No pictures in retirement?

 

As a part of both my writing process and the vagaries of personal finance, I am working  offline more and more every day.  The hard part about it is that while it doesn’t really change anything about what I do, it does change it and to a certain degree, make things less convenient and immediate.

Maybe the truth of the matter is that when one follows the “convenience and immediate” down the rabbit whole, an argument can be made that these twin concepts are at the root of our problems.  

The boring chores that are the bricks that build up the physical existence that we have made for ourselves here in the west.  When one looks pretty hard at the way that we live, with all of its little affordable luxuries (fuck you Starbucks) one starts to question just which one of these little bits of personal pandering actually give a life more meaning or improvement.

The way that I lived a pretty huge portion of my life was a sterling example of the issue.  Over time, I ended up doing less and less for myself and subcontracting the “bricks” of daily existence to others because I just didn’t want to do them.  But each of these bricks just made it so that I was tied into someone else’s plan delivering bricks to them.  As this continued over the years, I started to realize that the ratio of the bricks that I was making for others and the bricks that I was paying to have made for me just didn’t make a damn bit of sense.

Now, I don’t want you to think for a moment that I figured this out and through some mystical experience freed myself from the hurly-burly.  Nope, I just got old enough that people would pay me to go away.  

So now I get to watch my sons look at the world around them and make the decisions that will allow them to balance the input/output of bricks.  I can’t really say that I can offer any positive advice as I was only allowed off that particular treadmill because I was old and cranky enough to make it worth paying me to go away.  I try to just ask questions now and occasionally inform them where I found land mines.