My dream life over the last year or so has been what I once saw described on Hacker News as the "Victorian gentleman": enough passive income to be comfortable without necessarily being extravagant, spending my time working on productive hobbies that might or might not bring extra income, being with friends, taking long walks….
It's amazing, really, how much growing up in one of the world's most expensive cities has shaped my perspective — the idea that that's an impossible dream, that I'll be grinding away until I'm too old to be hired just to afford a single home, etc.
Whereas I'm actually in a situation where I could, in theory, go to somewhere like Birmingham and buy a small-ish apartment almost without a mortgage….