Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.
It’s been a pretty good week this week. We’ve managed to get a few bike rides in, my new job has started really well, and we got to watch Sheffield Wednesday absolutely batter someone on Saturday. There are definitely worse ways to spend a week.
The biggest thing, though, has probably been starting the new job.
When I was working in my last self-employed role, I don’t think I fully appreciated just how much it had hammered my confidence. When you’re in the middle of something, it can be difficult to see what it’s doing to you. You just keep going, assume you need to work harder, try to figure out what you’re doing wrong, and gradually start questioning whether you’re actually any good at the job in the first place.
I’m only a few days into this new role and already it feels like a weight has been lifted.
There’s still a bit of background nervousness, obviously. Starting any new job comes with that. There are new systems to learn, new processes to get used to, and that nagging little voice wondering whether you’re going to accidentally break something important before lunchtime. I think that’s fairly normal.
The difference is that this time the nervousness feels like new job nervousness, rather than the constant low-level stress of wondering what fresh bullshit is going to land on me next.
My new manager has been great so far and incredibly supportive. More importantly, I’m being trusted to actually get on with the job. I can sit down, work through what needs doing and crack on without being hassled every hour or left trying to decipher confusing, contradictory, or nonexistent communication.
It turns out that being given clear information, treated like an adult and then allowed to do your job is actually quite an effective management strategy. Who knew?
It’s early days, of course, and I’m not going to declare everything perfect after less than a week, but the difference in how I feel is already noticeable. Looking back, I think my previous experience had chipped away at my confidence far more than I realised. Sometimes you need to step into a different environment before you can properly see how dysfunctional the previous one was.
Away from work, there’s been plenty of cycling this week as well.
On Friday afternoon, we headed out for a smaller group ride before coming home for a couple of hours, getting some food and recovering, and then heading straight back out again for a mass cycle ride in the evening.
By the time we finally got home late on Friday night, our legs were very much aware that we’d been out riding. Between the two rides we’d covered a decent amount of distance and somehow accumulated hundreds of metres of climbing as well. Sheffield has many wonderful qualities, but being flat is absolutely not one of them.
Then came Saturday.
My Dad and I headed to Hillsborough for Sheffield Wednesday’s second league home game of the season, this time against Bromley.
And we absolutely hammered them.
Wednesday were 7-0 up after 81 minutes and, genuinely, that scoreline didn’t flatter us. If anything, it probably flattered Bromley. Based on the balance of play and the chances we created, we could have been 10, 11 or even 12 goals up without it looking particularly ridiculous.
It was one of those very rare football matches where you can actually relax and enjoy yourself rather than spending the final 20 minutes staring at the clock while mentally calculating all the increasingly stupid ways your team could somehow throw the game away.
At 7-0, even Wednesday would have needed to work quite hard to Wednesday it up.
As the game wore on and the result was obviously secure, we started making substitutions. Some of the players coming on weren’t quite at the same level as those going off, the game became a little more disjointed, and Bromley managed to grab a couple of late consolation goals.
The first came after a mistake from one of the players we’d brought on, while their second was eventually credited as an own goal. That made the final score 7-2, which somehow makes the game sound considerably more competitive than it actually was.
It really wasn’t.
After all that, Saturday evening involved another cycling-related social event, although thankfully without the actual cycling.
Oana and I went to a birthday party for a guy we’ve met through the cycling community. The party was near Bramall Lane which, as a Wednesday fan, presented something of a moral dilemma.
However, I decided to be the bigger person. I went anyway. I didn’t even hold his choice of location against him. Much.
So, all things considered, a very decent week. A positive start to the new job, plenty of time on the bike, a ridiculous Wednesday win and a Saturday night out.
I’ll take more weeks like that.
This Week on The AFI Podcast
Episode four of The Autism and Financial Independence Podcast is out now, and this week we’re tackling two very different subjects.
Darren asks a question that perhaps shouldn’t need asking, but absolutely does: why should people care about autism?He looks at why autism matters not just to autistic people and their families, but to society more broadly, and why greater understanding and acceptance benefits everyone.
On the financial side, I dive into one of the biggest concepts in FIRE: your FI number and safe withdrawal rates.
How much money do you actually need to become financially independent? Where does the famous 4% rule come from? What exactly makes a withdrawal rate “safe”? And perhaps most importantly, why shouldn’t you treat your FI number as some magical, immovable finish line?
We also look at the fact that financial independence isn’t an exact science. Markets change, spending changes and life changes, and you can adjust course along the way.
If either of those subjects sounds interesting, give episode four a listen. And if you’re enjoying the podcast, please consider subscribing, leaving a review, or sharing it with someone who might find it useful. It all helps us reach more people.
You can find all the episodes here, including the different platforms we are on.
What I’m Doing
Listening: Life Without Diabetes by Professor Roy Taylor.
Watching: For All Mankind (Apple).
Reading: Abaddon’s Gate (Expanse Book 3) by James S. A. Corey.
In preparation for watching the latest season of For All Mankind, we’ve gone back to the beginning and started from the very first episode. It’s such a strong show with some incredible acting, and strong writing and direction. It also melds two of my favourite genres; science fiction and alt-history.
For those who don’t know, the story starts with a simple point of divergence; what if the Soviet Union landed people on the moon first? What follows is an intense ramping up of the space race.
ANNOUNCEMENT
With my new job starting and the podcast taking up time, I’m probably going to scale back the blog a little. I’m not giving up on it completely, but I may revert to posting once a fortnight, or making every other post a bit shorter and simply more of a financial update.
I’d love to make blogging and podcasting a full-time thing, but I still need to pay my mortgage!
Financial Update
Assets
Premium Bonds: £250.00.
Stocks and Shares ISA: £152,911.98.
Fuck It Fund: £0.00.
Pensions: £129,414.00.
Residential Property Value: £245,790.00.
Total Assets: £528,365.98.
Debts
Residential Mortgage: £173,447.84.
Total Debts: £173,447.84.
Total Wealth
Total Wealth: £354,918.14.
Top Ten Funniest/Most Crazy Conspiracy Theories
10. Flat Earth
9. Hollow Earth
8. The Mandela Effect: No, CERN Probably Hasn’t Broken the Timeline
It’s time for another entry in my completely unordered list of the ten most batshit conspiracy theories, and this week we’re moving away from arguing about the shape of the planet and onto something considerably more unsettling.
What if your memories are wrong? Not forgotten or just hazy.
Not I think it happened on a Tuesday, but it might have been Wednesday.
I’m talking about completely, confidently, absolutely wrong, and what if thousands, perhaps millions, of other people remember exactly the same incorrect thing?
Welcome to the Mandela Effect.
Unlike Flat Earth and Hollow Earth, I find this one genuinely fascinating because the underlying phenomenon is real. Large numbers of people absolutely do share remarkably similar false memories. Where we part company is in explaining why.
Psychologists might point towards reconstructive memory, source-monitoring errors, suggestion, and the fact that human brains are essentially biological computers assembled by evolution with a focus on speed of processing rather than accuracy.
Alternatively, and this is a genuine idea out there amongst some people…
CERN broke the fucking universe.
Let’s investigate.
Nelson Mandela died in prison…
Except he didn’t.
The Mandela Effect takes its name from Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid activist who spent 27 years imprisoned in South Africa before being released in 1990.
He subsequently became President of South Africa. Then, in 2013, he died. This is all extremely well documented.
However, paranormal researcher Fiona Broome discovered that she remembered Mandela dying during the 1980s while still in prison.
This wasn’t simply a vague sense that she’d thought he had died. She claimed to remember news coverage surrounding his death and other details associated with it. More interestingly, she discovered other people apparently shared similar memories.
Right, now, there are two directions we can go from here.
One is to ask why multiple people might independently develop similar false memories about a globally famous political figure who spent decades in prison during an incredibly turbulent period of South African history.
Or…
Maybe they came from another universe.
Obviously we’re going with the latter.
The term “Mandela Effect” eventually came to describe situations in which large numbers of people apparently share the same incorrect memory.
And once you start looking at examples, I guarantee you’ll find at least one that makes you stop and think:
Hang on. What the fuck?
Let’s start with the Monopoly Man
I want you to picture the Monopoly Man.
Don’t Google him; just imagine him.
He’s wearing a suit, and he’s got the moustache and top hat.
He’s also wearing a monocle, yeah?
Except…
He isn’t.
Rich Uncle Pennybags, as the character was originally known, does not traditionally wear a monocle.
Yet loads of people remember him having one.
I’ll admit this is one of those Mandela Effects that feels right. A monocle just seems like it should be there. He’s an absurd caricature of an incredibly wealthy old-fashioned businessman. Of course my dude has a monocle.
Except he doesn’t.
There are several possible explanations. One is that we’re combining him with other characters associated with similar imagery, such as Mr Peanut. More generally, our cultural stereotype of an incredibly rich Victorian-looking gentleman includes things like top hats, canes and monocles.
So when our brains reconstruct the Monopoly Man, they helpfully fill in the blanks.
Top hat? Yes.
Moustache? Yup.
Ridiculous wealth? Yes, please.
Monocle? Well obviously.
And suddenly thousands of people have independently made the same mistake.
Or Hasbro altered reality.
Could go either way at this point.
“Luke, I am your father.”
This is perhaps the perfect example of how the Mandela Effect can develop without requiring anyone to fire up the Large Hadron Collider.
One of the most famous lines in cinema history is Darth Vader revealing his identity to Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back.
You know the line.
“Luke, I am your father.”
Except that’s not the line.
Vader says:
“No, I am your father.”
So why does virtually everyone know the other version? Because “Luke, I am your father” works better as a quotation.
Imagine you’re doing a Darth Vader impression. You turn to your friend and say:
“No, I am your father.”
Without context, that could mean anything. Add Luke’s name and everyone immediately knows what you’re referencing. So the altered version gets repeated over and over on television and between friends joking around.
Eventually, some of us have heard the incorrect version far more often than we’ve heard the actual line.
Then our brain does what brains do. It remembers the information but becomes slightly confused about where the information came from.
You haven’t necessarily invented a memory out of nowhere. You’ve just added some incorrect material.
Your brain isn’t a hard drive
I think this is where the Mandela Effect becomes genuinely interesting.
We intuitively imagine memory working something like storage on a computer.
Something happens and our brain records it. Then, later, we access the file.
Obviously, some files become corrupted or disappear over time, but broadly we imagine ourselves retrieving a stored representation of what actually happened.
Except human memory doesn’t really work like that.
Memory is reconstructive. When you remember something, your brain rebuilds the experience using stored information. That reconstruction can be influenced by expectations, knowledge you’ve gained subsequently, things other people have told you and countless other factors.
And here’s the really uncomfortable bit: You don’t know when it’s happening.
A false memory doesn’t arrive accompanied pop-up saying:
THIS MEMORY MAY CONTAIN INACCURATE INFORMATION. CONTINUE? Y/N
It feels like a memory. You can be completely sincere, incredibly confident, and vividly picture what you think is real, and still be wrong, like when Oana thinks the Natwest in Sheffield city centre is a fairly new building.
Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and others have spent decades researching the malleability of human memory. Experiments have repeatedly demonstrated that information introduced after an event can influence how people subsequently remember that event.
Even relatively subtle differences in wording can affect recollection. This has enormous real-world implications, particularly around eyewitness testimony.
But why do we all remember the SAME wrong thing?
This, to me, is the strongest argument made by people fascinated by the Mandela Effect.
If memory is unreliable, fine.
But why don’t we all remember different incorrect things?
Why do so many people remember the Monopoly Man having a monocle?
Why do so many people remember “Luke, I am your father”?
That’s genuinely interesting, but it doesn’t require alternate realities.
Human brains aren’t randomly generated.
We have broadly similar perceptual systems with shared languages and culture. We use similar mental shortcuts, and we’re exposed to many of the same sources of misinformation.
So it shouldn’t be particularly shocking that similar brains presented with similar information sometimes make similar mistakes.
Memories accumulate details and evolve over time. They can merge with other experiences, and every time we retrieve a memory, we’re potentially reconstructing it again.
That’s moderately terrifying; each time we remember something, it changes.
CERN has entered the chat…
Naturally, at some point people looked at all this and concluded:
“particle physics.“
CERN operates the Large Hadron Collider, the enormous particle accelerator beneath the French-Swiss border.
The LHC accelerates particles to extraordinary energies and smashes them together so physicists can study fundamental particles and forces.
It contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson, and has helped scientists investigate some of the deepest questions in physics. And, according to some corners of the internet, it has also apparently broken reality.
Various versions of the conspiracy suggest that experiments at CERN have somehow altered the timeline, shifted humanity into a parallel universe or merged different realities together.
This supposedly explains why some people remember things differently, and I love the scale of this escalation.
We start with:
“I thought the Monopoly Man had a monocle.”
And arrive at:
“European scientists have accidentally damaged the fabric of spacetime.”
There’s no intermediate step.
To be fair, parallel universes aren’t necessarily nonsense
Here’s where we need to separate legitimate theoretical physics from internet conspiracy theories.
The idea of multiple universes isn’t inherently ridiculous and there are serious scientific ideas that involve some form of multiverse.
The Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, for example, proposes that the universal wavefunction evolves without collapse, with different possible outcomes represented in effectively branching components of the quantum state.
There are also cosmological theories in which inflation could potentially produce regions sometimes described as separate “bubble universes”.
These are fascinating subjects.
We don’t currently know whether the broader multiverse ideas describe reality, but they aren’t inherently the same category of claim as saying the Earth is flat.
The problem is the gigantic leap from:
“Some legitimate physical theories allow for the possibility of multiple universes.”
to:
“Therefore I used to live in the universe where Pikachu had a black tail.”
Those are not the same argument. We’ve crossed several unsupported bridges there. Even if other universes exist, you still need a mechanism allowing people to move between them.
Then you need to explain how, and have evidence that it happened.
Then you need to explain why people’s memories somehow survived the transition.
All this brings us to my favourite question.
Why is reality changing such incredibly trivial stuff?
Imagine for a moment that the conspiracy is correct.
CERN switched our universe and we have moved into a neighbouring reality.
Perhaps two timelines merged. Whatever. We’re talking about possibly the most profound event in human history. Reality itself has changed.
So what’s different?
Does gravity operate differently?
Has the speed of light changed?
Did Germany win the Second World War?
Is there another continent?
Did dinosaurs survive?
No.
Apparently the universe is largely identical except Pikachu’s tail is slightly different and the Monopoly Man misplaced his monocle.
Imagine being responsible for maintaining the simulation and deploying that update.
REALITY PATCH 6.4.2
- Removed monocle from Monopoly Man.
- Modified Pikachu tail texture.
- Nelson Mandela no longer died in prison.
- Various bug fixes and performance improvements.
You’d at least expect them to make printers reliable while they were in there.
Occam’s razor is looking increasingly attractive
As with Flat Earth, we eventually reach the point where we have competing explanations.
Explanation One:
Human memory is reconstructive and demonstrably fallible. People share cultural information, expectations and cognitive tendencies, meaning large numbers of people can sometimes develop the same incorrect memory.
Or…
Explanation Two:
Parallel universes exist and humans can somehow move between them.
The universes are almost completely identical except for tiny details involving popular culture, logos and historical events, and a particle accelerator may be responsible.
Occam’s razor doesn’t prove the first explanation correct, as that’s not what Occam’s razor does.
If, however, two explanations account for an observation, generally speaking we shouldn’t start adding enormous unsupported assumptions unless we actually need them.
And “my memory was wrong” requires considerably fewer assumptions than “the universe changed.”
The Mandela Effect is more interesting without the conspiracy
This is perhaps where I differ from some of the other conspiracy theories on this list.
Flat Earth becomes more interesting because of the conspiracy.
Hollow Earth becomes more entertaining because we get mammoths, underground civilisations and Nazi UFO bases.
But the Mandela Effect?
I actually think the conspiracy makes it less interesting.
Because what the Mandela Effect potentially reveals about human memory is far stranger than a Fruit of the Loom logo changing.
Think about how much of your identity depends on memory; childhood, your relationships, holidays, school, work, embarrassing moments you remember during an unbidden mental highlight reel.
Those memories collectively form the story you tell yourself about your life, and we know that memory isn’t a perfect recording system.
That doesn’t mean your entire past is fictional and it doesn’t mean nothing you remember can be trusted. But it does mean the relationship between what happened and what you remember happening isn’t always as straightforward as we’d like to believe.
Two people can experience the same event and remember it differently.
Neither needs to be lying and neither needs to be stupid. They can both sincerely remember their version.
That’s extraordinary.
And that’s why the Mandela Effect belongs on this list
The Mandela Effect starts with something real. People absolutely do share false memories.
Some examples are remarkably compelling. Some make me look at the correct version and think:
Nope. That looks wrong.
That’s precisely why it’s such fertile ground for conspiracy theories. There’s a mystery. There’s an unsettling personal experience. There’s legitimate science involving memory that isn’t intuitively obvious.
Then somewhere along the line we decide psychology isn’t sufficiently exciting and start blaming Switzerland.
Could CERN have transported us into another universe?
I mean, I’m not a theoretical physicist, but I’m going to stick my neck out and say:
“probably not.”
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:
Biolink
You can now find all my social media pages by checking out my Biolink:
bio.link/davidscothern.
“You’d at least expect them to make printers reliable while they were in there.”
😂😂😂