"Why in the world would anybody put chains on me?"
-lionel richie
Chances are, if you're living in the Age of COVID, you're probably reading this at home.
Welcome to living a "No Wake Life"
It's what we called it back in 2013- https://docksixchronicles.blogspot.com/2013/03/another-dock-diatribe-debut.html
it's still true today.
Since the link is intermittent, here it is:
We work our asses off to buy stuff that
we can’t enjoy because we are working our asses off to pay for the stuff we buy
while diligently saving (or attempting to save) for our retirement which we
keep pushing back because we keep working our asses off to buy yet more
stuff to enjoy that we have to work our asses off to pay for, and there
is always something else that we want or need or think we need (but really
want) that we have to work our asses off to pay for and…
A generation ago somebody coined
the phrase “rat race” to describe this phenomenon of modern consumerism, and
the term stuck.
It’s wrong.
It ain’t a race.
You can win a race.
Modern consumerist life is a
strictly no-win proposition, friends…
… and none of us gets out of here
alive.
I began to think about this a few years
ago, when I received a matched set of stainless steel rechargeable electric
salt and pepper grinders as a gift.
Think about that: Electric salt
and pepper grinders.
I am pretty sure this is an
answer to a question nobody asked.
This gift made me ponder, and I came to
some conclusions:
1. I must be one of those
“hard-to-shop-for” people.
2. I’d rather have an LCBO gift card.
3. Grinding pepper over your mashed
potatoes is apparently much more strenuous than I ever thought., that somebody
decided the world needed this.
4. A gadget that doesn’t really save any
appreciable time or effort and provides little entertainment required somebody
to work to earn the money to purchase it.
5. Enough is enough.
At the time, I was working a gig
that required me to work 12 hour days 6-7 days a week, put in 40 000 km a
year behind the wheel of a car traveling to meet prospects, 75% of whom
either don’t want or can’t afford what I am selling, so that I can afford
the next toy/vacation/orthodontist payment/thing with the 50% of my income that
the tax man has allowed me to keep. I was alienated from, and alienating,
my kids, my wife, because of my absence from home life, and I became an
overcompensating asshole for the same reason which increased the tension and…
…any of you out there who have climbed
out of the wreckage of a crashed marriage know exactly where I’m coming from.
Actually, scratch that vacation
part. At the time I hadn’t taken more than a long weekend off in over a
decade.
And I thought I was successful.
I began to question where I was
going, what I was doing, and why.
Frankly, I figured
enjoying retirement is a myth.
That whole “Freedom 55” thing?
Bullshit.
First, you gotta get there.
With my diet, hours, stress level and number of miles driven every year, the
odds were good I wasn’t gonna make it.
Second, you gotta pay for it. You
need to keep squirreling away the cash, tending your investments, watching your
nest egg grow, deferring and sacrificing today for the dream of a better
tomorrow…
….As long as the market doesn’t tank,
your health holds up, property values don’t plummet, or your kids don’t move
back in, with their kids.
Money may not buy
happiness, but always feeling like you don’t have enough will make you bitchy
as hell.
I was sitting in the cockpit of our
old, small, paid-for sailboat one morning, enjoying a cup of coffee when
it hit me:
As a society we are conditioned
to approach life like a big twin-engine cabin cruiser- heavy consumption, lots
of noise, lots of flash, throwing a big wake. Unless you are getting
noticed, you’re not succeeding.
I finally figured out that
there is a lot to be said for living a NO wake lifestyle.
But how?
With a bit of soul searching we
realized we had to quit confusing our wants with our needs.
My wife and I realized that we
were perfectly content spending time on our old, small, paid-off boat in
our low-cost slip on our no-frills dock. We didn’t need a
bigger boat on a fancier dock.
And we didn’t need new
cars. As long as the old cars keep running , it is always gonna be
cheaper to fix ‘em than replace ‘em. If I need a new whip to impress you,
you’re likely not worth impressing.
Besides, there’s
something real liberating about parking wherever you damn well please, because
dings and scratches just don’t matter.
And we didn’t need a
$20 000 kitchen reno or a $10 000 bathroom makeover. Or a bigger
house. Or a bigger garage.
Or a bigger mortgage.
For a longer time.
With fatter payments.
We didn’t need to
stand in line to be grilled by a soul-patch sporting “barista” first thing in
the morning just to get a simple cup of coffee which costs as much as a Happy
Meal, when we had a perfectly good underused coffee maker on the kitchen
counter.
We needed to live life NOW, on OUR
terms.
A funny thing happened. By
deciding what we could live without, we could now afford to live.
With less financial stress, I didn’t
need to be on the road, living out of a car and fueling up on fast food three
meals a day. My wife and I discovered that cooking dinner together was a
great way to re-connect at the end of the workday. Chopping, sautéing,
stirring with a glass of wine while recapping our respective days beats the
hell out of eating a Whopper an hour from home.
We didn’t have to save
dining at restaurants with tablecloths for a special occasion to fit the
budget.
We could afford to drink
the bottles of wine we could only read about before.
We could take vacation
days without figuring out what we had to sacrifice to make up for the lost
wages.
Hell, we could take whole
damn vacations, for that matter!
The sunsets look
just as pretty from a small, paid-off sailboat as it does from the bridge of a
six-figure cabin cruiser.
The rum goes down
just as well.
And I can enjoy it
instead of working to afford it.
And so can you.
