One of my favorite free things to do is play with my Personal Capital finance management page. When I think I've spent some exorbitant amount on something I shouldn't have, I expand the dates and track the context. That expensive meal? About $5 a day on average. Wasting money on a gym membership I rarely go to? Less than .05% of all my expenses over the last 2 years. $23,000 towards rent and the big catch-all label “home maintenance” over the same period? Money I'll never have to spend again once I'm done.
I like to remind myself as often as I can how luxurious a life I lead no matter how hard I've worked or what I aspire to in the future. I didn't work myself to death in my 20s, and I think it speaks to why I had someone recently guess I could be 24 after I shaved. But now my thoughts are shifting into the kind of mind space I might be able to inhabit. I've craved that kind of security to “not have to think” about things. I wanna know if everything burns down, I've got insurance. I want to know that “retirement” will be a kind of choice and not desperate negotiation. I want to be the friend or family member who has that “secret” ability to swoop in and remind everyone that we have it better than the majority of the planet.
More than any degree of further personal gratification though, I want to go back to world building. I want to be able to have the freedom I had in college to cultivate environments and projects that I can plug people into. I want to compel by my increased access and expression verses being a desperate pitch-man walking a delicate tightrope about implausible futures. I want the freedom to fail, and I've materially already paid for that freedom at this point. That means, a driveway will be needed, but it's not a requirement to survive. I can paint and beautify my house, but it's not like I envision judgmental house guests particularly soon.
I talk pretty flippantly about how “long” it took to get to this point. I act like I didn't get an enormous amount of free time and experiences with things in the intervening years. For better or worse, I still enjoy knowing a little bit about everything. That's a luxury and hobby I've been able to engage in basically nonstop. I've more playthings and distractions than most would ever engage with in life, let alone by the time they were 30. I feel I've got a hard-enough fought middle ground environment that lets me appreciate what I have while not being naive about the power and difference money makes to your disposition and prospects.
This is a thing that irks me about watching YouTube videos trying to compare and contrast opinions on haves verses have-nots. The poor person inevitably takes solace in some personal characteristic of theirs or sense of family that “would never change” no matter the amount of money they had. The rich person makes some wholly unaware comment about how frugal they are in not buying something like a drink after arriving at Chipotle in their $100K car. I see a sense of denial and ignorance in both mindsets that I hope to avoid as I start to express myself differently as a result of my hopeful freedom.
They say money exacerbates you. I feel in recent years I've been brought to a relative heel, but I could see me slipping into some form of arbitrary nouveau hood-riche dilettante. I have something of a humanitarian-esc spirit and would find it great to create something that was sustainable and genuinely helped “things” and “people,” but on the same token, I've become several degrees more removed from my feelings of believing in what I can change, how, and the indefinable impact any one person's perception of it may be. One can remain skeptical if this is my attempt to run away from what will arguably be my increased responsibility to “the bigger things,” or if I actually feel that way and won't give a damn after I get mine and my circle is taken care of.
That was a big motivator in thinking there was any intention to reach beyond. “My circle.” Who's in that? Me and Byron routinely joke about how we can't seem to work together on a shared goal and mostly glean tag-along benefits from our individuated lives. My dad's in my circle. I stopped being so gushing in my “all of my facebook friends are the REAL MVPs” nonsense. How much do I want to contribute freely towards instead of seek to employ or exploit? My sense is it's a fairly smaller ring than the past. Keep the supply of goodwill low to increase the demand, like any emotionally manipulative parent. Because isn't that my angle? I've had enough middle-aged women inquire about my prospects for having children, implying my fatherly quality I assume. Will my fatalism regarding relationships usher me into the kind of surrogacy Byron maintains over his charges?
The fact that this specific change has happened so “slow” is not a testament that everything needs to be that way. That's the thread I'd hate to lose which I consider an important part of my personality. I still want things fast and to happen over-night, no matter how physically trained I've had to condition my body to not meltdown over them not doing so. I want the “empire” tomorrow, even if it takes next year. I want my experimental businesses to be branches off of every paycheck that would have otherwise went towards rent or car maintenance. I want to hang out tomorrow, not in six months after my floor is insulated and I can flush my toilet. The walls continue to come down. The “excuses” for as valuable and reasonable as they are, will be gone. And once every one of mine are missing, I'll be coming after yours.
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