Breaking Out of Time = Money
I hate money. It's a stupid game... and my generation particularly gets a bad gig. Here's how a college-educated millennial with a corporate job is going to live:
- Work all day during the hours that you actually have energy, and then come home to make dinner, do laundry, hang out for a little bit and then go to bed.
- Go out once every couple weeks, maybe to the movies. Happy hour on Fridays.
- Just barely keep up with the payments on your gigantic student loans just in time to climb back into debt when you get a house.
- Get 401k matching and health benefits. 2 weeks paid vacation until 5 years, when you get 3 weeks.
Not terrible, right? Comfortable. Safe. Stable.
This life terrifies me. Not because it's a bad way to survive, but because I go to bed at night feeling I've wasted a perfectly good day. I'm a robot. So how do I propose to change it?
The only way I've devised is to break free of being in debt and earn enough to be free to do whatever I want. The lack of those two things is what makes us go to work, makes us not go travel and explore the world, and keeps us away from our friends and family. It prevents me from helping people through the only way I know how (design), and it angers me whenever I think about it.
I want out. I want to break free of this mechanism that I'm a part of. And I'm not going to stop until I've achieved it.
Easier said that done, you might say.
One thing I repeatedly ran into in engineering school is that the cause of something is rarely singular in nature. In thinking about how to support myself financially in the future, I see it as more a case of building a house brick by brick, rather than raising a whole side at once.
What is truly involved in making that happen, well, I'm still figuring that out.