An update on life. My life is at polar opposites. Depending on my point of view, it's either great or a failure. From a financial vantage my life is a mess. Considering I made more money from the sale of my house than from physical labor over the past five years, I don't know what to make of that. Grateful, I guess. I was lucky to make the decision to buy a house than rent an apartment. I feel my inability to get hired anywhere - despite my academic excellence and years of experience - has been frustrating, but I have accepted this as part of who I am. It is an essential part of my path toward discovering the true me, and true life.
It doesn't matter. I am loved and I am in a secure place. I don't have to worry about money, so I can indulge in my creative projects without fear of homelessness or starving or lack of medical care. I am loved and appreciated, even though I am in a tough spot. But that's from an arbitrary yardstick set by modern society where success = income. My metric for success is making the most of what I have and the most of this gift of life. So what if selling my house has been my only significant source of income the past five years? I've created music, written books, and been places.
Through it all I have lived more these past five years than the forty years before that. I have no regrets. I cannot imagine my life without experiencing what I have experienced, visited or created. A job would have prevented all these wonderful things. Five years of unemployment has brought me to the realization that life is what you do while not working. Employment is the slow death. It is the robber of truly experiencing and enjoying life. Society dictates we must earn money to buy things to be happy: the expensive car, the spacious house, the big screen TV, the latest i-pad, whatever it may be. Work hard and make money so you can buy! The bigger your paycheck, the happier you will be! They convince you your electronic gadgets bring happiness. No they don't! They are a distraction from your lack of happiness!
Here's what they don't want you to know: your time is precious. It is far more valuable than any wage you could earn. Every moment you are away from those you love or doing the things that make your life fuller is one step closer to an empty death. So modern society gives you distractions from discovering this great injustice of life. Long-term unemployment has freed my mind to see this. My lone regret is that I now have too much time and far too much of it is wasted on useless and pointless endeavors. I must work on fixing that.
So, here I am. At one end, a freeloading failure. At the other, a seeker of life's treasurers. Life comes down to what you have done with your gift: accumulate money or build memories? Do you keep track of time based on your next vacation weeks or months from now, or is there still enough daylight today to visit that park you have never been to? I doubt I can ever go back to working full-time again. Not after what my life has become. I used to hate myself for being unemployed. Now I see this respite from corporate slavery as a blessing.
Life is so much more than I thought it was. The daily full-time grind blinded me to reality beyond the cubicle. I was convinced work = life. How wrong I was! I had missed out on so much. Now I'm desperate to make up for all that time that had been stolen from me.