I parted ways with my job in April determined to find change. Over the next many months, things started to change. I moved out of my large apartment into a single basement room. I gave piles of stuff to friends and to good will. My left over belongings consisted of:
– a bedroom packed a bit full including my consolidated ‘home office’
– the home entertainment equipment (LCD, Wii, PS2) which I ultimately planned to sell
– my snowboarding gear – more than I need but I like to have loaner equipment
– a small storage shed full of toys (i.e. tent, sleeping bag, snow shoes, toolbox, fishing poles, etc.)
– A small pile of boxes in a friend’s basement – mostly left over kitchen items.
– My 06 Nissan Xterra

And that, even know, accounts for all of my belongings. I spent the summer doing a fair amount of travel. I saw Mexico, Alaska, and Burning Man. Still, the lust to detach from all responsibilities burned and I was not satisfied.

I built a new job for myself. I was doing social media marketing. I could work from anywhere. And I did:
http://flickr.com/search/?q=mobileoffice&w=84516076%40N00

I could take my job anywhere and I’d already ditched most of my stuff… so I wanted to take it further. But then things went wrong.

I tried to sell my Xterra on Craig’s list. I posted it 3 times. However, bad economic conditions combined with high fuel prices meant I couldn’t find a buyer.

By the time the fall came, I’d burned through most of my savings from the previous job. However, it was time to bill the client, collect, and find the next social media gig. That’s when it got bad. A larger company bought my client out. To date, they owe me nearly twice what my burned out savings was and seem to have no intention of paying.

I started scrounging for work and sipping on what unemployment benefits I could draw. That time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is always thin anyway – but with the state of our economy – it was bad.

By 2009, it was clear. Little monthly charges such as my cell phone bill and truck payment were killing me. I suppose I could have fallen completely off of the grid. I could have ditched the phone, sold the truck for much less than it was wroth, and somehow figure out what to do with all of my belongings so I could get out of my rental agreement. I could have sized everything down to one pack and hit the road – like all those vagabonds you see spanging.

But I didn’t… I’m writing this post from a climate controlled office where the windows don’t open – not that I’m near one in my little cubical space. Sure, I’ve got dual wide screen monitors and a nice wallpaper up… but it’s not the same.

Did I make the right decision? I’m still not sure… but in an hour and a half I’ll be driving over to the doctors office to see what happened to my back. Something went wrong the last time I was snowboarding and it’s progressively gotten worse this past week. This is also the first time I’ve had health insurance since last April.

I want out. I want out so bad that I think about it every single day of my life. I wanted to build a company around that social media stuff. I wanted to build a culture of people – like myself – that worked together but from anywhere in the world we wanted to be…. Digital Nomads…

Maybe I’ll get another stab at it some day… Maybe I’ll try a different approach… But as I sit here in this cage, although I may be free to walk out the door any time I wish, I feel I am a slave.

I know I live in a country where I have great influence over my own life and I have great opportunities to find wealth – be it financial or otherwise.

However, in a society as greedy as ours, I’m finding it so very hard to live a simple life of enjoying the many wonders that are all around us – just on the other side of these office walls.

Sometimes… sometimes I think that if this is it… to spend 50+ hours a week making money I won’t have time to spend… for the next 30 years of my life… squeezing in short trips on the weekends or on those brief little windows of time we call vacations… if that’s it… I don’t think I really want to play this game anymore.

Maybe.. just maybe… I shouldn’t have read “Four Hour Workweek”…

~Scott

I don’t understand this romanticised notion of the past. The past sucked. Life expectancy was half of what it is now, or less. People frequently died of all kinds of nasty diseases, and unless you happened to be lucky enough to be born into one of the upper classes you were basically screwed.

Living off the land might seem like a peaceful, quiet existence. It’s not, however. For starters, you still have to earn your keep. Food isn’t just magically going to appear on your plate, so you’ll have to work for it.

There’s also a lot less security. If for some reason I were to catch a cold and not go into work for a week I’d still be able to put food on my table because of sick days and savings accounts and supermarkets. Living solely off the lands means giving up tons of options.

Then there’s the social factor. Would you honestly want to live away from society forever? These kinds of articles always mention our hectic modern lives and how IMing and emails are to blame for god knows what. But I like IMs and emails. They let me keep in touch with people, and I suspect that I’m not the only social creature here who needs to communicate with others. Case in point, your blog – you’re communicating your thoughts to people.

Not sure where I was going with this except to say that I feel that a lot of these rants – society is going downhill, hectic modern live, less time for each other, focus on what’s important – seem to ignore the many good reasons why we’re doing all this stuff in the first place.

1. Get a job where you’re not trying to prove yourself to anyone. Commit to working 8 hours a day, and not a single minute more.

2. Live near your destinations. If you can get to work and the places you visit via either walking, bicycling, or taking rapid transit..and cut your commute time down to 60 minutes total (for the day), then you’re on your way to being happier. Drivers who are stuck in endless traffic in an attempt to have their 10m x 10m square patch of grass in suburbia are often angry and over-stressed.

3. Learn how to say “no”. “No, I cannot make 2 parties this weekend.” “No, I cannot work extra hours.” “No, I will not help you move to a new apartment.” etc..

4. Eat healthier. Pretty obvious, but diet does affect all aspects of your life.

5. Yeah, it may be a waste of time….but commit to a schedule and sleep when you should. Don’t stay up and play video games or watch porn….it’ll be there the next day.

Historically, humans aren’t meant to live on islands away from society. We have a drive to improve ourselves, and our society. I’m certain there’s only a small percentage of the human race who could move to an island and be content there.

Everyone situation is different, some are more trapped than others. I find myself to be a generally happy person and I do love my life. I have come to terms that I need to work to provide for my family but can still enjoy life at the same time. I work 40 hour weeks and a little less if I can. I would rather make less money and have the time to relax and go out than make more money to afford a nicer car, clothes, etc. However, I am lucky enough to have a job that allows for a certain level of living comfort at only 40 hours, some are not so fortunate and in today’s economy the future looks bleak..

Your absolutely right though, true happiness does not come from idealistic things, and that will never change.

I was actually semi-plugging a book in my last comment (“The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less” by Barry Schwartz), but it seems relevent to this post as well. Everything that modern tech. does- information, communication, ie, globalization.. it all just turns us into a sponge, not too different from The Riddler in the final act of Batman Forever (couldn’t think of a better metaphor haha). Although I would say most times society ends up on the quantity [vs. quality] side of the scale when it comes to the knowledge that we typically soak in.

It is a big post-modern world though, and there is of course much good to be found, if not good to be taken at least. How we perceive things and what we take from each experience is a technique that most develop over the course of their entire lives, and I think it makes all the difference. My Taoist-style mantra for a long time now has been to have a ‘balanced perspective,’ and I think it’s been guiding me well so far.

(if I had more TIME, I should totally get into blogging again. That way my comments here would be much shorter haha)

Keep at keeping at your bliss, and success will find you.

It can be done! Don’t let those green backs be a barrier to follow your wildest dreams and wishes.

Another thing is that it’s just the fact of life that most people don’t ever figure out what they’re true calling/passion is – sometimes they just don’t have one; so they’ll never truly be “happy with their job.” And there’s not really anything that can be done with that – you could try and take those people and stick them in some hippie commune, and they’ll still be unhappy.

I’m a geek (second time I’ve mentioned that), and I’d love to do away with this archaic not-quite-24-hours clock system and just move to a Universal Time Clock with no time zones to get in the way of the unsleeping Internet or living in space. And when you’ve divorced that, you can bring in the awesome bliss of 30-hour days; being able to sleep for 10 hours a night, and still having a productive day AND leisure time would be fantastic.