There's no map for any of this.

The rent-vs-buy question has been following me around for a while – buying feels aspirational but hard to justify at current rates, and renting indefinitely compounds the wrong way. The retirement question has a similar shape, with the added layer of figuring out not just how much to save but when to actually start enjoying it. And the AI thing is difficult to think about abstractly when you're in tech watching it reshape the work in real time – it's less a trend to track and more a question I have to answer personally.

Calculated Paths is what came out of me trying to think through all of this more rigorously – calculators that handle real complexity, long-form journeys that trace the reasoning from question to decision, takes on things I have a stake in, and data visualizations I made because I wanted to see them.

I have a real day job in tech. This started as a way to make sure I actually understood what I thought I understood – and that turned out to be enough of a reason on its own. If it's useful to someone in a similar spot, that's a bonus.