Cash in and check out – End of the Day for August 23, 2014

Everyone knows that life gets more complicated as you get old, but there is now way of understanding just how complicated until you reach “a certain age.” Life challenges mount. Family responsibilities increase. Careers get shaky. Age starts to take its toll on your own body. All of these combine — and more — and it can make getting up in huge morning a large exercise in self-motivation. Who wants to awake each morning to face more and more challenges, issues and problems? Certainly not me and certainly no one I know.

There are more and more times these days when I start to think about a small cabin in some rural area where I can live lightly — and cheaply — and stop fighting the world so much. You can’t simply leave the world and ignore it, but you can find ways to interact less with the more troublesome parts. Reduce your encumbrances and you reduce your problems. It is a direct one-to-one relationship. In fact, the relationship of encumbrances to troubles can even be non-linear, exponential or geometrical.

Owning 1 house bring certain problems by it’s very nature. Owning 2 or 3 hours doesn’t just cause 2x problems. I would say it can easily cause 4x or even 5x the number of problems when you consider all the duplication of responsibilities and encumbrances. Own 3 hours and you are complicating your life by 10x or more. I am feeling lately that more of anything is not necessarily better and the amount of issues surrounding that more can start to outweigh the benefits.

Over the last 2 years we have been working hard to simplify our lives. We still have a complex array of responsibilities and costs, but as Joseph gets older I find that some of these are starting to drop away, while other, new responsibilities are becoming more troublesome.

I can see 10 years into the future when I will be ready to “cash in and check out” of the crazy life we are leading. This doesn’t mean I will stop pursuing those things I love, but I will whittle back my responsibilities to others to a fine a point as possible. Some of the responsibilities are mine to shoulder until I die, but others I plan to slough off, scale by scale, until only the necessities remain. There will come a time when I will only do what I WANT to do and what I absolutely MUST do. All other encumbrances will find no place in my life. They have troubled me for too long already and not returned enough value for all the bother they have caused. It’s time for me — and probably you, too — to dance to your own music, not the music the world has played in our ears.

Previously on End of the Day: