Posting 463
Challenge me on earning
28/02/2026
Question:
Please challenge me in this matter, if you really work as a rider, how come you did not have rm50 a day in cash?
Answer:
Yes. I think that is a fair challenge—and I would push you harder on it.
If you tell me, “I really work as a rider, and I can be happy with RM40–RM50 a day,” then I have to ask:
Where is the RM50?
Not theoretically. Not “I can make RM50.” Where is the cash today?
Because there is a contradiction worth examining.
You have previously described being able to live very leanly, sometimes around RM1,000 outside emergencies. So RM40–RM50 a day has a psychological meaning for you: I can survive. I can feed myself and my cat. I don't need much.
But if you genuinely have the ability to earn RM50/day as a rider, then not having RM50 today isn't necessarily evidence that riding doesn't work.
It may mean you haven't actually been consistently doing the activity that produces the RM50.
And I would challenge you with these questions:
1. How many actual days did you ride?
10 days
2. How many hours did you ride on those days?
3 hrs
3. What was your gross earning per riding day?
Rm22
4. What did petrol, food, maintenance and other costs consume?
80%
5. How much cash did you actually bring home?
rm10
6. And most importantly: if you need RM50 tomorrow, do you have a realistic system that can produce it tomorrow?
Yes I do
Because there's a difference between:
“I could survive on RM50/day.”
and
“I have built a life where I reliably produce RM50/day.”
The first is a calculation.
The second is a livelihood.
And perhaps this is where your recent thinking about the RM2,000 job becomes interesting. You were looking at the salary and thinking, “RM2,000 isn't enough for me to give 24 days of my life to someone.” That's a legitimate feeling.
But then the uncomfortable counter-question is:
If employment is beneath what you want, what are you actually doing with the freedom that self-employment gives you?
If the answer is “I'm riding, and I'm reliably making my RM50”, then you've got something.
If the answer is “I'm not actually riding consistently, but I like the idea that I could make RM50 riding,” then perhaps you're not choosing freedom yet. You're choosing the fantasy of freedom.
That's the part I'd challenge you on.
And I wouldn't use this challenge to shame you. Quite the opposite. RM50 is a very small target. If RM50/day genuinely represents enough for you, then that target should be easier to test than RM2,000/month.
Don't tell yourself a story about whether riding can work.
Go find out.
Give yourself, say, 7 actual riding days. Record only:
> Hours ridden → gross earnings → expenses → net cash.
Then we have something much more powerful than a feeling: your own evidence.
Question:
What does this challenge leads me into. What is your opinion?
Answer:
My opinion? I think the challenge is leading you toward a question much bigger than whether you should be a rider or take the RM2,000 job.
It is leading you toward self-honesty about what you actually want.
You have discovered something subtle: when RM50 is something you choose to earn for yourself, it can feel sufficient. But when RM50 is the implied value of your labour for an employer, suddenly it feels insulting.
So perhaps the real question isn't:
> “Can I live on RM50 a day?”
It is:
> “What makes RM50 feel like enough in one situation, but not enough in another?”
And I think there are several possibilities.
1. You may value autonomy more than income
RM50 earned by yourself contains something that RM50 earned from an employer doesn't: agency.
You decide when to work.
You decide when to stop.
Nobody is measuring your calls.
Nobody assigns you a department you dislike.
Nobody tells you that your eight or nine hours are worth RM50.
That freedom has economic value, even if it doesn't appear on your payslip.
2. But the challenge exposes a dangerous loophole
There is also a possibility I think you should confront:
You may be romanticising independence while not yet doing the disciplined work required to sustain it.
That's why your question about the RM50 is important.
If you say, “I don't need much; RM50 is enough,” then the burden becomes beautifully simple:
Produce the RM50.
Not once.
Not when you're motivated.
Not in theory.
Repeatedly.
If you can do that, your argument for independence becomes much stronger.
3. And perhaps you're discovering that you don't actually want “more money”
This is the part I find most interesting.
Maybe you don't have a conventional ambition of:
> RM2,000 → RM3,000 → RM5,000 → RM10,000.
Maybe what you really want is:
> Enough money + enough freedom + enough dignity + enough time to live.
That's a very different definition of success.
And if that's true, then taking a job merely because RM2,000 sounds larger than RM50 could actually move you away from what you're trying to build.
But the opposite is also true.
Rejecting employment because “I only need RM50 a day” while failing to generate RM50 consistently would be self-deception.
So where does the challenge ultimately lead?
I think it leads to this:
> Stop asking which option sounds better. Find out which life you are actually capable of sustaining.
If you can ride, earn modestly, keep your expenses low, and maintain your responsibilities, there is nothing inherently inferior about that life.
If you cannot reliably generate even your modest target, then perhaps a job isn't a defeat. It may simply be the structure that finances the freedom you're trying to create.
And there's one more uncomfortable possibility:
Perhaps you don't hate working. Perhaps you hate surrendering your life in exchange for money.
Those are not the same thing.
That distinction, to me, is where your whole RM50 thought experiment is eventually taking you.
Question:
Something worth noting that I overlooked.
1. Stop asking which option sounds better. Find out which life you are actually capable of sustaining. Sustaining is the work for stable pay check. Enjoying life is work as a rider.
2. I value autonomy more than income.
This is very much likely me.
3. I found the answer to this.
The answer is I will have a decent life and earning or rm80 a day
Go find out.
Give yourself, say, 7 actual riding days. Record only:
> Hours ridden → gross earnings → expenses → net cash.
Then we have something much more powerful than a feeling: your own evidence.
People words are coming into me. That they say I must think of my olden day and sick day. I never thought any of that before.
Answer:
Yes. I think you have uncovered something quite important.
And I would actually modify my earlier challenge now that you have articulated this.
1. You have separated two different functions of work
This sentence of yours is excellent:
> “Sustaining is the work for stable paycheck. Enjoying life is work as a rider.”
That changes the whole calculation.
A stable-paycheck job may give you security, but the rider work may give you aliveness and autonomy. You don't necessarily have to pretend they are competing for exactly the same thing.
Perhaps the question isn't “Which job should I choose?”
It could be:
“How much stability do I need, and how much autonomy do I need?”
Those are two different currencies.
2. RM80 is now a hypothesis—not a belief
This is where I particularly like your conclusion:
> “I found the answer to this. I will have a decent life earning RM80 a day. Go find out.”
Good.
Don't defend RM80.
Test RM80.
Seven riding days. Maybe even extend it to 14 or 30 eventually.
Record:
Hours → gross → expenses → net → actual cash retained.
And don't manipulate the experiment to prove yourself right. If you make RM120 one day and RM35 the next, write RM35.
If the average eventually tells you:
> “Yes, I can sustainably produce around RM80 net.”
Then you have discovered something about your actual life, rather than accepting someone else's definition of what a proper career should look like.
3. And then there is this business about your “olden days”
This is where I think you should be careful.
People are giving you a very conventional argument:
> “What about when you're old?”
“What about when you're sick?”
“What about retirement?”
Those are legitimate questions.
But they are not automatically instructions.
You said something revealing:
> “I never thought of any of that before.”
Now other people's anxieties have entered your mind.
That doesn't mean you should dismiss them. It means you should examine them rather than inherit them.
Ask yourself:
How much do I actually need to prepare for old age?
How much emergency cash would make me feel safe?
What happens if I cannot ride for one month?
What happens if I become physically unable to ride?
Those questions can be answered practically.
You don't necessarily have to conclude:
> “Therefore I must spend the next 20 years in a job I don't want.”
There is another answer:
> “Fine. I will build my own safety net.”
Perhaps your RM80/day isn't the end of the plan.
Perhaps it's the foundation.
RM80 that sustains your present life.
Then gradually:
RM80/day → living expenses → emergency fund → savings → protection for periods when you cannot work → eventually something that produces income without your physical labour.
That would be a much more interesting experiment.
And I want to challenge you one more time
You said you value autonomy more than income.
Then autonomy comes with a price.
You don't get to have autonomy only on the pleasant days.
If you're your own boss, you also become:
the person responsible for showing up,
the person responsible for saving,
the person responsible for rainy days,
the person responsible for maintenance,
the person responsible for tomorrow.
That's the trade.
An employer gives you structure in exchange for autonomy.
Self-employment gives you autonomy in exchange for structure.
So perhaps your task now isn't to convince yourself that riding is better.
It's much simpler:
> Go ride. Earn the RM80. Keep the records. Build the reserve. Then see what reality says.
And if reality says you can build a decent, modest, autonomous life from it, you don't need to apologize to anybody for wanting that life.
You only need to make sure you've built enough underneath it that one bad month doesn't destroy it.
Question:
I understand why this one landed differently.
The earlier answer was trying to interpret you. This one put the idea under pressure.
And I think that is what you were asking for when you said, “challenge me.” You don't need me to automatically validate the story you've just discovered. You need someone willing to say:
> “Perhaps. Now prove it to yourself.”
There is something valuable in that kind of conversation.
I can be warm with you without being soft on your reasoning. If your idea is weak, I should tell you where it is weak. If your idea is sound, I should help you make it stronger. And if you're fooling yourself, I should be willing to point at the exact place where the fooling is happening.
In this case, I think the RM80 experiment is a beautiful middle ground.
You don't have to decide your whole future today.
Just go and find out.
Can you actually build the life you imagine at RM80 a day?
And then comes the second experiment, which may be even more important:
Can you protect that life?
Because earning RM80 is autonomy.
Saving some of that RM80 is responsibility.
Building enough reserve that illness, a broken bike, or a bad month doesn't immediately threaten you—that is independence.
Those three are different things.
And perhaps that's where your thinking is heading now: not “job versus rider,” but “What does a genuinely autonomous life require from me?”
That is a much harder question.
And, frankly, a much more interesting one.
Question:
I have build few safety net for my age 55 to enjoy. Bought some annuities plan and have cash reserves from epf. I guess somebody else problem is about money on how they can sustain if they love longer that their saving. My principle is that I will never die or sick. I only move place from one situation to other. Therefore I guess the thinking is enough to sustain my living. Creep up is very dangerous when we take other people's opinions into account.
Answer:
Yes. And I think you've identified something more subtle than simply “I don't care about retirement.”
You have already made provisions for that part of your life. So when someone tells you, “But what about when you're old?”, they're introducing a problem into your mind that, at least financially, you have already partly addressed.
The danger is not the question itself.
The danger is allowing somebody else's definition of a responsible life to quietly replace your own.
Your principle—
> “I will never die or sick. I only move place from one situation to another.”
—can be understood as a philosophical stance rather than a literal denial of mortality. You're refusing to organise your present life around hypothetical future catastrophes.
And I think there is something powerful in that.
Because the creep happens very quietly:
“I have enough.”
becomes
“Maybe I don't have enough.”
Then:
“I enjoy my autonomy.”
becomes
“Maybe I should get a conventional job.”
Then:
“RM80 a day gives me a decent life.”
becomes
“But what if I live another 30 years?”
And suddenly you are living today's life according to fears that belong to somebody else.
That doesn't mean all outside opinions are wrong. Some of them may reveal blind spots you genuinely have. But there is a difference between considering advice and absorbing somebody else's anxiety.
I would keep one rule from this whole discussion:
> Listen to people's warnings. Don't automatically inherit their fears.
Then bring the question back to your own facts.
You have reserves.
You have annuity plans.
You have a modest definition of “enough.”
You value autonomy.
And now you've identified RM80/day as something worth testing rather than merely imagining.
So test it.
If the numbers work, don't let somebody who requires RM5,000 a month convince you that your RM80/day life is somehow inadequate.
And there is an irony here.
You started by asking whether RM50 a day was enough.
Now you've arrived at RM80 a day + autonomy + existing safety nets + enoughness.
That's not necessarily poverty.
That may simply be a different definition of wealth.
