Category: Purpose

How to succeed in a changing world

Kenneth Shaw on January 30, 2019

I woke up today with reports of “4500 people fired from Arbetsformedlingen” – sorry, translation not great, but something like that. 4500 educated, professional workers will be forced to leave their jobs at Arbetsformedlingen. Arbetsförmedlingen is Sweden’s national employment agency and my former employer. If any job would be considered safe, if would be a government job. It’s going to be a tough time for these 4500 employees as well, as it’s a very specific competency that is needed for Arbetsförmedlingen.

I’m not writing this to give my thoughts on privatisation, or the state of politics in Sweden or about the economical future of Sweden as a democratic socialism. My thoughts are more on the “what now” part of the equation. While I don’t think the layoffs come as a massive shock, I had been warning my employees for sometime that looking at the nature of things, the government has no choice but too sooner or later re-structure the agency to meet the demands of the future.

I’m not sure how long this process of thinning out the herd will go on for, but my guess is that the internal process of each employee at Arbetsförmedlingen is about the same:

shit, no way, my union will not allow this to happen
Ok, shit it will happen… that’s too bad for everybody.. else…
No not me, I’m too valuable
Shit, me
Now what

Of course this will look different depending on the person in question. It’s always tough to lose a job, especially a job that would be considered a “safe” job. The truth is however, that no job is safe, no employer is loyal and no government will remain the same. You have two choices in this situation:

Hide in a hole and cry
Be the first out of the gates and get your shit together

If you choose to hide in a hole and cry, that is fine, but remember crying and complaining never solved anything. You can bitch all you want to your Union reps, but the fact remains the same – Your safe job is no more. Many parts of your government have already been sold off to the highest bidder, to international corporations, to unknown teens living in the Bahamas and so on. Arbetsförmedlingen was/is the latest government program to fall: To be downsized, underfunded than in the end, privatised and sold off to hipsters drinking lattes on the beach.

Here is my suggestion:

Even if the pink slip hasn’t come yet, and the horizon looks like a 12 month process – start acting now. You most likely won’t be bought out, so don’t wait. Just do. Realise your job is no more – there is nothing you can do about it. In the modern world, most employees for most businesses don’t matter. The game is rigged against you, that is life. Soon doctors will be replaced by computers, semi-trucks will drive themselves and thinking computers will build other thinking computers and replace the human race altogether. Accept it and act. I once read a book by Adam Scott called “how to fail and everything and still win big”. In this book Adam gives an anecdote of a CEO he once met on a flight and it went something like this:

“we sat next together on the flight and I (Adam) was still a teen and trying to figure out what to do in my life. And this guy sitting next to me has a nice suit and we start talking. I ask him what he does and he said that he is a CEO (can’t remember all the details here.. ) of some major company that the CEO had a word of advice for Scott.

Never be loyal to an employer – Business will never be loyal to you. That is not how the world works.
Be constantly looking for a new job.

The CEO then goes on to explain how he was able to get so far in his life – he simply changed jobs constantly. Before anybody realised he was even there, he was gone. The experience helped him climb the corporate ladder to the point that he was now leading a major corporation.”

Adam Scott than goes on to describe his own experiences as an employee in hilarious detail.

Anyway, I bring this up because I know a lot of people working at jobs like Arbetsförmedlingen (government jobs) were convinced that it would be for life. Or at-least until they found something better.

See this as an opportunity – If you have been dreaming about doing something different with your life but never dared, now is the time. That’s the thing with a good cushy job – they are good for comfort, routine and to pay bills; but usually at the cost of ambition and dreams. With that said, by and large the majority of the employees working at AF are highly motivated, hard working, highly educated individuals that many businesses are in need of.

The job market is strong, if you have what employers want. Employers don’t want tired, depressed workers looking for a new (cushy) job to replace the old cushy job. They are looking for smart, motivated and experienced individuals that have the grit to push through whatever life throws at them. Not an employee that fights tooth and nail over an ergonomically optimised keyboard and chair. Employers want solutions – not problems.

The time is now

The time to offer quality is now. Everybody is doing mediocre in a world where the average attention span is between 1 and 6 minutes, or between “likes”. To excel in todays marketplace is quite honestly, easy. Everyone else sucks, just show up on time, put your phone on silent, be engaged and think of solutions. It’s that easy. Being engaged is not sitting and bitching about how nobody is taking care of the dishes or how the coffee taste funny. This guide will hopefully help you get your shit together and provide worth to society.

Want to start a blog – why bother there are millions of blogs. True, but most suck, including this one. Do a good job and your blog will succeed. Want to be a photographer? Take good pictures. Your pictures right now suck – admit it. Put time, effort and energy into the projects you want to succeed in, and, you will.

There is always a market for quality. Focus on the quality and everything else will take care of itself.

You matter

Well, you kind of matter. In an economy based on money and stats you matter less than we all care to admit, but you still matter. The truth is, if you get your shit together and show a company how you can bring more value to them, than you will in essence, be worth more than the cost to employ you.

Perpetual forward motion

If your not moving forward, you are dying. Can’t remember were I read that, but the idea is that our bodies get weaker if we don’t train, our IQ sinks if we don’t use our minds, (we get stupider with age), even on a biological basis, our sex organs quit working if we don’t use them. Put this altogether and the sum of the parts is simple enough to understand: If you’re not growing and improving, then, you are getting fatter, stupider and dying. Sounds lovely doesn’t it.

My point is this – you have now been working at the same job for quite some time (probably). The job quit being a challenge, you got comfortable and the honest truth is that the new people coming in know more than you do after 6 months of work than you have gained in over 20 years. Why? Because in your world, you knew it all, there was nothing left for you to learn. Or at least that is what you thought. All the events and courses meant nothing to you – because you knew it all already. This is not unique to you, or to the employees at Arbetsförmedlingen. This is just human nature. But we all know the employee who has been working at the same job for 20 years and doesn’t seem to know anything. If you don’t know who I’m talking about, then chances are, you’re that person.

So how do you learn new stuff? How could you possibly learn anything new after 10 or 20 years at the same job?

There is a learning technique called FAST

F – forget everything you know

A – Actively partake in the learning process – take notes, ask questions

S – State of mind – Is the course your taking a waste of time, or a chance to learn something new?

T – Teach – We learn the most by teaching.

If I have to explain myself deeper here, you’re not paying attention…

A morning routine

Own the morning, own the day. Sounds like some cheesy tag line on a Modafinil commercial.. If they made those (commercials for speed I mean). The truth is nothing is better for confidence, productivity and state of mind than a consistent morning routine. I’m not going to write about the benefits of a solid morning routine, there are many other writers out there far better at explaining such things than I, but if your looking for more info – Google is your friend.

Let’s be honest, you just lost your job, your life is changing in massive ways and everything is now thrown into chaos. I have been there, I know. However, now, perhaps more than ever, is a time to build a solid morning routine. A time to pull your head out of your own ass and rekindle your passions. Don’t have any passion? who cares, do a morning routine anyway. Don’t have goals? Who cares – as Adam Scott is quoted as saying “Losers have goals, winners have systems”. And a morning routine is the first part of a solid system. Sometimes we don’t know where we want to go, but we certainly can’t get anywhere by lying in bed eating ice cream and watching re-runs of Friends.

A solid morning routine starts your day in the right direction, and when your in the worst state of mind, this creates a small amount of order in an otherwise chaotic world.

My morning routine:

I wake up every morning at 5-6 am – no matter what. I start with 10 quick push-up, burpees or some other exercise that gets my heart racing and my brain goes from “fuck you why are getting up” to – “alright, lets do this”.

The trick is to get up before your brain tells you to fuck off – Get up and get down (push-ups) before you get a chance to procrastinate and let your brain take over.

Make my bed then brew coffee

From here – I meditate – my favourite meditation app at the moment is Waking up by Sam Harris. A great guide. Otherwise I prefer no sound or apps at all. The idea is to calm your mind, turn off the ongoing noise for a few minutes a day.

After 10-20 minutes meditation I do the Wim Hof breathing method – gets me high and energised at the same time. Follow this up with a cold shower and you firing on all cylinders.

Grab a cup of coffee that is now done brewing –

Next up is the 5 minute journal. There is a physical paper journal called the “5 minute journal” – there is also an app by the same name. Both work well. This journal just allows me to think about what needs to get done for the day, what I’m grateful for and a follow up at night to kind of check everything off. You don’t need the journal or app, they just work for me.

From here I dedicate at-least 20 minutes to reading a book, or listen to an audio book or something similar on something I want to learn about. Usually non-fiction, autobiography, business, self development – what-ever that falls into that category.

That’s it – this routine usually takes between 60 and 90 minutes to complete. I don’t always do everything in the list, but normally 50 percent of it and always the meditation and 5 minute journal.

Building habits

There is a great book on habits called “Atomic habits” by James Clear. Read the book, don’t just take my butchered down version of it at face value. In any case, the butchered down version can be summed up as Start small, repeat. Want to build a daily running routine? don’t start by lacing up your shoes and going running 10k everyday. While this works for some people some of the time, for most people it will fail most of the time.

Humans want shit easy – period. The least amount of resistance is how we are programmed. Within a very short amount of time the process of lacing up your shoes, putting your running clothes on, going outside and then running will be too much of a pain in the ass to be worth the benefits. So start small. Everyday at exactly the same time, put your running clothes on and your shoes. That’s it. Force yourself to then take the shoes off and go about your day. Don’t run, don’t leave the house – just change back. The process shouldn’t take more than a minute of your life daily. Eventually the pain of not running will be greater than the pain of running.

You can break down every habit in this manner. Want to write? Write. Everyday, without pause, at-least 200 words. That’s it. This blog post is 2610 words – so the first paragraph might be 200 words. It’s that simple. Write. Don’t have anything to write about? Who cares, write.

Want to meditate 20 minutes daily? Break it down to 1 minute until the pain of not sitting longer is greater than the joy of quitting after a minute.

Whatever your dream habit is – start small. You are lazy, it’s built into your DNA. Plan for that and you can re-program your mind.

Putting it all together

Get up from the shower floor, wipe the snot from you chin and get your shit together. You lost your job, ok, that’s horrible. But it happens, it’s life. Nobody is doing anything to you, god or some magical rock doesn’t hate you. In fact, they don’t give a shit about you or your problems. The truth is, you are a product of your actions – take ownership. Want to keep working at Arbetsförmedlingen? You can’t, get over it. But you can continue working with the issues that AF is working with. Just because the budget has been cut and 4500 people are being fired doesn’t mean the problem is going to magically disappear. This is not 4500 people that aren’t needed – This is 4500 people that Arbetsförmedlingen lost in an argument about politics and vision and the equation of where the money for the problem should go.

The majority of the AF budget goes towards the long term un-employed, immigrants, teens, under educated and handicap citizens. These problems have not magically gone away. Instead, heres what’s going to happen:

Certain parts of AF are going to be privatised – that means that you, if you so wish, can start a business and apply to take over certain contracts from the government. You will be fighting for these contracts from other such individuals and entities. So again, provide something better and you will have the contract. My guess is that the contracts will be worth more (cost more to tax payers) than your salary currently costs. But it doesn’t matter. AF lost the war of opinions and in re-turn – you your job.

There will be many opportunities in the coming months as more and more of AF are outsourced. While your time at AF is done, what you do with your future is only starting.

blog Purpose Ramblings simplicity

A chance meeting with a Jehovas Witness

Kenneth Shaw on August 29, 2018

So I recently had the pleasure of meeting a Jehovas Witness.. though not in the manner you are thinking. Yes, he came to my house, yes he knocked on my door, no I did not shut the door in his face, or pretend I wasn’t home or anything else. I opened my door, gave him a big smile and invited him in.

We didn’t talk about god, or about how he was part of the 100 or so special ones of the 7 billion people on earth that will actually meet god, nor did we talk about how god performs miracles everyday, or how religion in general has led humanity in or out of the dark ages depending on how you think of those things. We didn’t even discuss how gods word is so perfectly clear and understandable that there only exists 30 000 different scriptures and prophecies describing what god was actually trying to say. We didn’t discuss how wonderfully miraculous it is to pray to god and get cured from a common cold, but that growing back and amputated arm would never happen – because that’s not how god works.

We didn’t discuss how god loves us all, just that he happens to love kids in America more than kids in Africa.. or as Ricky Gervais likes to say “he loves kids in America, and gives kids in Africa Aids”. I would have loved to discuss these ideas, about the thoughts I have running around in my head from day to day, I would have loved to ask about his thoughts on Islam, or the Buddha, or any of the other thousands upon thousands of religions and why just his book, is the proper book. The one and only true path to god’s glory. I like these kinds of discussions, they open my mind, I don’t see them as debates, where I am trying to convince anybody of my views, but I think they are ideas that need to be discussed in all earnest.

We didn’t discuss the catholic church, ahh.. the Catholic church, by this point there can be no doubt of the true nature of the Catholic church: To cultivate, breed and protect a culture of pedophilia. Nor did we discuss the evangelical church that cares nothing of god and only of power. Power not just over minds of its followers, but power over politics, policies and politicians. We have an Islamic cult that wants nothing less than for it’s women to be chained and shackled and non-believers to be executed in the fiery napalm bomb of a suicide martyr. We lacked the foresight to discuss how world is transgressing, moving backwards in it’s evolution of the mind. A period of enlightenment is giving way to a dangerous religiosity.

But alas, these are ideas and subjects with which we are not allowed to discuss – for fear of being ostracized and stigmatized. No, these are subjects we are not allowed to discuss in public, only accept that the power these groups wield can force their own ideas, rules and regulations on us, but we, we are not allowed to discuss this. Only accept.

No, we did not discuss any of this as he was simply a young man that wanted to buy my computer screen that I was selling. As he parted we talked about life in general, and funnily enough, we discussed a little about the meaning of life.. or atleast what we could in just the briefest of meetings. I said to him that so many people fret over the meaning of life, that they forget to live. Life passes them by as they are too busy sprinting after money, security, love and sex. My point was that I have and had them all, and all I want is time. I want time to live more, to live fully, to experience everything I can in the very limited time I have on this planet.

It’s something I think about a lot, and even something I discuss with others from time to time. Many people say they want to live life, they want to experience life. It’s not new. For me though, it’s something deeper, I truly, honestly in the deepest facet of my being, feel. Time. ticking. Not subtle or quiet. But a loud and constant reminder that I will die sooner than I realize.

I accept death, I don’t mind the idea of dying, I have my regrets, we all do, but I will never have the regret of wasting my life on pursuing and sticking with a dead-end job, marrying a woman I don’t love, having a son I don’t want, not doing whatever dream or passion makes it’s way onto my brain or living a life I’m not happy with. At this very moment in my life, I have never been happier. Life is getting better the older I get. I have done more and experienced more in the short life I have lived on this earth, than probably most people alive, granted, that’s not saying much considering a large portion of people are born into poverty and die before turning 5. In any case, maybe someday I will write a memoir, maybe not, some stupidity is probably better off dying with me.

I realize I don’t really have a point with this post, just the ideas and questions that bubbled up got me thinking about some other things and I thought I would share them. Writing is sometimes like that, and it’s what I love about writing – I thought I would sit down and write a review of the High route, then I got thinking about some other things, than I just let my words flow and now here we are – a 1000 word bubbling mess that may or may not speak to you.

blog Purpose

A side hustle – key to happiness?

Kenneth Shaw on October 7, 2017

I recently listened to a podcast that Rich Roll put up, if you haven’t discovered Rich Roll yet, I can highly recommend his podcasts and books. Along with Sam Harris, I absolutely love the Rich Roll series, in fact, in my world these two podcasts are must listens. With that said, Rich roll recently did a podcast with Chris Guillebeau called “everyone needs a side hustle, even if you love your job”. I never heard of Chris Guillebeau before this episode, but apparently he has a few side hustles that are going good for him, and in a way the entire podcast was about the need to have a side hustle. A side income of some kind, it’s nothing you have to live off of, but just an extra income.

I can’t really go into detail about the podcast, as I’ve already forgotten most of it and I’m currently writing this at a kids playhouse while my son is running around being a kid.. Anyway, it got me thinking that for almost my entire life I have had a side income or hustle of some kind. When I was in grade school I was recycling bottles and putting that money into government bonds. Those government bonds eventually I cashed in for DJ equipment when I turned 14. Along with DJing in High School I was cleaning carpets, buying and selling on Ebay when it first broke through, trading stocks, writing books so on and so forth and today I run Backpackinglight.dk and .se. A site dedicated to lightweight backpacking gear – and I absolutely love it.

To say that I was raised with an entrepreneurial spirit is to downplay the things I’ve done. My family was and is very much a hard working middle class family. For the entirety of my adolescence I was a military brat. Not until I moved to Sweden did I actually experience life outside the military “socialist” bubble. I call it a socialist bubble, because that’s exactly what being in the military is: From school, to work, to shopping.. Everything is a self contained socialist bubble. Real life didn’t start for me until I left the states.

Anyway, I don’t know if I was raised in the manner that I must always have a side income, it was more just something I really enjoyed, and I find that I am happiest when I have something going on in my life outside the normal 9 to 5 job. To me, it’s not about the money, it’s about the joy of dedicating my life to something, for myself. With a job, I dedicate my life to my employers, to a middle class lifestyle that I don’t particularly care for, to my wife and child and their safety and economic security. Most of my life is spent in dedication to others, dedicated to everything outside myself and my own interest. A side hustle on the other hand, is something that I dedicate to myself. Instead of spending my time and money on things that mean or lead to nothing (video games, TV and so on) – A side hustle is a dedication to my passion. It engrosses me fully.

Some of my side hustles have been a great source of income, and even led to being my only income for many years – such as being a DJ and producer. It was a great life while it lasted, but I always knew I didn’t want to be the 40 year old dj, half drunk and playing golden oldies at geezer parties. So I moved on. Other side hustles have barely pulled in any income at all, but were enjoyable no less.

It’s easy to confuse a side hustle with a hobby. Running is a hobby. Playing video games is a hobby, even hiking is a hobby. A side hustle is when you run and maybe do training sessions for paying clients, or write books on running. Hiking, just for the sake of hiking, is a hobby, a damn fun one, but it’s not a side hustle – a side hustle might be designing and sewing your own backpacks to sell.

Another misconception with starting a business is that you have to give up everything and take out a loan on your house and life, all or nothing approach. I think that’s fine if you’re 20 and have maybe a cat as your biggest dependent. But later on in life, it’s time to grow up and be realistic – often times a side hustle doesn’t have to cost anything at all. The chances of being able to drop everything, start a business tomorrow and be able to live off of it within days is simply a fantasy for 99.9999% of the world’s population. But often that’s exactly how many people think and it’s not completely unusual for people to take out massive loans where most of the money goes to their own living expenses. It takes time, dedication and intelligence. You have to put in the ground work, and yes, you will probably have to continue living life at a job you hate, or love, until the side income gets moving.

When I started this blog, it didn’t have any income, it still doesn’t, more or less. Though it has led to other sources of income such as Books and Backpackinglight.dk. I still work at a 9-5 job as a manager over 20+ employees, I love my job, but I don’t want it to be the only dedication I have in life. And to be completely honest, my dream is to live off of my hiking hobby. My dream is to work hard 3 weeks a month and run my business, write in my blog and have contact with potential customers at backpackinglight – I absolutely love this, and spend a week out hiking. This is my dream that I have been working towards for the past 4 years. Maybe I will succeed with my dream, maybe not, but atleast I am trying and it makes me extremely happy. Fulfilled I guess is the proper word for it.

Maybe you like writing – what would that cost? Don’t know how to properly write or how to sew a backpack? Youtube is an awesome source of inspiration and knowledge. There is no limit to what you can achieve if you’re willing to put in the time and effort.

To sum it up:

Get your side hustle moving today! You are your only road block.
Think small and scale up! Don’t quit your job today and expect to live off your fantasy tomorrow.
Willful ignorance is your friend! My secret to getting things done is to start! I usually say to people who ask that I see the goal (where I want to end up) and I see the first steps. Everything else I ignore – and I do this because if I always know how difficult something would be, I would never start.
Do something you love – Obviously.

mindfulness minimalism minimalist Purpose simplicity

Finding purpose

Kenneth Shaw on April 8, 2017

I’m going to write about something different here. Something that I hope will help you on your journey to become not only a minimalist, but even a better you. We all have ambitions, goals and a journey we wish for ourselves. But somewhere along the line that vision we had for ourselves gets replaced by a reality we find ourselves in. Within that reality we try to make peace, find contentment and in the end we try to forget what our dreams and ambitions of a silly youth were.

When searching for that contentment we fill the empty space that once was our dreams with stuff. Many of us consume in-order to convince ourselves, often unconsciously, that the life we live or chose is better. Perhaps the life we dreamt about was simply that, a dream. Maybe some of us have tried and failed in pursuing our dreams.

I have done a lot of things in my life, at times I’ve made a lot of money, and other times I have been scraping by. The worst time of my life emotionally was when I was done with my studies, I was tired of playing music for a living, and I wanted to create a good life for myself and my girlfriend at the time (now my wife). I didn’t want to be a DJ anymore as I had been doing it since I was 12. I was tired, and I simply didn’t want that life any longer. However I wasn’t exactly a model student, in fact I barely got my Bachelors and I didn’t want to put in the work for a masters. I knew more or less what I wanted to do, I wanted to be a portfolio manager. I had been trading in stock, bonds, futures and options since I was 16 and had a good track record over the years. I figured a bachelors and my track record would be enough to land any job. I was wrong.

My studies ended in 2007. My bachelors term paper was written on the ”real or perceived threat of the housing market crisis”. A crisis that hadn’t hit full swing yet and was still brewing. When my studies were finished nobody was hiring, and even if they could they wouldn’t. I must have sent out a hundred or more applications, I called, had several contacts in high places, but in the end nobody was hiring. I was desperate to get my foot in the door, but I hadn’t done my homework or put the effort into getting my masters degree or make myself attractive enough for potential employers. So I eventually started my own fund called ”shaw logic, LLC”. I had a few investors and we had a decent amount of seed money, the first year or so we even had decent results. But it’s not what I wanted, I didn’t want to own a fund, manage it and do the investing. I just wanted to be a manager and build strategies to beat the market.

In the end the pressure of having a fund was too much to do it by myself so I closed down and gave the money back to the investors and moved on. Accepting the fact that I would never work as a portfolio manager in the traditional sense of doing it, also realizing that there was a large possibility that I didn’t want to either. I eventually took a job as an accountant to make ends meet and was still going to interviews and so on for fund management positions. But the truth is that if there are 10 applicants applying for the same job, I was the one that was automatically filtered out as I didn’t have the necessary experience or education.

Ten years removed from when I was done with my studies, and seven years after my time as a fund manager and five years removed as an accountant, I am happy with the life I have. I have done a lot in that time since I finished my studies. Together with some investors I started one of Stockholms largest sports bars, I got hired on as a financial advisor, I’ve worked and became part owner in a management consultant firm and now I work as a manager in the nation wide employment agency. But after doing all this I realize that none of it is really the life I wanted or craved.

I crave a simpler life, I crave a life where I wake up everyday on pursue my passion with vigor, where everyday is filled with the joy of living a life with purpose. Perhaps the problem with me is that I have had moments of pursuing my passion blindly, and they have been the greatest moments of my life. If I had never experienced this, then maybe I would be content with what I have?

I have often thought about what mans purpose is and I believe that our purpose in life is to find our purpose, than pursue that purpose with childlike abandon. (Yes a very Budhist like statement). I love the life that I have created with my wife and child, but I know we can do so much more than the traditional ”middle class life”. The house, Volvo, 2.5 kids and running endlessly in the hamster wheel.

Finding passion

In my bones I feel that I have to do something else, something that is my passion. Maybe my purpose is to write, to explore the world, to train, to teach, to help others. So if my passion is to write, explore and teach, how do I know? How would you know what your passion is when you find it? Or to that end is your passion you purpose? Just because you love doing something doesn’t mean it’s what you want to do as a career, or if it’s even possible. Some people say collecting stamps is their passion in life, but is it really? or is it a compulsion, a need to collect, a void that is being filled by finding, buying and collecting different stamps? I can’t answer that for other people, I can only relate to my own life experiences, and in my life I usually start to collect things when I am unhappy with something else. A kind of compulsion to fill my emptiness.

Think about it like this, if money didn’t exist, was no object and you got to do whatever you wanted to do with your time, what would you do? If I strip away everything In my life and break it down like this I always come back to the samethings:

I want to backpack more, I want to write more, I want to take the time necessary to be a photographer, I want to help others in their own journeys in life. I want to be with my family more and I want the time we are together to be spent with joy. How is this different from what I’m doing now? It’s not. I just want more of it and only it and I don’t want the middle class burden that I now find myself and family in. I don’t want the house, cars and stuff. I don’t want the bills and debt or the idea of somebody else owning my time. I don’t want my few precious hours where my family is home together in the evenings to be filled in front of a TV, iPad or computer. I want our time to be just that: Our time.

Yet the life we find ourselves in drains us to the core. My wife works 40-50 hours a week and Alexander goes to pre-school and I work. When we get home in the evening we are spent, and as an excuse we turn on the TV and Alex plays with his iPad. We are stuck in a hamster wheel of our own making.

Our backyard at the moment.. Filled with stuff that we at one time thought we had to have now getting ready for the dump

Everything is a distraction trap, every little buzz on the phone, every little beep on a watch, every little sound the iPad or TV makes. It’s all a distraction from a purposeful life. How do you find your passion if you can’t even stop to meditate for 10 minutes?

Making a change

Minimalism is the answer to the hamster wheel, the real answer. Not the ”get rich quick” answer, but a true answer to many of life’s real problems. I am stuck in the hamster wheel because we as a family like to buy stuff. We have debt which in turn creates a demand to pay. That demand to pay means we have to work. The bigger the debt the bigger the problem, the bigger the demand to pay. That debt is not just money that needs to be paid, above all else it is time. Time in your life, in my life, that must be spent doing work that isn’t my passion in-order to pay for a life I don’t want. With every purchase I make, I am giving up an equal amount of time from my life. The bigger the house, the more time needed from my life in-order to pay. It’s as simple as that. If I own less, consume less, and have less debt, the more life I have to pursue the passions that I love.

I don’t see debt as simply debt, I see it as my life, dreams and passions slipping away before my very eyes. I see the stuff in my house as an anchor, I see my house as a grave because it is owned by the bank. Don’t get me wrong, I love my house, I love my comforts, and the ability to buy what I want when I want. The problem is, I don’t want to have to slave 40 hours a week for 30 years for something that isn’t my passion in-order to have this life. On top of that if my house is not designed with singular purpose than it is very much a distraction from my passions.

What do I mean by singular purpose? If my passion is to write and teach, then how does a TV, hundreds of glasses, towels, DVD’s, sofas, chairs, tables, games and so on help me pursue my passion? It doesn’t, it simply distracts me from my passion. Anything that doesn’t help my pursue my passion, distracts me from it. The more stuff we have in our house, the more time goes towards, if nothing else, dusting the stuff off every now and then and re-organizing it.

We started to make some changes last year around summer time. I started emptying and selling tons of stuff, my wife caught on and started to sort a lot as well. But in the end, even though we have less stuff, we still have too much. Too much distraction, too much debt, too many bills, too many anchors. Minimalism has to be a singular goal in and of itself. A constant pursuit to own less, and above all else, the reason to own less. We must have a reason to own less. We must see the benefits before the actual goal is achieved. When we started to empty the house last year I felt it in my bones that this was the answer.

My buying habits have changed dramatically, I now make a 30 day wait list for things I want to buy. It’s interesting to see what pops up in my calendar from a month ago.. Stuff I put on a waiting list that I absolutely knew I had to have, and poof.. A month later I forgot what the item was to begin with. I now own less stuff, and I question everything that I do have. I still hunt, and the hunt is a pain in the ass and something I am still trying to break. I still have watch lists of stuff I want to buy. I still place bids on eBay just to see if I can get something really cheap. And all this hunting takes away from the important things in life.

With that said, our house looks like just about any other middle class house, it’s still filled with stuff we don’t use, in places that keep dust, organized in closest we never go into, and a house in a constant form of repair; Repair that requires time, money and above all else energy. At some point, we as a family have to decide that this isn’t working for us. This middle class life is a lie, this lie built on an advertisers playbook. Brainwashing us since birth. I long for the day when I wake up in my bed with my son and wife by my side and we have no idea what the hell we are going to do for the day, but have no worries at all. I long for the day when this is a reality that exist beyond the realm of vacation.

I believe this is possible with less. Less debt, less stuff to take care of, less bills, less house to repair.. Less of stuff and more of the things that matter. Life, love and passion.

Life should be just this.. a spontaneous day out with friends and family