I envy you. Sometimes I feel like life is an endless struggle just to feel worthy of breathing air. It’s really hard to break out of the mentality that just being me is sufficient. I’m constantly trying to prove to myself that I’m okay. Have I earned enough “deserve to live” points today? It’s an exhausting way to live. And it’s just depression talking, but it feels pretty real sometimes. (I’m fine at the moment, that comment just struck close to home.)
At least personally, I think there’s something to be said for creating stuff versus always consuming it. I can’t at all relate to wanting an unpredictable, untethered life. I grew up in a very unstable home with a revolving door of parent figures and constantly moved homes and schools. All I ever wanted was to live in one place and create a network of loving people. I didn’t have that until two years ago, and the difference it makes in my happiness is profound.
However, I’ve always got an escape hatch in my creative work. That’s the context where I can run wild at any time. Now that I’ve made my fiction a central focus it’s like I can’t feel right without that daily touchstone. It’s hard, sometimes painful, work that I am serious about, but I need it to thrive. I’ve always been this person bowled over so easily by my emotions and so ashamed, to be honest, at how often my feelings fuck with my productivity. But with writing I can actually use that to my advantage. If I’m having an emotionally fucked day, that’s prime writing material. The emotion drives the work. In my writer’s circle I’m known for being the one who knows how to write emotion and people come to me when they are struggling to write authentic relationships. It’s like this weakness is now my most important work’s greatest strength.
And I’m lucky. Not everyone has a creative outlet or such an insanely supportive spouse, for that matter. But I find the act of creation to be indispensable to my life. Not everyone is a writer or artist but there are plenty of ways to find and be creative, even if it’s designing a new database or something.
No, I understand. But ‘mediocre dead end job’ is all in the eyes of the beholder I feel. And I don’t know of ANY job where truly no one cares what you do. Even for a ditch digger, someone cares that it’s in the right spot, after all. And six years caregiving gave me a big taste of what it’s like having a job that truly ‘matters’. I could do that because it was someone’s life in the balance. But that kind of pressure, for papers and files and deadlines? I’m glad someone’s doing it, but it’s sure not for me!
I can’t think of a more life spirit killing work condition than to be in a cubicle farm. I did it briefly in my youth. Everyday I wondered how these people did this for years! I wanted to throw myself off the roof after a couple of weeks! Meantime my manager at that bank kept reminding me how great I was doing and how I was gonna go far. I’d ride the packed subway home, every minute thinking, ‘How do you all do this, for weeks, months, years, and not feel like cattle in a cattle car?’ I invested a portion of my youth desperately trying to walk that walk. It was awful for me, though it made everyone else, family, friends, Boss, happy. :::::shiver::::
I’m with you, elbows, I often say that I don’t live to work, I work to live. I walked away from making eighteen bucks an hour and full bennies in a call center, which is pretty good cash for phone monkey work. I just got to the point where the essential uselessness of that job was driving me insane–I produced nothing, I had nothing to show for my days and the best I could hope for was a day when nobody called me a cunt. That’s no way to live.
I have friends who work as trimmigrants–they head down to southern Oregon and Northern California for the cannabis harvest season and they work and save their money to be able to afford a three month trip through Asia or northern Africa or Spain. Drives their families crazy because they think it’s not “real” work and they should settle down into a regular job. I don’t get it–these girls are making as much yearly as a clerical worker does and while they work crazy hours and weeks straight without a day off the trade off is they can either afford some wicked good travel or just make any other work more or less optional for a year. That’s some freedom right there.
I have to say that being in control of your life and not being subject to the grind of a schedule set for you is one hell of a fringe benefit. Finding a way to make enough money (and being debt free and fairly frugal is an excellent strategy to support this) without having to trade 60 hours of a 176 hour week to get it has a lot of charm. My nephew banked his money for a good long time, quit his job and took a six month sojourn riding his bike from Seattle down to San Francisco. He can usually find a job within minutes–he’s in the coffee industry and very good at it, there’s always an opening for a barista–and he worked a couple months then travelled back north when the weather turned crappy. His branch of the family, a bunch of college educated over-achievers, thinks he’s crazy but there’s nothing that a pile of money would do for him than a thousand mile trip on his bike and the freedom to take it wouldn’t.
The tradeoff is for security, but I don’t see a lot of that around and I figure that being able to get by without a lot of money if the chips fall that way is a good strategy. After all, when the meteor fell the mighty dinosaurs died but the itty bitty shrews made it through the cataclysm.
But extreme frugality also represents a lack of freedom, of choice. It’s just a different set of constraints.
Now, working poor–which $18/hr is–may well be the worst of all worlds. But going from comfortably middle class to hand-to-mouth would be really different than poor to hand-to-mouth, and I think it would feel a great deal more constrained.
And, finally, children need stability and resources. Many of us want children, and are willing to trade a lot of freedom and the ootion for stability for that.
Yeah. I guess it’s because I was married to someone disabled by chronic illness and work in health policy, but I don’t view “security” as “nice to have” but “vital to staying alive.” Yes, it’s possible to really enjoy extreme frugality if it makes it possible to do fun things like travel, but every day I see people who were unable or unwilling to put any money aside and now are literally dying for lack of resources.
You DO get it. There are unseen, unrecognized life lessons such a lifestyle brings that are never acknowledged as well. It’s too simple pto see just a vagabond without any direction or commitment. But if you look closer you’ll notice there is a lot more to it than that.
Firstly, the ability to save. A big pile of funds for a giant airfare and several months of travel. That is not a life skill to take lightly. It requires resisting spending along with your peers, picking up extra hours, a second job, and staying laser focused on a goal. A lot of the people critical of such a lifestyle could not themselves follow through on this first step, I think.
Secondly, once away, to make it work you’re gonna have to develop some pretty impressive money management skills. Or your holiday could go from six months to six weeks. You’re going to have to make consistent good choices, weighing the savings of the train journey over the time saved by flying. And no one is there to tell you which is right for you, in which instance. You’ll have to learn, sometimes the hard way.
Also, there are valuable lessons about consumerism that are impossible NOT to internalize. After being on the road for months, living off a set amount without income, when you get back home and get back to work, that regular income is a blast. And it’s an enormous pleasure to reengage with capitalism. You can spend on a whim, there’s more $ coming next week! And so you get a rush of pleasure, to join in and buy shiny new things. Just because you can! But here’s the thing, no matter how much fun it is initially, it wears off rather quickly. After about six months it’s lost it’s charm, feels kind of silly and you start to think how you’ve always really wanted to see Paris in the spring. In some ways, repeating this cycle is almost an inoculation against the rampant consumerism that you can see consuming those around you.
I personally feel like one of the most import lessons is contained in the repeated experience of returning home with little funds, no place to live or a job. Only to be, two weeks later, finding a place to live, having a job, and money in your pocket. Initially, when we were younger, we’d stay with friends for a week or ten days on return. (There were always numerous offers awaiting us!) Knowing you’ll be okay starting from scratch again cannot be overvalued as an asset in life, in my opinion.
But these days we just return back to our little house, no moving required. My husband returns to his same job, I’m retired. And it’s no longer months and months. Now it’s just two months, at a time of year that suits his employer. And certainly as we’ve gotten older security is on our minds more, hence a house and no more jumping jobs each time. But those are small sacrifices to make for us, both now past 60.
These seem like invaluable life lessons to me. That will serve a person well all of their life, no matter what circumstances may come. They don’t teach you these things in business school, but I feel they are equally of value.
Discounting someone who can accomplish these things as a bum is remarkably short sighted in my humble opinion. The next time you’re ready to judge someone outside the mainstream as lesser because they’re not just like you, and making similar choices, perhaps look a little closer, past your initial first impression. You might find you see something you weren’t expecting!
I don’t define my self-worth by either, but since you asked which is better, I’d say relationships, hands down. Jobs (mine or anyone else’s) hold no cachet for me.
I won’t say you don’t know such people, you know what you see, I don’t. Just to say, it’s 10’s millions of people in the US who have the skills to save enough to avoid marginally comfortable poverty on nothing but public old age pension (Social Security in the US) and subsidized public housing when no longer able to work, but don’t. It’s a whole lot more than will literally (as in literally, not figuratively ‘literally’ 
) die from that choice.
Some are ‘wage slaves’ who just like to spend too much, perhaps most. Some are people who can’t avoid it despite their determined efforts and constant work, or because long term illness ruins a working career. But some are ‘free spirits’ who don’t want to be ‘wage slaves’ (not directed at the person harping on ‘wage slaves’ on this thread btw, the superfluous ‘u’s’ in his/her spelling say non-US and maybe in their country you can be independent, fat and happy on just a public old age pension, or some other govt support if you can no longer work before old age).
The point being, that decision has be looked at in the long term. Jacking around for awhile when you’re young is one thing. Taking a long term decision to forgo the chance to work yourself into a well paying job eventually, another. But again it’s not applied to particular people whose actual situation I don’t know, and who often aren’t telling their situation completely. People don’t always for example let it be known they have family money to fall back on, etc.
I’m missing your point. In what way are you countering what I’ve said?
Broadening what you said, in the big picture, from a relatively small number of people who actually die directly from not saving or being able to earn any private pension, to a big number of people who do or will have to accept a distinctly lower standard of living in old age. And many of them will have done it to themselves. Something to factor into the romance, when young, of ‘avoiding being a wage slave’, IMO.
Ah.
Well, as I said, because I’m coming at this from my particular POV, inability to cover long-term services and supports or long-term care is the major problem I see. And while you seem skeptical about people dying because of it, it’s a very significant issue.
You are making up your own definitions for words. $18 an hour is nowhere near any legitimate definition of working poor that I have ever seen.
I think it is pertinent to the discussion to some extent though - I’m not exactly sure how yet, but I’m not saying it just to be pedantic and annoying, at least in my own mind I’m not.
I can see what you’re saying, but it’s perfectly okay to just live your life even if a bunch of lesson learning isn’t involved. Most people are simply trying to find the right balance between what they are good at, what they enjoy, and what will keep them comfortable. It seems like you feel a need to justify your own life choices by pointing to all the wisdom it gives you, and while I don’t at all dispute your perspective on that, the way you live probably comes with certain drawbacks that other lifestyles don’t. So in the end, so what? If it works for you, it works for you.
Also, $18/hour for a single person whose mortgage in one of the spendier cities in the US is only $600 a month is very different from someone making the same amount who has a high rent/mortgage and a family to feed and child care to pay for. It’s a very relative position.
True. In the part of Ohio I’m from, you could generally live somewhat comfortably on that if everyone’s healthy.
HaHa, sorry, I’m not trying to justify anything to anyone. Just thought I’d point out that most every life style comes with a skill set. The skill set I use has value, requires discipline, focus and commitment. Something most people can’t see. Even when you point it out to them.
I’m not going to come into any money, don’t live on any public subsidy, will receive a gov pension, that I paid into, just like everyone else. I own a home, and have retirement savings sufficient for my needs. (It’s true I live where my medical needs will not be an issue as I age, but that’s hardly my doing or different from my fellow citizens.)
Yet in this thread have been accused of ‘jacking around’, being a bum, relying on public housing, goofing off, and belittled for doing menial work, or secretly coming into an inheritance probably, and not telling the whole story. Because I am not driven by or to, what drives the majority!
The single greatest gift my travels have provided for me is seeing there were more choices open to me, in how I choose to live, than Western culture illustrates.
I never justify myself. I am exceedingly happy with the life I’ve had and built. Proud of the path I’ve walked and the amazing adventures I’ve experienced. I have freedom, adventure, abundance (to me, but unlikely to y’all!) and have never regretted the choices I’ve made. There is nothing remarkable about me, only that a chose a different path to different goals.
And I don’t think that makes me lesser, or a goofing off, jacking around, bum.
Society in the US is not kind to those who choose a different path from the expected and tends to use negative terms and slants to describe those who are nonconforming to the socially idealized roles and behaviors.
My branch of the family tends to be lacking in formal education due to becoming independent early, usually in our teens. Sometimes this is by choice, sometimes by circumstance but is ameliorated by a strong tendency toward auto-didactism and a willingness to pursue education related to whatever passion we settle on. We have a wide streak of entrepreneurism and prefer to be self employed. We also tend to be frugal by nature rather than by design–just not all that interested in the trappings of success and we tend to define success somewhat eccentrically. We also tend to avoid getting into debt and keep our debt ratios very low, compared to the national average. We tend to value experiences over possessions and are really good at entertaining ourselves without spending a lot of money.
The go to college, choose a career and stick with it, marry once, work for retirement wing of the family thinks we’re nuts and are obviously tapdancing on the minefield. We can’t imagine being so hidebound and regimented in service to illusory security that could be ripped away in a microsecond. We value flexibility, self reliance and resilience, they value solid building of their familial fortress. And we’re both right–for us. The main difference is that when the Solid Citizens throw a Free Spirit child it bothers them a lot more than when we get an Alex P Keaton type.
We catch a lot more shit than we shovel, just sayin’. 
Someone called elbows a bum. She’s on the defensive, not being arrogant. If someone attacks your life choices you’re going to do everything possible to justify them and extoll the positive virtues of the thing you’re being attacked for. Well, I would, anyway.
The OP shows what road this defensiveness can take people down. It causes people to look like Guy.
The poster who called her bum later admitted to hating his job and what it has him doing, so I don’t think the comment merits a second thought.