Early Retirement: Day One

I finished my job yesterday after 14 months of work. Before starting this job I thought I’d successfully brainwashed myself into being excited about my chosen vocation and that I could conduct a forebrain initiated restructuring of my satisfaction pathways and recommence an exciting career in IT.

Wrong.

A month in and I was exhausted from lack of sleep and puzzled how, given the banal, tedious and irritating nature of the job and the utter repulsiveness of most of the people in the industry I was supposed to carry out this amazing feat of mind-programming.

Two months in and I’d realised

“this is fucked. the sooner you realise you can’t have a normal office career job anymore the sooner you can find happiness”.

I’d given up trying to explain my predicament to family and I was very careful about which friends I explained it to. Family members and blue-pill friends reacted with scorn:

“what makes YOU any different? everybody else has to put up with it!”

I have two responses to this:

a)

No, not everybody does. There are a quite a few entrepreunerial, lazy, lucky (or all) people working very little in something they don’t mind and having lots of free time off. Sometimes it’s not a case of the guy who cracked affiliate selling and lives in Thailand making half a million a year; I know a plasterer who works three days a week on his own timetable, takes however much time off he feels like and earns £25k a year.

b)

I don’t GIVE A SHIT that other people have boring, miserable lives. I’m a capitalist, not a dreamer. I don’t want everybody to have a high standard of living because then who will dig holes, scrub potatoes and sweep up dirt.? I don’t care that other people have crappy jobs. I don’t feel sorry for them either; everything I have has been the direct consequence of my father’s and my own work. ALL OF IT. Feeling sorry for people in bad jobs is intellectually and morally void. It’s a brittle, stupid little frame. You get what you earn. If your parents work hard then in a capitalist society/economy they can send you to a better school and you get better grades and get a better job. THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT OF WORKING HARD: your life is better.

Each to their own I say.

I like the fact there are loads of stupid people: my life would be hell if everyone was as smart as me.

I like the fact there are lots of lazy, fat people: makes me look better.

Why would someone WANT to work hard till the day they die? Would it not be better to want the maximum with the minimum input?

Think like a winner. Free yourself from this chode programming. Dare to think ambitiously.

Let me sum this up, and this is undoubtedly going to incense some readers…

I want the best for me. The lifestyle I am seeking is unsustainable should everyone have it and I do not care. I want what is best for me, not what is best for strangers. Selfish self-interest.

Anyway let me continue with my rambling blog post.

After deciding chode-career was fucked I came up with an interim plan: save like a motherfucker, work 12-14 months then take one to two years ‘off’. And by ‘off’ I mean ENJOYING LIFE.

Towards the end of my sentence I decided on two years.

How do I feel on Day One? I still feel flat. I think my emotional spectrum has become compressed by the depressing weather of winter plus 14 months of work gradually pulling my state ever downwards. I hope that in a few months I’ll start to get the work out of my system; that my state and mood will improve and I’ll start to generally move upwards on the joy graph. During the last 14 months a certain non-working friend used to seem puzzled at my frequent flat periods of state… IT’S CALLED A 9 TO 5 JOB MATE!

I remember the last time I took time off. After 3 months off I was tootling round Chiang Mai on my scooter and just felt so…. content and calm and happy. Then I realised ‘Oh! THIS is the real me. That other thing wasn’t quite me.’. It’s a dark thought for all the office-chodes: perhaps the you you think is you is not: it’s the squashed office version. Perhaps the real you would come out in a few months of travelling.

The other thought bubbling round my head is a mild anxiety. I certainly feel that unplugging from the 9 to 5 is going to take some adjusting to. That weekly structure is gone. I’m already having mild anxiety attacks that I’ll end up an unstructured mess, sleeping way too much and achieving way too little each day and gradually becoming irritable and unhappy. I think the important thing to remember is that it’ll be a learning process: I’ll need to learn again how to manage time off and how to manage my life without the structure of work there. I’ll need to re-learn how to be disciplined, how to be productive, how not to turn into a bumblng, useless wop and also how to relax and not feel guilty about it. In short: taking effective ‘career breaks’ is in itself a skill. Incase you haven’t already guessed I think a key tool in letting me learn this is journalling, so I’ve decided to start diarising my progress to help me achieve this task.



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