For the past few days, I’ve been taking walks around the neighborhood during what would have been my morning commute before my company switched to working from home. This has been very relaxing, and has also given me food for thought.
These walks are one of the big reasons I hope to retire very early. It’s that sense of freedom, that sense of peace, the beauty of the sunrise, and the feeling of freshness. It’s cool that I still get to enjoy this even while having a job, but I’m reminded just how impossible this felt when I had to crawl out of bed, get ready, try to leave as soon as possible to beat the worst traffic, and then still spend at least 35 or 40 minutes driving. There was no peace in that routine. So much so, that I’m starting to wonder if working from home is something I should permanently establish in my career. It’s not that I’m so introverted that I haven’t enjoyed the company of friends and coworkers before – it’s that the stress in my life has gone down considerably ever since getting into a stuffy office stopped being a part of my routine.
Software’s not all bad. I enjoy it. It’s not that by “retirement” I mean to sit around and do nothing. That would be boring. But there have been many times at the various software companies I’ve worked that I would actually have rather spent my time studying programming than attending to some mundane programming task or script. Ironically, I suspect a few years off from work would make me a better developer than half a decade of work experience! But that’s just in theory. Much of the job involves maintenance and bug fixes, and you don’t have a to be a particularly bright developer to make it happen. How do you think I’m in the industry?
Options. Options are the name of the game. Imagine only working 3 days a week! I could get used to that. And I’d probably produce better quality, too!
I don’t always know how to write about money. Mostly I focus on saving money and wasting less because I think we can all identify with that. I don’t know how to help people earn more, though. It seems pretty callous to tell someone who needs more money, “Just earn more!”, like people have never considered that before. Saying something like that puts you in serious ‘jackass’ territory. And telling people to “go into code” is not a solution either, because it’s no walk in the park, and the highest earnings at any job always come from years of experience in a skilled profession. One does not simply “switch” on a whim. And people are made differently. They process different things in different ways. They have their own likes and dislikes, their own styles. I even saw a few cool articles about the average earnings of people based on their Myers-Briggs type, because your personality has a huge effect on what sorts of occupations you enjoy and how you go about “succeeding” at any one of them. A humorously large number of software developers are INTJs and ISTJs. It’s pretty stupid for me to tell somebody with a very different type that “software is the answer”, because no, it’s probably not.
But I also know I’m not helping anybody by not shooting for my dreams just because they may be harder for some people than others. But I did find myself grumbling the other day. For me, personally, to retire in the US would take maybe 10 years, but if I want to get married and have kids, we’re looking more at 15-20 years, unless I were married and my wife and I hauled savings butt in the years before kids. But nothing’s guaranteed there, and I’m kind of okay with that right now. Such first world problems. But it’s also a huge privilege just to have what I have: a job (to start), and a career path that I generally enjoy, generally high earnings and high savings, a great family, and even a few close friends [and not in this order, my brain just stepped through categories while writing this]. A little perspective is important, especially as I don’t know what the next 10 years carry, and as for going overseas, I just have no idea where that’s at, either.
But still, I long for the day that I wake up and get to work on my own projects. The things that matter most to me. It could be history or archaeology or software, or something completely new that I was never aware I would enjoy so much. It could just be pleasant mornings walks for a time. It could be a thru-hike of the Colorado Trail. There’s just no way to know yet.
How does a person live with such unspecificity? I don’t know, but it seems to be a common thing in my life. Yeah, some people think it’s impossible, and those people are typically either reading their own unfortunate circumstances into the equation, or they just don’t yet have control over their spending. Risky has hope. Risky believes. Risky wants his words to resonate with at least a few people, and that some people would be inspired to go on and kick his butt in savings. But for now, I don’t need to be concerned with all that. You gotta keep living and make the most of your days. The savings is on autopilot at this point. One day at a time.