Of course this should be bullshit, but for some reason, it's the only way I seem to be seeing 'Freedom'.
I've been following and re-reading a lot of blogs, where Mr. Rip's, Doom's and last but not least Mike's being my absolute favourites. Even though I like their filosophies and their way and vision of life, there are some major differences to theirs and my situation. Mr. Rip and Doom had incredible well-paying jobs for the last five years or so of their working career. Mike got out of the rat race before he even started since he's an astonishing well thinking person from birth I guess. And I am trying to catch up on them financially for some reason (well, because of this posts' title I guess).
And even though I've been saving more or less 50% of my net income ever since 2017 (so more or less 2.5 years from the day I ended my debt until I quit my job to go for IT) this resulted in a total of just short of 50K in savings (part of which I 'invested' in 6 months of no-pay while going for the IT challenge and a part I splurged into my car which I still have a hate/love relationship with because... costs.). Since I'm making money again since a couple of months and since I'm still able to save more or less half of it I'm currently somewhere around 30K and climbing again. And this once again leaves me with the important question about Freedom.
If freedom for me is only reachable through being financially free, I have a BIG problem. Because if I 'need' around 20K yearly to live off, I would need at the very least 500K invested to be able to live off, all not considering inflation and more financial crisises to come. With my current savings rate this would mean I would have to work at least 320 months to be able to get there. That means almost 27 years. That would make me 64 years old. Ok, when looking closer at it (I'm only just beginning so my pay grade might go up quite a bit averaging this out) I would need at least another 13 years (but that's a crazy-positive-5%-yearly-raise idea). So on average I guess that would leave me with more or less 20 working years, with an early-retirement age of 57 years old. Even though I'm a fan of challenges, I don't see myself saving as fast as I was paying of my debt, because factor-fiving my income seems wishfull but how the heck should I pull that one off? (Tips, anyone?).
Ok, fair enough, staying with this 20-year-plan that's 12 years short of the current 'pension' age here which will probably only rise, but still. The question is, will these 20 years be worth it the way I'm living right now? Because the more I'm contemplating these subjects, the more I think how I want to live is a lot more important to look at than a financial free distant future in which I might not even be alive anymore.
I'm not suggesting the "YoLo splurge all yo' moneyszz @ everything you wan'do". Not at all. But I am suggesting I need to take a closer look at how my ideal life would look like and what that implies to both my job and my savings. And this brings a whole new level of consciousness to the table. Because this is all about perspective and conditioning. Our damn hard to break conditioning.
My life can more or less be summarised into one word. A search. The problem is, I have got no clue what I'm searching for. So I'm kind of looking for a solution without knowing what problem I'm trying to solve here. Since I've spend quite some time in this search, in the mean time I've found out I'm more or less trying to find 'happiness' and by reading a lot and even more trial-on-error I've more or less come to the conclusion I'm great at copying what others did but since that's all just trying to find something externally that should make me happy there seems to be a lack of intrinsic motivation. And that's the point I keep finding myself at. No intrinsic motivation for my own life. Mark Manson wrote something about this in his 'The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fasterixck'. But just 'doing' might be the trick into lifting weights, vacuum the house, taking a walk and cooking dinner, it hasn't done it for me in my life search. Now I've come to think about it, maybe that's just the one thing I'm forgetting the whole time: how to live. I recently heard the quote 'Are you living the life you choose or are you managing your circumstances?'. Because that seems to be what I'm doing: not making deliberate life choices so the choices are making me.
This might all be beautiful words, but I'm really stuck here. How to live a happy life? How to live my happy life? What's happiness? What's freedom? What's living? I love to look at these kind of things because they remind me of the tiny, tiny creatures we really are and that nothing really matters in the end, but a life ideology to 'just wait till it's over' that's pretty crappy, then I might just as well do go with the YoLo thing... OK bye now, YOLO!
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