My motivation to be diligent at work often depends on the level of interest I take in a project. Building something new, making it look great and function exactly as it should? Piece of cake: I’m engaged all day. Go back over this and fight an existing system, full of mysterious and hidden standards, to write the integration tests for said feature? Not so much. It’s hard on the brain in a way that a challenging puzzle is not, simply because you often don’t even know what the goal is. But whatever. Today was tough because I was learning a lot about writing tests, so my mind wandered as I was driving home….
This past year, I took the week of Thanksgiving off because I was having family in town. Unfortunately, there was a huge blizzard here in Colorado, so they couldn’t make it. Regardless, I very much needed that week off, but as an hourly employee at the time, this meant not being paid for that week. Now, I like my money. Every paycheck is a step closer toward my goals. But not at the cost of my sanity. I had no PTO restrictions and wanted the time off, so I took it off. What amazed me, though, was that my two paychecks still totaled to about what I had been earning at my previous job. And that’s when I first had the idea…
Holy crap. I could work a 30 hour week and still be making good money.
I don’t know exactly how that math worked out. I may have worked a few hours over, I don’t know. As a contractor, I was getting paid “more” per hour than I am now as a full employee, partly because I didn’t get any PTO or holidays paid. But it was still a bit shocking. If I’d been happy with my pay at my previous job…I mean…I could technically just “trade” the extra money I earn at this job for time.
Now, it doesn’t usually work that way in real life, and benefits has a lot to do with this. Plus, employers aren’t typically looking for a bunch of part-timers to manage and worry over. Full-time employees are typically more stable, easier to manage, and less of a hassle on payroll. But still…if I continue to improve as a developer…what if I could be paid what I am now while only working 30 hours a week?
What if…I could be paid well working 20 hours per week?
What if…work were completely optional?
Mwuahahahaha!
Well, of course, it’s a trade off in time. By being full-time now, I get to dump more money into *my dreams* or whatnot. But would 20 hours of programming every week be the worst thing in the world? No, nope.
And it’s not just being paid well that would allow me to do this, it’s the mindset that I’ve been trying to explore and hack and extrapolate from for years and years. You can outspend even the highest of salaries. Trying to free myself from consumerism and wasteful spending, whatever that looks like to me. It is almost infinitely interesting to me, which is why I’ve been writing in this blog for over two years now. Something’s working. It’s certainly not the only way to do things, though. If somebody, understanding the downsides and risks, managed to scrape $150k together to buy a little house in a much smaller town so they could work an easier job and pay their other bills that way, hey, that’s cool. I’ve been thinking lately about all the options out there, just because there are so many angles to take. But all of them involve avoiding the pitfalls of consumerism.
Maybe that’s just my tired mind talking, today. Whatever. Money is not the most important thing in life, but it sure gives you options, and those keep me dreaming.