.

Anyway, this list is way shorter than I expected given that I have unlimited time – maybe I need to focus more on watching TV and movies next year 😉 . If you’re interested in following along with what I’m watching and how I rate these films, feel free to check out my Letterboxd profile here.

Movies

This year I watched 118 movies. Here is a list of all the movies I saw this year and below are my Insta mini-reviews of the films that were most surprising to me in 2023:

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Overall, here are my favorite films of 2023:

1. Nimona
2. Talk to Me
3. Quiz Lady
4. The Menu
5. Plan B
6. John Mulaney: Baby J
7. The Banshees of Inisherin
8. Blackberry
9. Puss In Boots: The Last Wish
10. Red, White & Royal Blue
11. Missing
12. The Fugitive
13. Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse
14. Argentina, 1985
15. Violent Night
16. No One Will Save You
17. Oppenheimer
18. Elvis

TV Shows

Here is a list of my favorite TV shows I watched this year:

• Arcane
• Poker Face
• The Resort
• Ted Lasso S3
• White Lotus S1
• What We Do In The Shadows S5
• Always Sunny S16

And here are all the other shows I saw this year:

• Wednesday
• Animal Control
• Abbott Elementary
• Lockwood & Co S1
• Big Door Prize
• Witcher S3
• Darcey & Stacey S4
• I Think You Should Leave S3
• Almost Australian
• Kitchen Nightmares

I also rewatched these shows:

• Brooklyn 99 S1-S8
• Always Sunny S4-S5
• Community
• Ted Lasso S1-S3
• Poker Face
• The Resort

YouTube

A few years ago, I started getting really into YouTube. Below is a list of my channel obsessions this year. I also thought it would be fun to include my favorite videos of the year without context 🙂 . So here they are:

Media

• D’AngeloWallace
• TiffanyFerg
• Jenny Nicholson
• Smokey Glow

Education

• Kyle Hill
• The Plain Bagel

Film

• Dead Meat
• Jeremy Jahns
• Pitch Meeting
• NickDiRamioTV
• James Vs Cinema
• Patrick H Willems
• Red Letter Media
• FilmJoy

Gaming

• Deligracy
• PeteyPlaysIt
• LGR
• Carl’s Sim Guides

Scams/Anti-MLM

• Savy Writes Books
• Coffeezilla
• HBomberGuy

Comedy

• Tom Cardy
• Pro ZD

PLAYED

2023 was originally going to be my year of video games, but as you can see from the title of this post: I failed 🙂 . However, I did play new video games this year along with my old favorites so I did expand my experiences, but hopefully I can do even more next year. I never thought “play more video games” would be on my to do list, but retirement is weird 🙂 .

New-To-Me Games

• Stardew Valley
• Zelda: Breath Of The Wild
• Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
• Return Of The Obra Dinn
• Sable
• Subnautica
• Stanley Parable

Old Faithfuls

• The Sims 4
• Cities Skylines

I’ll have a post coming out in the new year about my favorite games that I played this year so look out for that if it’s of interest to you.

READING

This year I accepted the default Goodreads goal of reading 52 books in 2023. However, I had already blown past that goal in May of this year:

After reading 100 books in 2022 I never could have imagined that I'd surpass that number and yet here we are in May 2023🤷🏾‍♀️. I doubt I'll have as much time to read given all the exploring I plan to do in the second half of 2023, but let's see what happens😜📚🌍! pic.twitter.com/bV0MjuhZ2n

— A Purple Life (@APurpleLifeBlog) May 15, 2023

Instead in 2023 I read 15 fiction books, 235 non-fiction books and approximately a million fanfics for a total of 250 published books in 2023. My goal this year was to read more books by queer authors and books with queer protagonists and I definitely hit that goal!

The other big thing this year was that I kept finding new authors I loved so much that I had to read their entire bibliography. I think this was a result of almost all of my reading list this year being from recommendations from others and those recos were on point 🙂 . A list of all the published books I’ve read this year and their ratings can be found on my Goodreads here.

Favorite Books Of 2023

Here are my favorite books that I read this year in no particular order:

Non-Fiction

1. Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
2. Allow Me To Retort by Elie Mystal
3. Poverty By America by Matthew Desmond
4. The Body: A Guide For Occupants by Bill Bryson

Fiction

1. Like Real People Do by E.L. Massey
2. Like You’ve Nothing Left To Prove by E.L. Massey
3. Get A Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert
4. The Serpents And The Wings Of Night by Carissa Broadbent
5. Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
6. The Rest Of The Story by Tal Bauer
7. Secret Service by Tal Bauer
8. Soul Eater by Lily Mayne
9. Until I Saw You by Dianna Roman
10. Levity by Roe Horvat
11. For The Fans by Nyla K
12. Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid
13. Love Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

Lessons Learned

This year instead of randomly choosing books to read, almost all of the books I picked up were based on recommendations. I also continued using Goodreads to track and rate all the books I was reading.

There I found other people with similar tastes to me that read and rated a lot of books, which gave me even more recommendations to choose from. I used the Compare Books feature on someone’s profile to see if we were compatible. I would then Follow them and as a result, would see their ratings of books before any random reviews, which was very helpful when quickly evaluating a book.

As a result, I found more new authors that I became obsessed with than ever before, which is one of the reasons I accidentally read so much this year when I had planned to focus on video games instead 🙂 . I wanted to devour all their books…so I did. I think the other reason I read so many books this year is because I read a lot less fanfiction than usual. I suspect that I’ve always read this amount of words per year, but it was mostly fanfic so it didn’t count on my reading list. That’s wild 🙂 .

Something else I learned this year is that BookTok and I do not see eye to eye. I’m not on TikTok (and never will be because of privacy concerns) , but I kept seeing wildly good reviews of books on Goodreads and read them as a result. And they were very, very not good 🙂 .

I then read more of the reviews and saw that this was a BookTok recommendation and that’s why it had such a positive rating, but when I looked at the reviews they were all saying how it wasn’t worth your time. I know writing is a process and these authors will get better, but their current writing isn’t for me. So now if I see something is  4.9/5 stars with 100,000 reviews, but the first two most upvoted reviews say this book reco is from TikTok and it’s actually not good – I’m out.

As for positives of social media recommendations, some of the reviewers I follow on Goodreads have Insta accounts about books that I’ve been enjoying following. Doing that also led me to find new book cover artists that I love, which has been really interesting. It’s been cool to find other ways to engage with these communities and let them know I appreciate their hard work.

And lastly, I learned to DNF books this year or mark them as “Did Not Finish.” I previously never had. I wouldn’t want to stop in case the book got really good at the end somehow, but after that not happening repeatedly I’ve embraced the DNF. If a book isn’t vibing with me about 1/3 of the way through, I stop. I luckily haven’t had to do this with many books, but having the option has helped me get rid of a book that I realized I didn’t want to finish anyway so I can focus on books that excite me 🙂 .

PODCASTS

I listened to way fewer podcasts this year than I have previously. In fact there was only one that I listened to every week: The Always Sunny Podcast

It’s hilarious and poignant. Understandably they stopped recording in July when the Actor and Writer Strikes began and haven’t started back up again, but I still had a lovely backlog to enjoy including this lovely addition from last Christmas:

LISTENED

This year I’ve been taking full advantage of Spotify Premium’s new music features, specifically Discover Weekly, Daily Mixes, and Release Radar. I listen to the whole 1.5 hours of Discover Weekly every Monday and Release Radar every Friday. It’s exposed me to so much new music that I never knew existed while helping to regulate my moods and I’m loving it 🙂 .

I listened to over 84,939 minutes of music in 2023, which was in line with previous retired years (29K in 2019, 71K in 2020, 84K in 2021, 66K in 2022) and apparently more than 98% of people in the US listened to. As a result, I found even more new artists and albums that made my heart sing. If you’re interested in more stats, in 2023 I listened to 2,648 artists and explored 63 genres. Here’s the best music I found this year:

Soundtracks & Scores

I love film soundtracks and original scores, so here are the songs from musicals, films and TV shows that I couldn’t get out of my head:

• Arcane
• Hamilton

Artists

Here are the new artists I’ve become obsessed with this year:

• Freya Ridings
• GIMS
• Agnes
• Dermot Kennedy
• Remo Forrer
• Alexander Nate
• Sam Fischer

Songs

These are my favorite songs that I listened to in 2023:

Running Playlist

This year my music tastes also shifted a bit to find music that keeps me pumped while running. Here are a few that made me push extra hard:

• Takeover by NightOne Beats & Nat James
• BOTH by Tiësto, 21 Savage, BIA, MK & Sonny Fodera
• It Burns by Alle Farben
• I’m Good (Blue) – R3HAB Remix by David Guetta, Bebe Rexha & R3HAB

Conclusion

And that’s everything I got up to during 2023 🙂 . I’m still curious, still growing as a person and still finding new things to love and become obsessed with. In essence, life just keeps getting better. Let’s see what happens in 2024.

My goals for that year include improving my running times, continue practicing Spanish, read at least 52 books including 1 non-fiction book a month and to keep blogging. Let’s see how it goes! Thank you for being here 🙂 .

How was your year? Did you accomplish your goals?