Solving life’s problems

You’re 25, you have just realized that life passes by much faster than you actually thought it would. Ahead of you two things are certain, death and taxes. They allude to some of the foremost problems you will encounter in life, which are health and money.

Before you go ahead solving the world’s problems, it is likely a good idea to fix your own first. And likely, your main problem right now is the 45 year career staring at you, and you hoping you find a way out so that you can escape the prison that is selling 8h per day every single day and having to plan your entire life around that sale.

At least, that was the one and only problem I ever thought about since I was 16 until the age of 30 (thats when I plan to stop thinking about it nonstop. I wont be retired but also won’t be desperate for wealth).

Adulthood so far felt like running. Running as fast as I could before my knees were weak and I no longer had the youth I needed to make something out of life. Now, at 28 I still haven’t really made anything at all worthy of too much notice or praise, but I ran enough. Enough so that I have a second to catch my breath, to actually look at the map and see where I’m going, and to plan ahead. Just enough so that I realize that there is more to the story.

You see, by spending literally my entire adult life so far focused on solving the single problem of “money”, I lost track of any, or all other problems.

Out of sheer blind luck I stumbled onto good relationships, fun adventures, a little bit of knowledge, a little bit of purpose. But that was all incidental, and not at all central to my life. A life which was for the most part devoted to escaping itself. Devoted to being so good at a 9-5 job that you are able to skip the job entirely. Either because you are so good that you work 4h a week and produce 40h worth of work, or because by being so good you made so much money and quit.

So, after the “great escape of 9-5” has been achieved, after you are no longer simply a machine that outputs hours of work in exchange for less hours of work in the future, what’s next? I have no clue.

I’m weird, I think most people don’t think like me, they have a more holistic and less methodical view of life. They don’t hyperfocus on “financial freedom” as the one problem to center your life around, so that then, later, they can focus on the next thing. More power to them.

For everyone else, I think it’s business as usual. For me, if everything goes remotely the way I expect it too, I’m in for a quarter-life crisis. In a good way I suppose. The question remains, what to do? What problems to solve? After we free ourselves from the obligation to sell hours for money, what comes after?