Part 321: Living Life on Easy Mode

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE. This week, I discuss living life on easy mode, and share some thoughts on courier companies.

Weekly Update

I’m getting increasingly fed up with my right elbow and tricep, which I injured in the summer of 2022.  Since then, I’ve had scans, physio, and appointments with surgeons, and nothing has come of it.  There’s clearly an issue, but having done some research, it looks as though the problem may be one that does not show on scans.  This is annoying because all the surgeons I’ve spoken with will not perform exploratory surgery and will only operate on something they can see from a scan.

A few days ago, I reached out to my GP to see if I could have a chat about it.  I’ve got an appointment in a month.  Not to sound all “back in the day”, but I remember back in the day when you could get a same-day GP appointment. 

My arm hurts all the time, but I need to do something physical to stay sane.  I enjoy biking, but that’s not something you can do all the time when it’s wet and windy.  The gym has always been a way for me to decompress and manage my mental health.  I’ve been following an exercise program that should avoid further damage to my elbow, but to be honest, it hurts if I exercise and it hurts if I don’t.  I’ve tried resting it for months at a time with no real benefit.  Hopefully, with me seeing an NHS GP and, hopefully, an NHS surgeon, I might get somewhere this time.

My Nan

I posted last week about my Nan passing away, and I just want to thank all the people who sent me messages both publicly and privately.  She genuinely was one of the kindest and strongest people you could meet.  When my Grandad, her husband, passed in 2018, she carried herself with such dignity and strength.  They had been married for just shy of 60 years, and we were looking at requesting a message from the then-Queen for them.  Sadly, my Grandad passed a few weeks before their anniversary.  

Her funeral has been arranged for January 12th, which was the earliest possible date.  This would have clashed with my start date for my new job, but thankfully, they’ve agreed to push the start date back a week.  

Bike Rides

We finished up the week with two good bike rides.  On Friday, we cycled to Sharrowvale, and then through Endcliffe Park and on to Whiteley Woods.  We then came back and went shopping.  We covered just under 20km.  

On Saturday, we set off on a new route we had researched.  The first part of the journey was standard, as we approached Meadowhall.  From there, we had to find the entrance to the Blackburn Valley Trail.  We had a little back and forth to find it, but once we did, the ride was fantastic.  On the way out, it was a long, but gradual, climb.  We covered a few kilometres out to Ecclesfield, and then on to Chapeltown.  Once we had covered 15km, we arrived at the end of the route where we planned to turn back.  Rather than following the same route in reverse, we went for a little explore before heading back along the BVT.  It was a brilliant area for cycling, and we’ll definitely repeat this ride going forward.  On the way back, we stopped at a Starbucks for a coffee and then at Baker’s Yard for some treats for our hard work.  In the end, we covered a little over 32km.  

On the subject of Baker’s Yard, it’s dangerous having a bakery that is so good in Kelham Island.  We popped in on Friday for a couple of bits, and then again on Saturday as we finished our ride. Oana waited outside with the bikes whilst I went in to order.  The thinking was we’d have a cake each.  I left the bakery with two boxes and a bag, with four cakes and a focaccia.  

Easy Mode, Hard Mode, and the People Who Never Had to Notice

I was watching a video from one of the YouTube channels I subscribe to, and the guy was talking about an actress who has fallen from grace and how part of this is due to her having lived all her life on easy mode.  It’s a concept I’ve heard discussed before, but I don’t think I’ve ever talked about it explicitly in those terms.  

Living life on easy mode is never having to realise you were on it, and that is one of the hidden privileges some people have.  After all, if the road is smooth, you assume everyone else is just bad at walking, right?

That’s how you end up with people who’ve never seriously struggled confidently explaining success, discipline, and poverty to those who have, usually with the same tired lines about hard work and “good choices”. It’s not usually malicious. It’s just deeply uninformed.  It also completely ignores the huge impact that chance has on all our lives. 

What Mode I Played

When I was at secondary school, getting there wasn’t a short walk or a quick lift. It was public transport across the city. Sometimes two buses there and two back. Later, I was able to get a tram instead.  This was every day for school; a minimum of one hour’s commute each way.

That meant hours lost, not occasionally, but routinely. Hours that could have gone into homework, revision, rest, or just being a teenager and spending time with friends. Instead, they were spent waiting at stops, watching the clock, managing connections, and carrying the low-level stress of needing everything to run on time.  

The typical school day ran from 09:00 to 15:40.  Even going with the best-case scenario of an hour each way, that totalled ten hours a week, or an extra day and a bit compared to many of my peers who lived a few minutes’ walk from school.

No one ever wrote that into my report card.  No teacher ever adjusted expectations to account for it.  It was just… invisible.  And that’s what hard mode looks like. Not dramatic hardship. Just constant friction.

At the time, I decided that when I got my own place to live, I would never go through that sort of commute again.  When I moved back to Sheffield from university, I’ve only ever lived in the city centre.  It’s been a very deliberate choice.

Easy mode isn’t about never working hard. It’s about not having your effort siphoned away before you even get to apply it.  It’s living close to school, so time expands rather than contracts. It’s getting home with energy left. It’s being able to say yes to clubs, sports, music, revision sessions, social plans; all the things that quietly build confidence and opportunity over time.

Hard mode is the opposite. It’s starting every task slightly depleted. It’s needing more effort just to arrive at the same starting point as someone else.  It’s like starting a race ten meters behind everyone else, and that’s before you layer anything else on top.

Because for some of us, the difficulty was set too hard, long before we had language for why.

Being autistic, whether you know it or not, automatically changes the game.

It means navigating a world not designed for how your brain works. It means sensory overload, social exhaustion, masking, misinterpretation, and constant self-monitoring just to appear “normal”. It means burning energy on things other people do on autopilot.

When you don’t know you’re autistic, you don’t get understanding or adjustments. You just get labelled difficult, awkward, intense, lazy, or underachieving, depending on how your traits happen to present.  So now hard mode isn’t just about time and money. It’s cognitive load. Emotional load. Identity confusion. You’re spending energy you don’t realise you’re spending, and then being judged for having less left over.

Again, none of this shows up on a CV.

This is where the myth of meritocracy really starts to fall apart.  People on easy mode often look at outcomes and work backwards, assuming the result proves the virtue. If someone is struggling, it must be because they didn’t plan properly, didn’t work hard enough, or made bad choices.

That belief becomes much harder to maintain when you’ve lived with the compounding effect of small disadvantages.  Take the old example about boots created by Sir Terry Pratchett.

A wealthier person can afford £100 boots that last ten years. Someone without that money buys £20 boots that fall apart every year. Over a decade, the poorer person spends more for worse boots purely because they couldn’t afford the upfront cost.

Easy mode people love to say, “I always buy quality. It saves money in the long run.”  Which is true if you can afford the long run.  That logic applies everywhere. Credit. Interest rates. Housing. Transport. Education. Health. Time.  I heard in an interview the other day that some nursing agencies in the US offer lower pay to those who have more debt, on the assumption that they are more desperate for work.

Wealth isn’t just money. It’s slack. It’s margin. It’s the ability to absorb mistakes without your life unravelling.  And this is where easy mode often turns from ignorance into arrogance.

Not because people had advantages, but because many refuse to acknowledge them. They rewrite their story so success becomes proof of moral superiority rather than circumstance plus effort.  They climbed using lifts, ladders, and helping hands, then turn around and lecture others for taking the stairs two at a time.  They don’t see the lift. They only see the view.

If you’ve lived life on easy mode, that doesn’t make you a bad person.

But denying it? Minimising it? Looking down on people playing on hard mode, people who are exhausted, overstimulated, under-resourced, and still trying?  That’s not strength. It’s comfort mistaken for character.

Surviving and even progressing on hard mode isn’t failure. It’s resilience under pressure. And the real measure of integrity isn’t how far you climbed when the path was clear, but whether you’re honest about the ground you started on or whether you kick the ladder away and tell everyone else to “just try harder”.

What I’m Doing

Listening: Callsign: King – Chess Team Book 3.5: by Jeremy Robinson and Sean Ellis.

Watching: Woman of the Hour (Netflix). 

Reading: nothing at the moment. 

Woman of the Hour is the directorial debut of Anna Kendrick, and it tells the story of serial killer Rodney Alcala.  It’s a fairly short, but well-made film.  The direction is good, and the acting is generally decent.  It always feels wrong to say you enjoyed a film like this, but the best praise I can give is that it was well made, and it kept my attention throughout.  It currently has 91% on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £125,551.06.

Fuck It Fund: £1.61.

Pensions: £109,792.28.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00. 

Total Assets: £501,774.95.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,874.05. 

Total Debts: £174,874.05.

Total Wealth: £326,900.90.

2026 Goals

We have less than two weeks of 2025 left, and I’ve started thinking about my goals for next year.  I think they can be split into personal goals and financial goals.  I’ll be discussing these in more detail next week, and I’d love to hear your plans and goals for the new year, so please leave a comment.

Courier Companies: The World’s Easiest Job, Performed Badly

Let’s establish the baseline.  Courier companies have one job.

Not several.
Not mostly.
Not when vibes are right.

One.  Job.

You take a thing from Point A, and you put it at Point B. Ideally, in one piece. Ideally, somewhere that resembles “safe”. Ideally, without lying about it.  That’s the entire business model. That’s it. 

Somehow, the courier industry, an industry built around moving objects, manages to turn this into an ongoing farce.

Now, mistakes happen. Weather happens. Traffic happens. Humans happen. Fine.

But what we’re dealing with here isn’t the occasional mishap. It’s structural chaos. It’s companies that have decided the last 10 metres of a delivery is optional, interpretive, and largely theoretical.  It’s companies that have decided a delivery address is a suggestion, not a direction.

Which brings us, as it always does, to Evri.

Evri. Formerly Hermes. Rebranded, presumably, so people would stop flinching when they saw the name.

Evri have somehow cornered the market in aggressively missing the point. Parcels lobbed over fences like the courier was late for a flight. Items left in bins on bin day, which is either negligence or performance art. “Delivered” notifications accompanied by photos that prove absolutely nothing beyond the courier’s ability to wave a phone in the same general direction as the parcel.

At this point, “Evri lost my parcel” isn’t a complaint; it’s a meme.

And before anyone says “well, that’s just anecdotes”, I agree, so it was genuinely impressive when BBC Panorama showed up and went: oh no, this is actually worse than people think.

When an investigative documentary is made about how badly you perform the single function your company exists to do, that’s not bad press. That’s a post-mortem.

Panorama didn’t uncover a couple of rogue drivers. It exposed a system that runs on failure. Unrealistic delivery targets. Zero accountability. A structure that all but guarantees parcels will be mistreated, misdelivered, or disappear into a parallel universe where customer service emails go to die.

And yes, before someone climbs onto their soapbox, this is not about the drivers as individuals. Many of them are exploited, underpaid, and set up to fail.

Which raises the obvious question: why is the customer expected to absorb the consequences of that failure?

Spoiler: because the company knows it can.

So here’s my policy now: If a retailer uses Evri, I don’t buy from them.  Not anymore.  My last two experiences with Evri were enough for them to make The List.  Life is too short to play parcel roulette, and ordering something online shouldn’t feel like entering a low-stakes lottery where the prize is “receiving the thing you paid for”.

This isn’t a boycott. It’s risk management.

Now, let’s contrast this with DPD.  Are they perfect? Absolutely not. No courier is.
But in our area, the drivers are solid, decent, and polite.  They call. They wait. They don’t treat delivery like an Olympic shot put event.

This isn’t hard.  The technology exists.  The expectations are not unreasonable.  Move the thing to the place.  That’s it.  That’s literally it.

When a company repeatedly fails at that and still expects customers to shrug, retry, and “contact support”, the problem isn’t logistics, it’s contempt.

And once a company shows you that level of contempt, the only sensible response is to stop trusting them with your stuff.

Preferably before they yeet it into next door’s flower bed.

DISCLAIMER

The views and opinions in this blog are my own, and do not represent the views or opinions of my former, current, or future employers, nor should they be considered advice.

If you want personalised financial advice, seek an appropriate professional.  If you are in financial difficulty, seek advice via the resources below:

StepChange

MoneyHelper

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