Mid Life Rebirth

Transcript:

I’m going to make an audio log here. I’m actually in Vegas at the moment, keeping my voice a bit low to make sure I don’t wake too many people.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about the journey I’ve taken since I turned 40-ish. The main point being: up to that point in my life, I more or less lived a life that was designed for me. The idea was — okay, you get a job, it pays, after the day’s work you go home, relax, do things, and then it repeats. Week repeats, and so on and so forth.

After I hit 40 — around 42, really — I started exploring new ways of living. One thing I had to do was accept the idea that I could make my own schedule, my own activities, that kind of thing. The essential idea is: you can reset your schedule to zero. You can make up absolutely everything. Naturally, things like paying bills still have to happen. But as one example: if you purchased an RV — a recreational vehicle — and paid for it completely and lived in it, then rent would no longer be an issue. There’s the obvious question of RV parks, where they have monthly expenses — that is rent — but my understanding is it’s far less than normal rent, which can be $800 to $1,000 a month for a decent-sized apartment, at least in the US. And then of course you have essentials like food, water, and maintenance of your RV. But that’s a far smaller cost.

The reason smaller living expenses matter is that you have more freedom to do whatever you want with your life, including activities that don’t pay — or don’t pay immediately. Some things take time to wind up into something that can support your life or even make it more fruitful.

For example, if you decide to pick up a guitar one day because you’re fascinated with it — that fascination is one of the basic things that keeps you going with something. You like it, you want to keep playing with it. So you pick up a guitar, you play around with it. One or two months in, you learn some chords, you fumble with your fingers, calluses develop. But then as the weeks turn into months and into a couple of years, now you’re strumming along nicely. Because you enjoyed it and kept going, you’ve put in enough work that you’re at least semi-professional. And that opens many doors — getting an agent, networking for gigs, that kind of thing. But I’m skipping over that for now.

Just as important as picking something up and slowly working into it — is recognizing when to let it go. If you pick something up, enjoy it, but get to a point where the interest drops off and the novelty fades, and you find you don’t want to go any further — some part of you might think, “No, you have to keep going, that’s your responsibility.” But no, that’s just a precept. It’s just as acceptable to say, “I’ve gotten everything I wanted out of this, so I’m going to let it go.” Put it down just as easily as you picked it up.

These are some lessons I’ve learned over the last few years — taking stock of myself, what I wanted to do, what I enjoyed doing. And, not to go too deep into it since it’s a bit of a different subject: I like creating things. I like making things. I don’t like maintaining them, I don’t like polishing them. I like ideating, planning, building from the ground up — making something useful, something with resources.

Funnily enough, I have a couple of parallels that led me to that realization: playing the video games Minecraft and Terraria. I would often start from zero, build up a base, get it to a point where I’m living comfortably with all the resources I need — mines, farms, that sort of thing. Then I’d get bored and start a completely new game. Do the same thing. Again and again. I don’t even know how many save files I’ve gone through in Terraria — probably a hundred, at least. (There’s a separate subject about Terraria where I found it almost zen-like to dig lava tunnels through the underworld to sort lava into lower layers — but that’s another story.)

That’s kind of the culmination of what I’ve gone through over the last decade or so: trying to move from a life that was more or less designed for me, to something that is more me — something I can actually live in.

As a side note — a bit of an epilogue — I have an internal voice I call “the professor,” who in the past has piped up in my head to do exactly what I’m doing now: pick a subject and slowly walk through it, explaining it. That same voice started up a couple of minutes ago on this exact subject. I had enough presence of mind to stop, grab my iPhone, and record it so I could add it to my audio log. So that’s where this came from, and I hope it was enjoyable.