I know I’m an outlier, because I read many blogs and listen to many podcasts and some of what seems mainstream in today’s world seems puzzling to me. I’m in step when it comes to frugality, financial independence and retiring early but I’m totally out of the loop on some other things. So, at the risk of alienating my readership I’m just going to testify, brothers and sisters, about things I do not comprehend!
Work stress is awful and potentially deadly? No, it isn’t. Stress really just means you care about how something turns out. So, let’s say you have a stress-free job. Do you think that will make you dance a happy dance every day? I do not think so, and here is why. Having no stress means that there is no chance of anything going wrong. That means your actions have no consequences, either good or bad and no impact on changing anything. Think Grey’s Anatomy, lots of stress in that show because every episode people live or die depending on what Meredith and her fellow health care workers do. But faithful fans, like my wife, love the victories and mourn the failures, because the show represents jobs that matter and people who handle the stress of saving or losing lives. My job was not as glamorous as an emergency room doctor or surgeon, but I had a lot of people to lead and develop and sometimes things caught on fire and sometimes we had life threatening situations develop. Those times were highly stressful when someone could die based on my decisions. Fortunately, that never happened but it could have, and oddly I never felt more alive than when I was responding to those crises. And when I had to fire someone, that too, was stressful, and not fun in the least. But it did not wreck my health and spiral me into a funk. I just did what I felt was right and let it go. I think a stress-free job would be the most soul sucking, horrible thing in the world. My job was fun because it was a high stakes proposition.
Work is something to tolerate until you don’t have to anymore. It doesn’t have to be. My career ranks up there as one of the best parts of my life. I got to go from summer intern to managing hundreds of people and several companies. I got to mentor and help develop some truly gifted engineers that are lifelong friends. I got to travel all over the US and meet with a president, several governors and more senators and representatives than I can count. I was on YouTube and network television and testified to congressional committees. I enjoyed going in to work on Mondays and enjoyed getting the weekend off on Fridays. Those were my favorite two work days, in fact. I met brilliant and fascinating people from all over the world. I do not think I could have possibly had such a life of rich experiences without my career. I worked well past financial independence because I simply wasn’t ready to leave the fun behind. And my kids are great grown adults I did not neglect, and my marriage is still strong after 40 years. I wouldn’t change anything about my work. I still choose to keep earning money I don’t need consulting part time, because I enjoy working.
Cities are the place to be. Not for me they aren’t! I grew up in what passed for a large city in Arkansas. But it wouldn’t even qualify as a decent suburb of Dallas or Chicago, much less San Francisco. And my wife grew up outside of a town of 300 people, way outside. We both got good public school educations and college degrees and I chose a small town in Arkansas for my first job specifically because it looked possible to live there for an entire career without limiting my advancement possibilities. And I’ve been here for 40 years. Maybe I could have made more money in the big city, but I doubt I could have amassed the net worth we have because life here is so inexpensive. And I made big city wages with rural living costs. Things we have learned not to need are lots of restaurants, a close by airport, specialized medical care, traffic, noise, crime, smog, crowds and a high cost of living. We don’t have to keep our doors locked and our neighbors are like family, often walking over in the evening to sit on our patio and chat without invitation. We’ve never had a break in or crime in the neighborhood in 40 years. It is quiet, and there is that 800 acres of woods behind our houses, with beaver, deer, bobcats, bears, otters, mink, coyotes and foxes. And lots of poisonous snakes! We travel often to cities here and overseas and always, after a few days, we crave getting back to our neighborhood in the woods. You really could not pay me to live in a big city.
Minimalism is a key to happiness. What can I say, it does not spark joy in me. While minimalism is wonderful for many, my wife and I are very happy and we are far from living a minimalist life. I only work a day a week, that leaves six to do nonwork stuff. So, we do a lot of that. We distance run, we extreme hike and bushwhack, we fish, we ride off road trails, we play tennis, we ski, we pickleball and we travel. And all of that requires some gear to do at a high level. We have running shoes, trail running shoes, hiking shoes, tennis shoes, dress shoes and work shoes. We have 16 fishing rods and reels! Because we bass fish, crappie fish, trout fish and ocean fish and it takes a lot of tackle to cover all that. We have eight tennis racquets and two pickleball paddles because there are two of us and we break strings all the time, plus in 100 degree heat the handles get so sweaty you have to switch to a dry racquet at changeovers. We have hiking poles, packs, gps apps and a satellite panic transponder for our hiking in the middle of nowhere. We have a fishing boat and trailer and an off road side by side all terrain vehicle and trailer. My wife is a wood worker and craftsman so she has a table saw, a router, a radial arm saw, drills, wrenches, screwdrivers and a dozen other tools. She is a seamstress so she has a sewing machine. We live on two acres and have a garden so we’ve got a tiller, a lawnmower, a chainsaw and all the normal hand yard and garden tools. We each have a notebook PC, an iPad and a smartphone. I’ve also got an iPad Pro which I use in my volunteer work. We’ve got four television sets. Worst of all, shudder, we have three cars between the two of us! Even worse still we have three empty bedrooms we rarely use and two of our four bathrooms that we don’t even turn on unless we have guests. What can I say, everything I’ve listed is something we use almost constantly, except the extra rooms in the house, and those are paid for. We like where we live and have no financial incentive to downsize. All those rooms were very well used when we had three teenage animals living with us.
Maybe because we are boomers there is no hope for us to get in step with a more modern mindset? And maybe it doesn’t matter anyway since we are happy and fiscally quite sound in spite of our peculiar preferences. I hope these candid confessions do not make me sound like a terrible person.
What about you, do you agree with anything I’ve said?
Are there, perhaps, some popular mainstream trends that don’t do it for you?
As usual if you don’t see a comment box just click on the title.
I too fall in line with your views on living outside the city. Everyone says how convenient it is for things and the restaurants but I am fortunate that I am within 35 min of a decent sized city and 60 min between two major cities. So when the mood hits to eat somewhere fancy it is not an issue.
Living in a lcol area is the main reason why I don’t have to be a minimalist because my income is so much higher than my burn rate.
You have a beautiful place and are closer to metro areas than I am, but overall more similar than not. I think it is a great way to live!
One thing I’ve come to understand over the years is that stress is mostly self inflicted. The more jobs/client sites I’ve worked at, the more commonality I came to observe in the stressors.
Different people. Different places. Much the same problems.
Which (unfortunately) means we can’t run away from it, as we can’t escape ourselves. The flip side of that is (fortunately) once we learn to deal with it, manage it, see it for what it really is then we can make things work pretty much anywhere.
Of course things like genuinely crappy jobs and doomed marriages do exist. The important thing is to understand whether the real problem is actually them… or within us. Escaping the former might help, but running from the latter can’t help in the long run.
An inconvenient truth is that if we don’t care about something much, we don’t tend to get stressed about it. Some folk will find things to get stressed about wherever they are and whatever they are doing!
Wise thoughts, I was generally not feeling much stress though I was in what most people thought were stressful situations at times. I think it is internal, but even so, now that I am on the outside looking back I think I was more stressed than I realized at the time because I feel so crazy relaxed now.
I stopped reading at “Grey’s Anatomy”… just kidding.
I’m not saying you weren’t great at your job, but I get the feeling you never hit a ceiling at work where you had one or two or four people who were “ahead” of you, and you were never going to be “allowed” to pass up (be promoted past). Does what I’m saying make sense?
I left my last corporate job in May of 2000 (Fidelity Investments). I’ve been self-employed since then. I probably would not have made the sacrifices I did to leave that job (a very long story) had I been happier there (of course my life overall has turned out great, but still). I loved the company, they had fantastic benefits, I was well-liked, but my next manager up had friends in the spots ahead of me. I knew most, if not all of them, even with the friend badge could not move any higher — they simply did not have the skills. And the only way I could continue to grow money-wise in the company was to change departments — something I had no desire to do. I was the only degree’d person in my department, and was considered the smartest person — but that didn’t matter, friends came first. Understand this isn’t ego speaking — I was the smartest in that department (I gamed the system a bit to be the smartest — but that’s another story, too). I I knew I had hit a ceiling. And guess what? … I was right. I’m not exaggerating when I say this… my manager and the friend positions ahead of me HAVE NOT CHANGED in 20 years (I have a friend who still works there).
I understand my story is an extreme one, but I know it’s not an outlier. That’s the corporate baloney that many tolerate until they can get out. I’m guessing you continued to rise in a normal matter over your career (normal based on you proving you were really great at your job and continuing to get big raises and move up). I’m not saying you didn’t deserve it… I’m sure you did — you’re a smart guy. I’m just saying maybe you never hit any of the corporate road blocks along the way that some others get frustrated with.
It is kind of a yes and no. I got the basic position I held when I retired at 60 when I was 41. And I never wanted the next higher job. It simply did not look like fun, and the various people who held it clearly weren’t having as much fun as I was. So while I kept getting paid more and getting corporate titles the job responsibilities did not change much. The biggest problem I had was I get bored pretty easily and after 15 years basically running the company for guys who ran several companies(the job I did not want) I was just too bored to keep doing a good job. I could have advanced pretty easily had I wanted to, I just didn’t and the extra money wasn’t enough to make me take a job I did not want. I had 700 people to manage but the next level job only managed three or four people, each of whom managed hundreds. I liked leading a big team and managing four people who really didn’t need my help just wasn’t what I wanted. I did get derailed one time by corporate politics similar to your “friends” situation. But it just pushed me into being the company lobbyist for a few years and while it hurt my feelings at first I loved the job, it was tons of fun to get paid to go to functions with great food and drink! Then when our company was sold to another corporation they put me back in charge. I left a few years after that because I was just tired of doing the job and had more than enough money.
“Cities are the place to be” – I grew up in the Big Apple and still reside in NYC. I can’t imagine living in a better place than New York City. A few years ago, I took a trip with my wife to check out some potential homes in a New York suburb about a 1 hour drive away from the city. The suburban town was nice but it wasn’t for us (we had a semi-panic attack on the drive to the suburb when even the slight chance of us living there caused fear and panic). We really enjoy the city life. I guess different strokes for different folks.
Definitely, and I do not think anyone is more right or wrong than another. Humans are social animals but I think some of us are wired for small groups and some like much larger social settings. I do like visiting cities but just feel a little crowded after a few days there.
I do fall opposite on a lot of your views you point out here, of course that does not mean either one of us is right. We are doing and living the life that we have personally found satisfies our happiness.
I definitely fall somewhere in the minimalist camp but am not full on. I rarely buy anything unless it pertains to my two younger daughters. I also do not generally enjoy work, of course it could be the work I currently find myself in. A change of scenery will definitely happen when I do decide to hang it up for good, and I will find myself doing some type of work that brings me more joy.
Interesting thoughts… I believe the underlying solution is mind over matter. For example, the stress that most people talk about isn’t due to the situation… but it’s your thoughts about the situation. If you train your mind, you can be happy and less stressed in any job. This also ties into your point on minimalism. Anyone can be happy with less and it’s relative. The more you buy, the more you want.
Excellent points, I always try to remember that no other person has the ability to make you feel a certain way. In truth you decide how to feel and you decide how much value you assign to situations that occur. Of course that is a concept that works better in theory sometimes than it does in the moment when you feel fear over some possible dire outcome.