“Oh I rush and rush until life’s no fun, all I really gotta do is live and die, but I’m in a hurry and don’t know why.” So goes the chorus of the Alabama song “I’m in a hurry” and it’s been stuck in my head for days.
This past weekend I had my first true alone time in five months. Part of my Father’s Day gift was that my wife took the kids for the day and left me to my own devices for twelve glorious hours. I don’t think I wasted a single hour of that time (I didn’t even nap for fear of missing out on my free time).
While I was floating on my back in the pool, I started to think of what drives me and why I would or would not consider retiring when the opportunity arises. My primary motivation has always been the financial security of my family. I’m approaching a point where, thanks to my life insurance policy and ruthless savings and investing, my family would be secure if something were to happen to me. Next I have to reach a point where we’d all be taken care of with me still breathing.
If things are so good, why am I still so driven to this life of independence? Despite living a solid financial life, working from home, having my wife home to help with the kids, and having the freedom to control my days, I feel like I’m always in a rush. I realized this weekend that it is the number one stress in my life at this time.
I would never say I’m busy. Busy people are naysayers that never seem to have time in their lives. And what they’re really saying is “your thing isn’t important to me.” I’m not a busy person, and I can always make time, but that new thing is just another deadline. Even though I’ve managed to decouple my work life from the clock, my home life has raced in to fill the gaps. Every morning I have this vision of me dragging an anchor to the edge of a raging river, throw the anchor in, jump in after it, and then try to control the situation until bedtime.
If I’m up at six, I have two hours to set up my day and take care of myself before the kids get up at 8 (they’re up at 7 but not allowed out of their rooms until 8). Then just an hour to get everyone fed and dressed and ready for the day before the true demands of my job start. The demands on my time at work are absurd. A normal day managing my team, which is spread out in seven time zones from India to California, can have me in meetings anywhere from 7 AM to 7 PM and there are usually eight to ten calls per day. Then immediately after work we have to get dinner on the table by 5:30 or the kids will start screaming. After dinner it’s a countdown to seven as the kids slowly go crazy with bedtime approaching. I can usually attempt to relax by eight, but I’m nearly unconscious by 9:30 and often fall asleep with a book in my lap. The next day, groundhog day repeats. This seems to include weekends, since there’s no off time for parents of toddlers, so it all blends together in one endless cycle of wanting to get things done but never really getting around to it.
FI isn’t going to solve this problem for me. Even at my 50-60% savings rate I wont truly be FI for years, and by then the landscape will have changed. My two existing kids will be in school by then and I’ll have more time by default. Today I need to focus on better time management in order to eliminate this constant stress of feeling rushed. Dreaming about a life without work is wonderful, but it’s an ever changing future, my stress is now.
For the next few weeks I will be focusing on feeling less rushed and appreciating my time more. My wife has been feeling the same as I am, so we are looking forward to working on this together. My hope is to make that metaphorical anchor smaller and smaller, and that river seem to flow slower, until I have more control over each day.
Freed by 50 