There’s no better time for a New Year update than the second week of March. I’ve been in the process of moving to and settling into life in Argentina over the last couple of months. My writing has taken an unwilling backseat, but I’m far from unsettled.

This edition of Ferg’s Focus is brought to you from a sunny cafe on a quiet street corner with a half-decent black coffee on the table. Buenos Aires has retained every bit of the charm I remember from my last time here back in December 2022. Better yet, all the Argentina football jerseys have three stars above the badge this time around.

Queue “Muchachos”…

Restructuring Ferg’s Focus

Fulfilling my quota of one video per year with another Ferg’s Focus update on YouTube. Join me in Buenos Aires for a walkabout as I detail the changes coming to this newsletter in 2024.

If you’re not a video person, allow me to summarize: expect shorter Ferg’s Focus editions, more links to longer reads, and extra thought experiments meant to challenge the autopilot generated from becoming too comfortable.

Minutes Under the Mattress

Argentina’s annual inflation rate as of January 2024 hit somewhere around 210%. This means that any peso earned in the nation one day only holds 97% of its value by the next week. After one month, that peso can only purchase 90% of what it could a month before.

This is a trend that has sadly been ongoing for over three decades and has in turn impacted saving habits in Argentina. It has become more valuable to spend pesos soon after earning them than to put them away for a later date.

It's as effective as storing water in a leaky bucket.

Interestingly, time follows a similar pattern. Our lives pass at a fixed rate. There is no equivalent to monetary policy or economic constraints that can intervene with its speed either.

If we can’t slow time down, then why do we still treat it like it can be stored like cash under a mattress? Why the obsession with “saving time”?

Most of us have become well-trained at “saving time” but at the cost of knowing how to spend it.

Someone who spends all their free time building time-saving systems rarely knows what they will do with it once saved. Worse, they don’t even understand why they began trying to save time in the first place.

Time is indifferent to how efficiently we construct our days and is a resource that will diminish at the same rate no matter how much time we vainly amass.

Best not to delay spending it well today.

Circling Back on the Clos

The first chapter of my initial vagabonding stint in Latin America arrived in September 2022. Stepping off a bus in the dusty Chilean town of Población, I met my host for a volunteer gig I had landed at a local vineyard. Expectations of learning Spanish and becoming a wine snob were soon replaced with a reality of pidgin French phrases and long nights cooking for the Chilean elite.

You may recall that I wrote a story on this experience shortly after leaving the vineyard. While proud of how the initial work turned out even in my fledgling writing days, it would have been a disservice not to revisit and rewrite “Around the Clock on the Clos” with better prose.

At the Clos, the stories wrote themselves much of the time. I was but a witness to the oddity of the whole affair. Read below about what it’s like to live and work on a vineyard surrounded by peacocks, Chilean diplomats, wine kingpins, and an Italian pirate.

Thanks once again for reading Ferg’s Focus! My goal is to continue using uncomfortable experiences to learn and share meaningful lessons and insights about the world beyond the small bubble of predictability at home.

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Until the next,

-Ferg