Your Money Or Your Life
// September 5th, 2008 // No Comments » // Life
I’ve always felt — deeply — that the 7am-6pm, 5-days-a-week grind was a waste. A waste of my precious time on this Earth. Time I should be spending with my family, or saving the world, or napping. But to spend most of your life building widgets or whats-its for somebody else to earn money to trade for goods seems so menial to me. We’re meant for so much more.
Maybe it’s my inner scientist that analyzes everything to death, or the sociologist in me who wonders why people do the things they do, but in reading Your Money Or Your Life by the late Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, I feel a little less alone in my anti-traditional-work “radicalism”.
In it, they describe a 9-step program “for changing the way you earn, spend and save money”. But the value for me is finding kindred spirits who share my “Is this all there is?” sentiment. “What are your working for?” is a core theme of the book. But it’s delivered in a way that resonates as other similarly-themed books haven’t.
I’m surrounded at work by people who I feel would work 70-hours a week even if you told them they didn’t have to. I’ve never related to that. One of the people described in the book answers nay-sayers with this: “My job is not the biggest thing in my life.” I have to agree.
I think the biggest blessing of the work overload these last two years may be that it makes me re-examine the value of leisure time in my life. Time with my family, with my hobbies, with myself. I may emerge from this having re-oriented my life entirely around free time and leisure activities, even if it means I don’t get as many toys, I keep things a little longer, and I learn how to fix a thing or two myself. All of which would be good things.
I don’t live to work. I am more than what I do. It is a means to an end, and this book and this busy time have given me a new perspective on what that end should be.
