* my Co isn't outside the USA so your idea won't work.

* It's not about the money, I'm looking at moving for other reasons. I'd like to live reasonably without scraping by though. I heard COL in Dublin, Ireland and Netherlands was comparable to Seattle , WA. if this is true, and taxes are higher, my goose is cooked. However, on considering Cost of Living, I think I have it distorted a bit since the average wage is 55k in Dublin , and Google says it can rent out a decent 2 bedroom apartment, and live comfortably.

* Netherlands is facing a housing shortage, not sure if it's decent to move there.

* it looks like pay in FAANG does drop with country.

* I know the other ideas won't work - A work visa is required. Digital nomad possibly, or a Work Search Visa, but that seems more risky.

A sharp knife. I already had a sharp knife relative to most people, but this is a lightsaber by comparison. I am almost excited to chop stuff with it, and it also looks really nice. It's probably the best souvenir I could get from Japan because I use it every day.

A few months ago I listened to Casino Royale (narrator Dan Stevens, pretty good) and was kind of bummed at just how poorly it read. It's an OK story with very middling language, badly in need of an editor especially around the end. I was surprised that it received so much popularity when written. But maybe it only could get popular at the time, when the English were in need of a certain kind of hero.

I decided to re-read (via audiobook) my favorite John Le Carre novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (narrator Michael Jayston, one of the best audiobook performances I have ever listened to). So wildly different to have them back-to-back. It made me appreciate Le Carre all the more.

Speaking of audiobooks, Le Carre's own memoir The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life is read by himself and is a must-listen if you like his books. To hear him tell his own tales, with his own accents for the people in his life, definitely one of the cases where the audiobook format is superior.

There’s an idea in your head. You produce some text with your fingers. I consume that text with my eyeballs. Some idea forms in my head.

Phrased like this, your aim is obviously that the idea in my head closely resembles the idea in your head. Don’t get distracted by trying to make your text more closely resemble the idea in your head; your text is just a tool to get past my eyeballs and into my brain.

The best advice I have for improving that resemblance is this: Re-read your writing looking for other possible ideas that could be formed, and then edit it such that it is incompatible with as many of the other ideas as possible. You may need to put it down and come back later with fresh eyes in order to see those other possible ideas.

This sounds like the cliche advice of “re-read and edit, put it down and come back with fresh eyes“ - because it IS that cliche, expanded into the most specific and effective form of itself that I know. Unfortunately, the cliche by itself isn’t as helpful, since there are many other ways to expand it. You could re-read, but looking to see how closely it resembles the idea in your head (a common mistake, I cautioned against it above). You could edit, but such that it has fewer words (aesthetically pleasing for sure, but it risks sacrificing that all-important ‘inter-brain idea-resemblance’). You could come back with fresh eyes thinking the goal is to rediscover and refine the idea that’s already in your head (a good way to think, but this is more precisely called ‘journaling’ and it doesn’t have much to do with writing to communicate.)

Case in point: it was only upon re-reading my comment and thinking ‘damn, that last paragraph is really long, can I fix that?’ that I realized the entire last paragraph is literally me being worried that you’ll see “re-read … edit … come back with fresh eyes” and then the idea that ends up in your head will just be whatever you usually interpret the cliche to mean, instead of the very specific process I have in mind! I should also add a concrete example, those are usually very effective. I suspect concrete examples are helpful precisely because they are derived from your idea and not from your text description of the idea: there’s a cloud of possible ideas compatible with the text you wrote, and there’s another cloud of possible ideas compatible with the examples you give, and the intersection of those two is quite specific.