I’m writing this sitting at my home office desk with a sausage biscuit and a coffee. I’ve been waking up at 6am every day to get my body into that habit so I can hopefully do it without an alarm one day.
The past few weeks have kicked my ass at work. They’ve probably been the roughest few weeks of work that I’ve had in the past 5 years or so. This past week specifically was definitely the worst week I’ve had in the past 2 years. Not typing that to get sympathy, but just to describe where my head space is when I’m writing this post.
I may have had a shitty Monday through Friday, but I figured work is work, and it’ll still be there Monday, so why not have a good weekend? Hence the coffee and sausage biscuit.
From the start at 7am on Monday to 6pm on Friday, this past week did not stop hitting.
Granted, the past few weeks we’ve been super busy with projects and meetings, which I can’t even be that mad about because I get bonuses based on how we do profit wise at my job. The more projects we do, the more we sell, the more I get paid, so it’s not like I’m burned out about that part.
It’s the back to back meetings, the unexpected issues that arise, the problems that are always coming up, the managing of different personalities of grown ass people. I’m just burned out by it all.
It seemed like it was never ending at some point. There was one part of my week where I went to the restroom. I didn’t take my phone because I just wanted to get away from a screen for a bit. I came back after 10 minutes and had 9 Teams messages, 5 texts, and 12 emails. All within 10 minutes that came in and they all needed me to do a task or needed information.
Then, when I would finally sit down to work on those items, something else would pop up. It was just a continuous cycle of this.
I’m always having to make decisions. I am perfectly fine making decisions, and I’m not saying that I am ungrateful. There are people out there who can never make a decision for themselves, so this one sounds like I’m crying about something stupid.
But at work all day it’s, “What do you want to do about this? How should we do this? Have you decided how you want to approach this?” Then it’s all the little decisions that stack up on top of that. “Where are you going to order lunch from? Do you want to discount this for the sale? How should I do this?”
Then, after a day of all of that, I still have to come home and decide what to eat. I live alone, so it’s only me that I either cook for or get food for, but I hate having to pick what to eat. It’s such a simple, but infuriating thing to decide on.
It’s even more stupid that nowadays it’s easier and cheaper for me to get takeout and spend $10 than spend $8 to $10 on groceries, and then spend another hour to an hour and a half cooking and cleaning.
Typically when I work at night, I put a YouTube video on, get food, and just do some work. Although I know this week I should have done it more than any other week this year so far, I just didn’t have it in me.
This past week made me realize that I would just come home, eat dinner, work out, and go to sleep. Repeat. It just seemed like it was never going to end. It was constant issue after issue.
I’ve always envied the people who have kept their lives simple. Not simple in the way that they’re seen as less than me or that I’m looking down on them. I mean it in a way where they have their apartment, little or no debt, a decent car, hobbies, and that’s enough.
At one point I did have that. Then the whole “more money, more problems” thing started to become true. Eventually I found myself taking jobs that I needed to do just to pay the bills for the debt that I got myself into.
I call it the simple life, and I envy it.
I do have a nice new truck, a nice apartment that’s average for the city I live in, I take vacations every couple of months, I eat well, and although I don’t have as much money saved as I’d like, from the outside this is the life that I worked towards in college, minus the debt.
But my Monday through Friday is chaotic. Lately my weekends have been too. I’ve been traveling or so busy with work that my weekends are just playing catch up from what I missed during the week.
Most nights I work out and go for a 30 minute walk after. This week I did an hour to an hour and a half worth of walking per night. I know my life is getting chaotic when that happens. It’s kind of one of those things that I’ve always known about myself. Once I start going for longer and longer walks, unless I’m talking on the phone, I am stressed and I just want to get away.
Something about walks calms me, but I think I tie that to a childhood memory of walking around town with friends with no worries, or walking around another city in another country with nothing guiding me. It just feels free. It’s liberating.
I get paid well to deal with all of this. I get good bonuses to deal with all of this. But if I had to be honest, the only thing keeping me in this job is the financial goals that I have.
At the end of the day, I have achieved a lot of the professional goals that I wanted to reach when I graduated college. I am proud of myself for getting where I’m at and doing the things that I do. Being an Executive as a company was something I’ve been working towards for years.
And who knows, maybe my attitude will be totally different once I’ve paid off my debt. Right now, it feels like I’m working just to pay off debt. I imagine my attitude will be a lot different when I’m working to save money instead.
If I can achieve my goal of paying everything off, I’ll be able to pay all of my monthly bills with just one paycheck each month since I get paid biweekly. The other paycheck, along with my quarterly bonuses, can go straight into savings.
I think when you’re able to save that much every month, you start to look at work differently. You don’t feel trapped. You don’t feel like you have to put up with everything just because you need the next paycheck. You’re no longer working from a place of, “I need this job.” You can have a little more of the “I don’t give a fuck” attitude because you know you’ll be okay.
With all that said, I gotta keep going.
Ball up top.
-J