creativity

Day 28: Making Meaning By Helping Dogs

Christa Avampato

So here we go – the first day of my month of reflection as I count down to my medication switch. One thing I’ve learned on this long cancer journey is that helping others helps me. Even when I feel down and out, and that’s happened many times over these past 5 years, helping others gives me a boost.

My souldog, Phineas, was a great comfort to me during this time so when he passed away in January 2024, I was absolutely gutted. That was the lowest I’ve ever been. A home without him was a terribly sad and lonely place. I tried everything to get through that time – grief counseling, donating, talking to friends, keeping myself busy with work and every activity I could find, writing my graduate school dissertation. I would love to tell you that helped but it barely moved the needle. You know what helped? Fostering dogs through Muddy Paws Rescue. Since November 2024, I’ve had 15 foster dogs and they gave me a place to pour my love for Phinny that was physically tangible. That’s what I needed.

That’s why I’m participating in the Muddy Paws Rescue Pack Challenge where I raise money to help save rescue dogs from now until July 23rd! And I’d personally love your support to help more people find their Phineas!

In addition to fostering with Muddy Paws, I also volunteer at events, review foster applications, do welcome calls for new fosters, and help the Development team raise money. Every dollar we raise goes to helping the dogs in our care. We get ~1,000 dogs adopted EVERY YEAR and this spring we celebrated our 10,000th dog getting adopted.

If you’d like to contribute, the link to my fundraising page is: Give.muddypawsrescue.org/phineas2026

If you’ve been looking for a way to do something good for the world, this is it! Every single dollar helps me save more dogs. I’m so grateful for every single contribution, and so are the dogs.

creativity

28-Day Countdown to Healing

Christa Avampato

This is me after acupuncture today. It was my 10th session with the incredible Dr. Degenhardt at NYU Langone Health. My body’s responded so well to the treatments that I have no more blocks in my body. Now we are moving on to strength building in my core, left hip, and left leg. This is a huge milestone and we got here much faster than expected.

Tomorrow marks my 28 day countdown to my medication switch. Over the weekend, I opened my last bottle of letrozole – a medication I’ve taken for 5 years to prevent cancer recurrence. The side effects it’s caused, along with the side effects from my other treatments, are what brought me to Dr. Degenhardt. The medication did its job, and also took its toll. The hope is that this new medication will be easier on my body.

To mark this turning point, I made a special dinner: zaalouk, a Moroccan dish that is synonymous with celebration. It’s meant to be scooped up and savored with our hands – a tactile experience to nourish ourselves. I made these za’atar flatbreads by combining greek yogurt, flour, salt, baking powder, and olive oil. It’s all topped with toasted harissa chickpeas – a symbol of prosperity, continuity, the cycle of life, feminine health, the sustaining power of nature, and the desire for a good life. All fitting for this day.

When I was a kid, I loved making paper chains that countdown to Christmas. When I was going through radiation (another treatment that precipitated side effects Dr. Degenhardt is clearing!), I made a paper chain with inspiring quotes to count down the days of that treatment. I’m going to do that this month as well, but rather than a paper chain, I’m going to count down the days by sharing my thoughts about these past 5 years via writing.

Thank you to everyone who has played a part in this journey in so many ways. I’m so grateful. I’m the luckiest, and I know it.

creativity

Outer Space Innovation at the World Cup: Survival of the (Out)Fittest?

Christa Avampato
adidas Cooling Vest – an Innovation for FIFA WORLD CUP 2026™. Image is free to use from here: http://bit.ly/4p61XLk

If you’ve been following the World Cup matches over the last few weeks, you’ve witnessed some of the most intense athleticism on the planet. To win, teams aren’t just strategizing against their opponents—they’re actively managing nature’s wrath. A brutal summer heatwave has blanketed the host cities, pushing the physical limits of human performance to a dangerous breaking point.

To keep players from overheating, teams turned to outer space engineering. As reported by The Athletic, players are donning specialized cooling vests and silver space jackets during warm-ups and half-time breaks, using materials originally designed to keep astronauts safe in hostile conditions.

It’s a brilliant feat of adaptation. As we watch multi-million-dollar athletes use aerospace technology to perform at the top of their game, it begs the question: will all of us eventually need this kind of adaptation to survive on a warming planet?

The Illusion of the Tech Fix

There’s a dangerous comfort in high-tech climate solutions. When we see space-age cooling gear or air-conditioned stadium hubs, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that human ingenuity will always engineer a way out of a crisis. We tell ourselves that as the planet warms, we’ll just adapt our way through it.

But this World Cup is exposing the deep inequality of technological adaptation. We can build specialized, high-conductive cooling gear for elite athletes, but we can’t wrap a space jacket around the construction workers building the stadiums, the transit staff moving the crowds, and the local communities whose power grids are strained to the limit by the surrounding infrastructure. In my own Brooklyn neighborhood, ConEd has to reduce everyone’s voltage to avoid a blackout for several days. If you aren’t a million-dollar-athlete (and I’m certainly not!), then you’re asked to adapt in a way where you give up something that provides comfort. In many parts of the world, air conditioning doesn’t exist at all. What becomes of them when the heatwaves are the summer norm, not an anomaly for a few days?  

When Adaptation Hits a Hard Wall

This is the exact tension at the heart of our ongoing climate choice. Adaptations like cooling vests are vital for immediate safety, but they are a backstop for a privileged few, not a solution. When open-air stadiums face temperatures that FIFA deems unsafe for play, we aren’t looking at a management challenge—we’re looking at a systemic failure that’s much bigger than FIFA.

If we rely entirely on tech patches to shield us from a changing climate, we’re choosing a path of continuous, exhausting defense. Real progress happens when the friction of these extreme events forces us to move past temporary fixes and start investing in systemic mitigation—greening our local grids with renewables, restructuring our public spaces with natural shade from trees and vegetation, and designing infrastructure that works within the planet’s boundaries rather than trying to out-engineer them. We’ll never beat nature in the long game. We can’t burn down (or overheat) our home and expect to be able to live in it. That goes for our built homes as well as the planet we share with every other living being.

The Togetherhood Takeaway

Resilience means recognizing the difference between a temporary shield and long-term safety.

  • Audit Your Local Shields: Think about the adaptations you rely on during a heatwave: your home’s AC, the food and drink you consume, neighborhood cooling centers (our public libraries in New York stayed open despite the 4th of July holiday to give people a cool place to go), the clothing you wear, etc. Are these available and sustainable for your entire community over the next decade, or are they temporary fixes? What will you do if summer temps over 100 degrees become the norm, when heatwaves are simply just how summer goes?
  • Look for the Living Infrastructure, and Advocate for its Expansion: Tech is great, but nature is often a more effective, efficient, and less expensive cooling mechanism. Support local initiatives that plant urban tree canopies, install green roofs, and create public shade structures that cool entire neighborhoods and cities, not just individuals.
  • Advocate for the Whole Team: True community agency means ensuring that climate protections apply to everyone, not just you and your household. When local labor advocates push for mandatory heat-safety standards for outdoor workers, back them up. Survival and comfort shouldn’t require elite status.

We can’t out-engineer a warming planet with silver jackets alone (though they are arguably cool in more ways than one!) Our collective and individual future depends on our willingness to cool the planet we all share.

creativity

Leave No Trace: Japanese World Cup Fans Demonstrate Collective Care

Christa Avampato
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Photo by Brendio.

If you’ve been watching the international matches lately, you’ve likely seen a familiar scene play out after the final whistle. While thousands of fans stream toward the exits, dodging discarded cups and food wrappers, the Japanese supporters stay behind. They quietly move down the rows, filling large blue bags with garbage—not just their own, but the litter left behind by total strangers.

To the western eye, this looks like an extraordinary act of volunteerism. But to the people doing the sweeping, it isn’t an extraordinary act at all. It’s simply routine.

This viral tradition first broke onto the global stage during the 1998 World Cup in France. For nearly thirty years, these fans have acted as unofficial ambassadors, proving that how we treat our public spaces is a direct reflection of our collective character. It forces us to ask a vital question about our own neighborhoods: Why do we treat shared spaces as someone else’s problem?

The Root of the Ritual

In the West, we’re often socialized to believe that public maintenance is a service we pay for through taxes or ticket prices—that it’s someone else’s job to wipe down the counter or pick up the stadium floor.

But in Japan, civic responsibility is an educational milestone on par with reading and mathematics. From their first days in elementary school, children participate in osouji jikan, or 15 – 20 minutes of daily cleaning time. Because schools don’t hire janitorial staff to clean up after the children, the students themselves sweep the halls, clean the desks, and care for the physical structure. Many hands and hearts make the work go quickly because everyone does their part.

This creates an entirely different relationship with the built environment. When you spend your childhood cleaning your own classroom, you grow into an adult who can’t look at a littered stadium step without seeing a collective failure.

Leaving No Trace

This behavior is anchored by an ancient proverb: Tatsu tori ato wo nigosazu, “the bird taking flight does not leave the water muddy.” It means that when you leave a place, a job, or a situation, you should do so gracefully—cleaning up after yourself, settling all your affairs, and leaving things in pristine condition for those who come next. It pairs with the core Japanese aesthetic and moral value of awareness and respect for others (omoiyari).

When we view our shared space not as temporary commodities to consume, but as shared ecosystems to protect, our behavior naturally shifts. True sustainability isn’t just about big corporate climate policies or high-tech recycling grids. It’s found in the everyday culture of respect for the places we inhabit and the people who will occupy them after we leave.

The Togetherhood Takeaway

One of the ways to build a strong sense of community resilience is by caring for our shared public spaces, and right now you can embrace this idea and act.

  • Adopt the Bird’s Philosophy: This week, practice the art of leaving no trace. Whether you’re spending an afternoon in a public park, a seat on the subway, or a local coffee shop, make it a point of pride to leave the space cleaner than when you arrived.
  • Reframe the Labor: Take a moment to notice the people who clean up your workplace, your local streets, or your apartment building. Acknowledge that public cleanliness is a human effort, and make their jobs easier by managing your own footprint.
  • Teach Local Custodianship: If you have children, nieces, or nephews, involve them in the active maintenance of their spaces. Normalizing the idea that cleaning up is an act of community care builds the foundation for a more resilient future.

We don’t own the places where we gather—we are gifted them by the people who came before us and we borrow them from the people who use them after us. Let’s make sure the only remnant of us we leave behind is a space that’s even better than we found it.

Photo link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Japanese_fan_at_FIFA_World_Cup_2006.jpg#metadata

creativity

Macro Grid, Micro Power: The Two Frontiers of New York’s Clean Energy Transition

Christa Avampato
Balcony solar panels. Photo by Yuma Solar on Unsplash

We are currently watching the redrawing of New York City’s energy map from two opposite directions at the exact same time. One boundary is shifting hundreds of miles away in the Canadian wilderness; the other is moving right at your apartment window frame.

For decades, the city’s grid has felt like a massive, untouchable black box managed entirely from the top down. But as the climate transition accelerates, a fascinating dynamic is emerging: we are realizing that achieving true resilience requires a dual strategy—coupling massive, industrial infrastructure with hyper-local, decentralized community power operating at an individual apartment level.

Two recent breakthroughs show exactly how this macro-micro puzzle is coming together.

The Macro Frontier: The Deep Wire from Canada

This month, the energy landscape downstate underwent a monumental shift with the activation of the Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE). This 339-mile, high-voltage direct current line runs underground and underwater all the way from Quebec straight into Astoria, Queens.

This is infrastructure engineering on a massive scale, designed to funnel 10.4 terawatt-hours of clean Canadian hydropower directly into our local electricity market—enough to meet up to 20% of New York City’s entire energy load. Since the closure of the Indian Point nuclear plant, the city has leaned heavily on fossil fuel plants, causing local emissions to spike. The arrival of this deep wire is a vital macro-level act of mitigation, helping to displace those dirty peak plants and clean up the regional grid baseline.

The Micro Frontier: The Fight for Balcony Solar

But while the city hooks up to Canadian dams, a parallel revolution is brewing right on our brick facades. The state Legislature just passed the Solar Up Now NY (SUNNY) Act—the balcony solar bill—which is now heading to the governor’s desk.

Historically, participating in clean energy has been a luxury reserved for suburban homeowners with vast roof lines, leaving millions of apartment dwellers entirely shut out of the transition. The SUNNY Act flips this dynamic by allowing New Yorkers to legally hang small, portable solar panels from their windows or balconies and plug them right into a standard wall outlet without needing complex utility agreements.

These plug-in panels max out at 1,200 watts. They won’t power an entire building, but they allow everyday renters to generate their own green electricity to shave money off their utility bills. It turns passive energy consumers into active participants in the grid. Even ConEd has backed the bill, noting that these tiny, localized generation devices pose minimal risk to the broader infrastructure.

The Synergy of the Ecosystem

True urban resilience is built in the space between these two extremes. We cannot run a global metropolis solely on window panels, but we also cannot foster a culture of sustainability if regular citizens feel entirely disconnected from the systems that power their lives.

The macro grid gives us the foundation we need to survive; the micro panels give us the agency to be engaged in the decision-making process for our future.

The Togetherhood Takeaway

Building a clean future means looking at the energy transition as an ecosystem that requires both major public investment and local, individual action.

  • Track Your Baseline: Take a look at your next utility bill. As big projects like the Champlain Hudson line come online, pay attention to where your power is actually sourced and keep an eye on how the regional mix is shifting.
  • Watch Your Windows: Keep an eye on the progress of the SUNNY Act. If it signs into law, audit your own apartment’s sun exposure. Even a small window setup is a vote for decentralized energy independence.
  • Support Local Legislation: Change happens when state and local representatives push bills that democratize access to green technology. Call your representatives and remind them that climate policy needs to work for renters, not just property owners.

The future of energy isn’t just arriving through a massive pipeline in Queens—it’s also setting up shop on our fire escapes and windows.

creativity

Museum of the Dog and NYC’s Secrets & Lies Team Up to Give Knicks Fans Freebies on June 18th!

Christa Avampato
June 18th: Knicks parade, free admission to AKC Museum of the Dog, and a special storytelling show by NYC’s Secrets & Lies with free snacks, exclusive after-hours museum access, special guests, and raffle prizes!

NYC is PUMPED for the New York Knicks 🏀 parade on Thursday, June 18th! The AKC Museum Of The Dog and NYC’s Secrets & Lies are teaming up to do something special for Knicks fans because the Knicks love dogs – we’ve all seen the viral posts about Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, and Kona & Stevie (Jalen’s pups!) 🐾🫶

🖼 The Museum of the Dog is offering free admission all day on Thursday June 18th from 11am – 6pm for everyone who wears any Knicks gear 💙🧡

🎤 Then at 6:30pm NYC’s Secrets & Lies is doing a special storytelling show all about NYC dogs! The show requires a ticket and along with the show you get:

🥨 Salty and sweet snacks

🏛️ Exclusive after-hours access to the museum

🐕 A rare chance to meet a real working transit dog and their handler who work the MTA subway every day

🎟 You’ll be entered into a drawing for 2 tickets to the American Kennel Club event Meet the Breeds

Where: AKC Museum of the Dog (101 Park Ave at 40th Street, Manhattan)

When: Thursday, June 18 at 6:30 PM

Info and tickets for the storytelling show: You can buy at the door of the museum or reserve in advance at https://museumofthedog.org/mc-events/good-dogs-of-gotham-the-working-dogs-who-built-new-york/

creativity

The Power Paradox: Can the AI Boom Force the Green Transition?

Christa Avampato
Illustration by Manuel Campagnoli on Unsplash

We are currently watching two seemingly unstoppable forces collide. On one side is the relentless corporate race to integrate artificial intelligence into every corner of our digital lives. On the other side is a fragile, aging energy grid and communities across the country that are refusing to let massive, resource-hungry data centers steamroll their neighborhoods.

The environmental toll of this digital gold rush is undeniable. A single AI query can use ten times the electricity of a standard internet search, and the data centers required to process these models require billions of gallons of water for cooling and unprecedented amounts of power. Trying to slow down this technological train feels nearly impossible.

But what if the sheer velocity of the AI boom is exactly what forces our hand? What if this crisis becomes the ultimate catalyst that forces tech giants and governments to finally accelerate the green energy transition?

The Corporate Collision Course

For years, tech conglomerates have enjoyed a sterling public relations narrative centered on ambitious net-zero carbon pledges. But the energy and resources demands of generative AI are obliterating those goals. To keep their AI systems running, these companies need power immediately, and they are quickly exhausting the capacity of our current infrastructure.

This is where the leverage lies. Tech giants cannot afford to let their AI ambitions starve for power, but they also cannot afford the reputational destruction of abandoning their climate goals to say nothing about the potential that these ambitions have to create more havoc on an already delicate planet. This paradox could force an unprecedented shift in corporate behavior: Instead of waiting for municipal utilities to green the grid, could tech companies put their massive balance sheets to work—directly funding utility-scale solar, wind, and geothermal projects to create the very clean energy they require and that would benefit people and the planet?

Friction Breeds Innovation

Local communities are proving that they are not passive backdrops for industrial expansion. From Virginia to Oregon, residents are organizing against the noise, land use, and water strain of new data centers.

This hyper-local resistance is creating a massive operational bottleneck for tech companies. When communities refuse to lie down, companies cannot just build bigger; they have to build smarter and they have to listen to these concerns to build partnerships with local residents. This friction could bring about a wave of structural innovation. Advanced liquid cooling systems that eliminate water waste, architectural designs that blend into local landscapes because they’re quiet and unobtrusive, and decentralized data centers that can operate on microgrids without straining the local town’s power supply would be wins for communities, tech companies, and nature.

Government action often lags until a system faces a breaking point. The sheer, unyielding demand of the digital race might be the exact pressure needed to force regulatory policy. Imagine a world where we have modern our grids that run on abundant clean energy and embrace radical efficiency.

The Togetherhood Takeaway

AI often feels like a runaway train, an inevitability. But it needs energy to operate. there isn’t any way around that. If we in the climate community flip the script, it could just be the lever that redirects its energy toward real, meaningful progress.

  • Audit the Corporate Promises: This week, look at the AI tools you use and research the climate pledges of the companies behind them. Hold them accountable to the idea that digital progress cannot come at the expense of ecological stability. Write to them. Call them. And call your reps to demand that they demand these companies keep their climate pledges intact, especially if they want to expand data centers in your city or town.
  • Support Local Demands: When communities near you advocate for stricter zoning laws and resource transparency from data centers, back them up. Local friction is the primary driver of corporate innovation. Show up at meetings and again, call your reps on the local, state, and national levels.
  • Advocate for Grid Modernization: The conversation around data centers is ultimately a conversation about our grid. Support regional policies that prioritize upgrading transmission lines and scaling renewable energy storage. Start with your local utility company. Contact them and find out what they’re doing.

We may not be able to stop the digital race, but we can demand that the machinery running it is built in a way that preserves the planet for all beings who call this home.

creativity

The AI Backstop: Erin Brockovich Maps Human Cost of AI Through Community Voices

Christa Avampato
Smokestack collapses as an industrial site is demolished among residential homes. Community photo from Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting website: https://brockovichdatacenter.com/

We’re told the future is in the cloud. But the cloud isn’t an ethereal, weightless concept; it is a physical network of massive, energy-hungry data centers that require vast amounts of land and water to survive. As the race to build out artificial intelligence accelerates, these industrial hubs are quietly rewriting the landscape of rural and suburban communities across the country.

Often, the decisions to build these facilities happen in closed-door corporate and political meetings, leaving local residents to deal with the aftermath without having their voices heard and considered. The results: overburdened power grids that fail to provide for communities; strained water tables that bleed faucets dry; noisy cooling systems generating air pollution; a loss of jobs and decimation to the local economy. The list goes on and on.

To prevent these community voices from being lost or overlooked, environmental advocate Erin Brockovich is flipping the script. She launched Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting, a crowd-sourced mapping initiative designed to track the expansion of AI data centers through the eyes of the people who live next door to them.

Uniting the Collective Voice

Brockovich’s initiative isn’t about halting progress; it’s about establishing radical transparency to make sure the stories and concerns of communities aren’t sidelined by business and politicians. By creating a centralized map where community members can log the location, environmental impacts, and local concerns surrounding data centers, she’s turning isolated complaints into a powerful, unified database.

When a multi-billion-dollar tech company enters a small town, individual residents often feel powerless to ask for accountability. The company is big and powerful, and the individuals are made to feel small. But Brockovich knows data can be an equalizer. When communities unite their voices and aggregate their lived experiences onto a single map, they create a visible, undeniable record – the power of one amplifies with the power of many. They shift the conversation from corporate promises to real-world impacts to people.

The Reality of Local Agency

True sustainability cannot be achieved if we sacrifice the resilience of our local neighborhoods for the sake of digital expansion. Brockovich’s map is a tool for local agency. It reminds us that technology must serve human communities, not the other way around. By tracking these facilities together, people and communities ensure the human and ecological costs of our digital infrastructure are out in the open, where they belong. This projects makes the invisible visible.

The Togetherhood Takeaway

Resilience means refusing to let your local environment be managed entirely from the top down.

  • Check out Erin’s initiative, Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting: At her website for this initiative (https://brockovichdatacenter.com/), Erin has so many resources of information paired with ways you can take action right now. It’s the most comprehensive and actionable resource I’ve ever seen on this topic!
  • Look Beyond the Screen: This week, find out where the data centers that power your digital life are actually located. Are they concentrated in specific regions, and how is their resource consumption affecting local utility bills or water tables? you can start by looking at resources like https://www.datacentermap.com/ and click “Explore Map” to see how the data centers are clustered around the world.
  • Contribute to the Map: If you see data center expansion happening in your region, participate in crowd-sourced tracking initiatives like Erin’s. Sharing local data ensures your neighborhood’s reality is part of the national conversation.
  • Demand Transparency: When local officials debate zoning laws for new industrial technology, show up and ask the hard questions about long-term power and water usage. Contact your local official’s office to find out when these meetings are happening. Collective accountability starts with local inquiry.

The digital future is being built on real ground. We have a responsibility to protect our communities and all beings who call them home.

creativity

A new chapter in my cancer journey begins

Christa Avampato
It’s me!

Yesterday, a new chapter in my life began. I got my last Lupron shot. This is a photo of me outside Perlmutter Cancer Center right after I got my shot. I couldn’t stop smiling, and right after this photo I cried many happy tears.

By the end of August, it will be out of my system and I’ll transition to a new medication regimen to keep cancer recurrence at bay now that I’m approaching the five-year mark since the end of active treatment. For a few weeks the old and new meds will mingle in my body — orchestrating the hand-off as one recedes into my past and the other ramps up to carry me into the future for the next 5 years. The hope is that this new medication will cause less chronic pain and fewer, less severe side effects than what I’ve been taking for 5 years while also protecting me from having a recurrence.  

These past 5 years have required me to break down and rebuild every area of my life several times over. It’s felt like a constant dance of doing and undoing. Just as I started healing and getting my bearings, something else would send me back to square one. To get through, I reminded myself that this is exactly the process that also strengthens muscles. I’m very strong physically and mentally. I’m also very tired. 

All I can do is what I’ve been doing. Living each day, one day at a time, as best I can. It’s all any of us can do. 

After my June 18th storytelling show at the AKC Museum of the Dog, I’ll be taking it easy this summer, mostly because I need to start this new chapter as healthy as possible. As I bid farewell to these medications that massively impacted my body and mind, I’m grateful for their service and everything they taught me. I’m grateful that they worked as hoped, even though they made daily life difficult every day. I’m still here and that’s what matters. 

creativity

How to Reconcile Your Financial Strategy with Your Psychological History

Christa Avampato

This morning, I had my annual managed portfolio review call with Luke Brown, an Investment Management Consultant at Fidelity Investments. I’m especially grateful for their thoughtful insights and actions during this turbulent market.

Fidelity has 3 principles of investing
1. Asset Mix – which is personalized (more about that below)
2. The outside economic / business cycle of the market
3. Maintenance – the constant re-evaluation based on the 2 principles above

They recommend 3 buckets of portfolio assets
1. Cash emergency fund
2. Protected income – social security income and pensions
3. Growth – investments that compound over time

Finally, they consider 3 main inputs for the asset mix of the portfolio
1. Personal risk comfort (on a scale from 1 – 10)

2. Age / time left in market before retirement and withdrawal needs in the retirement
To factor in all of this they use something called a Monte Carlo Analysis. They model how much money someone will have left at the time of their passing based upon the assets they have at the time of retirement, their retirement age, a potential age of their passing (which conservatively I have as 94 years old), the rate of withdrawal depending upon how they want to live in retirement, and three market scenarios – average, below average, and significantly below average.

3. A principle known as Sequence of Return Risk
This principle adjusts the Monte Carlo Analysis based upon different withdrawal rates by year from different accounts (social security, pension, investment accounts, etc.) to find the optimal mix so someone does not outlive their money.

Putting it all together
In the course of an hour talking to Luke, we mapped all of this information and then Luke explained the changes Fidelity recommended for me in real-time.

Two example of how these principles play out for me at this moment in time

1. In a balanced portfolio under average market conditions, foreign stocks are ~21% of an investment portfolio. However, given the current state of the global economy, Fidelity saw that there was additional opportunity in the global markets that match my personal goals, investment level, and risk level so my portfolio has ~25% foreign stocks.

2. A year ago, I was saving to buy an apartment within 5 years. However, over the course of this year that’s changed for me. I now plan to stay in my rent stabilized apartment until 3 years before retirement (when the rent stabilization on my apartment will expire). By that time, I will have saved enough money to buy an apartment. Because that account now has a much longer time horizon, we’ll now invest that account much more aggressively. More time in the market means more compounding and more growth.

Emotions around money

Financial planning is an emotional process. We are talking about the heavy topics of the future and death. Data, when presented as thoughtfully as it is by Fidelity, can bring peace of mind to an emotional discussion. For example, using data from 1950 – 2024, Luke showed me a graph that illustrates recessions (bear markets) last ~11 months. Expansion (bull) markets last ~5 years. So why are we so much more panicked about recessions and less joyful about prosperous cycles? Because loss is painful and dangerous. As humans, we are biologically and neurologically primed to anticipate and protect ourselves from pain and danger. We’re not as primed to be as celebratory and hopeful as we are to worry.

From Fidelity Investments: https://www.fidelity.com/go/dsk-mv/staying-invested

(Since I’m a public historian, here’s a cool piece of secret finance history: The names of the two market types are derived from the animals’ attacking styles: a bull thrusts its horns up (prosperous market), while a bear swipes its paws down (recession). These terms evolved organically in 18th-century London’s Exchange Alley.)

Priming myself for peace

I grew up poor. Because I didn’t have enough, I thought I wasn’t enough. While I have overcome much of that thanks to therapy and a lot of personal work on myself, I remember exactly how I felt as a child. Truthfully, I never thought I’d be able to retire. I assumed I’d have to work until I was dead. Working with Fidelity and people like Luke, I’m hopeful about the future. I printed out that graph about the length of bear and bull markets and taped it up at my desk. This way, whenever these fears about money creep in, which invariably they will, I’ll look at that graph and remember all I have to keep doing is exactly what I’m doing. I do have enough. I am enough.