Yes, I did this for four years.
Serious Warning: I’m going to embark on some very long, self-indulgent posts through June the end of July mid-August.
If you read blogs strictly for financial insight, skip these. I won’t be offended, and you’ll thank yourself for not wasting ten minutes every day.
Introduction
Work and Money. Money and Work. Bound together, two sides of the same coin. Their relationship makes discussing employment experiences acceptable in the context of personal finance and lifestyle blogging.
And I will be discussing these experiences quite a bit over the next couple of weeks. Part of the drive is simply to document my journey, highlighting positives and negatives, while sharing a few epiphanies which ultimately led to my decision to get the hell out of the rat race forever. I have this vague sense that I might forget many of the details once I’m not actually living it anymore, and I don’t want to let these memories disappear or, much worse, become rose-colored over time.
The other part of the motivation is that there might be interesting or helpful bits scattered about. Before I went into the workforce, it was difficult or impossible to know in advance what the experience would really be like. This is because no one talks about how the hours actually pass. If you ask someone how it’s going at their job, they’ll search for an anecdote — some passingly funny joke or incident that they think will entertain you for a moment — and deliver it. What they won’t do is give you a blow by blow accounting of pain and pleasure, suffering and triumph. Or boredom.
And holy shit is there boredom.
In my teens, for example, I looked up at folks in their 30s and 40s, people who I knew held down full-time employment, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what their jobs or lives were like. Example: Oh, that’s Uncle Teddy: He’s an insurance salesman. And that’s Aunt Rudy: She’s a registered nurse. There was zero concept regarding the real texture of their days. The Job Experience was basically a black box, the truth hidden from prying eyes.
I want to provide some of that truth.
One final note before I get started. Many of the posts are very long.
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