Friday, December 10, 2010

I am tired of living this life

I am so tired of my life. It feels hectic and stressful. People at work communicate so poorly. Emails are literally a game of "can you spot the differences?" That's how hard it is to find the part of the message to respond to. Some emails are literally mind reading exercises. Can you tell what this blank email was supposed to say? Verbal communication is frequently even less clear. I get yelled at for not knowing something nobody ever said anything to me about. Sometimes I feel like crying or throwing up because of the stress. Nobody at home cares. It's like living with my dad. "That's why they call it Work."

Coming home should be a place of peace and relaxation but it is not. I only get a few minutes a day to myself. Most of the time spent at home is spent having to pay attention to the TV so that I understand what the heck The Man is joking about or arguing with. I don't want to watch the TV. I want to read my email. But I can't. I rarely can read through an entire sentence without 20 interruptions.

And then there are the birds. Even if I get some time to myself I can't do anything with my hands or a telephone unless I hide in the bathroom or in a back room with the door securely shut. Even with the door shut, birds will follow me and sit outside the door trying to get in. I can rarely type or play musical instruments because birds have to sit on my hands all the time. It's frustrating. I can't read anything because they start to poop on me so I have to run over to the newspaper, or they sit on my reading material like a cat would so I can't see it.

I can see no end to this. In the US you have to work until you die. The age of pensions is long over. 401K savings are a joke. All your savings could be wiped out in one bad day on the stock market. I read somewhere that you can retire in Nepal with $50,000. You'd be living extremely frugally, but they say with $100K you can live comfortably. All I need is something between the two and I could escape this unending life of constant frustration. I could work a little here and there to supplement. It would be so much better than doing the same thing, enduring the same frustrations, day after day after day with no end in sight. I'd never get to hike the PCT ever again, which would be sad, but they have good hiking in Nepal.

5 comments:

  1. Every time I start to feel down, I make a list of all of the "little things" that happen every day. The things I overlook while focusing on the big picture. It makes me extremely grateful, and I can always reread old lists on a bad day. I also think about all of the amazing experiences I've had in the past, and the beautiful people I've met. Then, I plan a new adventure to stay excited about the future. Keep your head up :)

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  2. Somehow stuff works out if you just go for it.

    I hadn't planed on not going back to work when I spent a winter living in an intentional Buddhist community in Thailand. I was only spending a dollar a week and even that was not necessary. I started thinking about moving there permanently. The English school in town offered me a job teaching English so I could have even made some money. Here is my blog post about it http://asthecrowflies.org/2007/02/02/how-i-ended-up-not-going-back-to-work/

    I thought I was a little nuts to sell my house, quit my job, and buy a cabin but now I think I would have been nuts not to.

    If you move to Nepal you'd have to give up those birds anyway so why not start finding homes for them.


    You can work and work and save every penny and the next day the economy could fail and all your money is worth nothing. It's happens all the time.

    You could also work and work and die and never get to do the stuff you want. The biggest gamble you can make is thinking you have more time. Best to just get on with your life and start living it the way you want now. What if this was your last year of your life?

    Just take the next step you don't have to see all the way to the end.

    So why not just quit your job, find homes for your birds, say goodbye to the old man, and go to Nepal and check it out. Worst thing that could happen is you get a good trip out of it.

    I lot of people find under the table jobs in different countries.

    Don't settle. First get clear in your head how exactly you want your life to be if price was no object.

    So many people are so use to compromising their dreams that after awhile they don't even know what they really want.

    You're also always welcome to camp out at my place if you ever need some land to hang out on without being hassled.

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  3. Thank you for sharing your story. I enjoyed reading about your experience in Thailand.

    In 1999 I visited Nepal. I really liked it there. I think I will try to save enough money to go back. And maybe I won't come home. I suppose it depends on whether it's still as nice as I remember.

    I'm not a millionaire. I'm not even a hundred-thousandaire. It remains to be seen what will happen to me. I know things will work out.

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  4. I have never met you, but I hiked the PCT a few years ago, and I follow your blog. I just wanted to say that a lot of what you write really resonates with me. I've done another long hike since the PCT, and I still have a tough time coming back to "reality."

    The idea of spending so much of my time working just to exist in "civilization" is difficult for me to accept. I enjoy your writing, and you're not the only person out there who feels this way.

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  5. Thank you for your kind comments.

    I was telling The Man yesterday, after the bird bit my ear really bad, that Hell for me would be to go to work all day every day and spend every evening in a room with birds, hats and glasses (the bird does not like me to wear hats or glasses.) Then I realized that IS my life.

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