Agreed. I'm quite content living a rather simple lifestyle, owning very few new things, doing almost of the maintenance on my belongings myself. The "magic number" was really more about giving myself permission than anything else.

The one thing you do have to factor for, though, is what happens if you don't keep your health. The thing that kept me in tech a little longer than I hoped to be there was a parent with long-term care needs. I could live a happy life on ~$2k a month, but it took five times that just to keep my mom alive the last few years of her life.

Living that cheaply does require adopting the lifestyle. But cooking at home or eating a casado from the local soda instead of a US-style restaurant meal sounds preferable to me anyway.

Don't wanna spoil your dream, but have you actually lived in Latin America? Cost of living might not be what you think. I also have the feeling that foreigners don't really understand the crime situation. Of course, its a big regions with some variation.

Sounds as if you think you have no agency in this.

You realize as a worker you're allowed to demand better working conditions right?

Folks who do what I do don't seem to have much of an online water cooler, aside from some National Co-op Grocer forums which are restricted access. Do check out ncg.coop though.

That said, I'll take the word of encouragement that maybe a blog would be interesting. You can do some really fun things at smaller businesses because it's fine if it doesn't scale. I can actually save us money by 3D printing or laser cutting things myself, and have done some fun projects around that. A lot of the tech projects I do are pretty much solo endeavors, which is challenging but also rewarding - that self-hosted project you tried out at home will almost certainly be robust enough for work. I'm one of two people here who write code at all, so I get to make pretty much all of the architectural decisions myself, and even a shitty Bash script is probably still 10x better than whatever process existed before. I also manage our product and marketing teams (did I mention it's a small business, lol?), which means I get to shape our message and values, and even be our taste-tester-in-chief.

You got this!

Most grocery co-ops these days are staffed almost entirely with normal W-2 employees, the one standout exception being Park Slope in NYC which requires you to work a shift in the store to be able to shop there. The other ~170 co-op grocers in the US don't use this model, and in fact, don't require you to be a member to shop there at all. The co-op I work at is a little different in that it's a hybrid model, jointly owned by shoppers and workers, whereas most grocery co-ops are exclusively shopper-owned.

I run a lot of administrative functions that don't fit neatly elsewhere: POS, web, marketing, member services, community outreach, pricing, purchasing, product selection, vendor management, etc., but because I came from a tech background I also was gifted a lot of digital transformation and operations projects, which is fine because I enjoy that kind of work too. I've got a two pizza team helping me, although one would need to be vegetarian and the other gluten free. :) Ours is a fairly large co-op, with four retail locations and a wholesale operation. The median number of retail locations for food co-ops is generally one, so in many ways we behave more like a chain than most co-ops (although still small enough that locations run pretty independently).