Cost of Past and Future
It has been a week since I posted a flower picture.
And this week, it was a toss up between the blooming lilacs which smell awesome, or the dahlias I planted in the pot outside our front door. The dahlias won this round, because with a little bit of editing, they look a bit like a painting that would be on an old woman's wall, or her pillowcase. And well, old women and myself are like kindred spirits.
I am okay being an old person.
Some say "age is just a number" but the fact is, those numbers are pretty representative of likely condition. Of course, there is a lot of variation nowadays as there is such a wide variety in the way people live their lives, but all things remaining equal, it is pretty predictable.
With a client today I was rambling on toward the end of the session about how we should "live in the moment" in the sense of being attentive, but not care about whether that moment feels good or bad. Because, quite often the things that we need to do to be able to have options later on, don't feel that good right now. Eating healthy doesn't generate as much immediate pleasure than eating unhealthy, but over time, it matters. Similarly (and what we were talking about in the session), the tasks of a job that need to be done might not feel great, but they can lead to much greater opportunity later. In this case, my client has changed company and role and even though logically he knows he made the right choice, the current challenges of a role that he hasn't done before compared to a role he was used to and very good at, makes him question his decision to move.
He made the right call.
Being comfortable in a career is fine, but it also comes with a range of limitations, meaning that there can be a ceiling on progression depending on the career path. While he still had a way to go had he stayed where he was, the change he made is into a field that is going to see some very large growth and investment over the next several years at least, and with that comes more opportunity and far more job security, which is at a premium in today's employment market in Finland.
Personally, I wish I had made some bolder decisions when I was much younger, because playing it safe has made it difficult now to get out from under the various ceilings and over the roadblocks. At the time, I thought I was making the right calls of course, but in the end it was comfort-seeking, even though it wasn't very comfortable. I should have instead put myself into far more discomfort and hardship early to build a stronger foundation for later, but like many I suppose, I didn't feel I could, or it was never the right time, or I had some justifying reason to keep doing what I was doing.
There is always tomorrow.
No, there isn't.
We all run out of tomorrows eventually, which means we should be doing what is needed today. Not what is wanted, what is needed. It might not be fun at the time, but it is less fun to be a decade or three down the track with limited opportunity and increased hardship because the foundation wasn't built deeply or reinforced enough. This goes for careers, and for bodies. Do what you want with both, and pay the price later.
That said, there are no guarantees that doing what is needed now is going to reap rewards later, which is why so many people take the "live in the moment approach" to mean, spend in the moment and chase pleasure in the moment instead. They think it is a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush position, but in reality, they are betting against themselves, rather than playing the odds. The odds are, investing now will see greater gains than spending now.
Pretty easy.
But investing is painful, or at least, uncomfortable. It is giving up the opportunity for something now in the hope for something greater in return later, and many of us (myself included) often take the short gain, even when we know we shouldn't. But it is far easier to justify to ourselves the actions that lead to an immediate return, than the ones that have an immediate cost.
Now or later though, there is always a cost.
Taraz
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Haven't you posted in the past about how people let their jobs define them a bit too much? Maybe I am wrong. Or maybe I am just talking as someone who has done the same job for over 20 years, but I think part of knowing what is best is knowing some of those risks aren't worth it. I guess it probably depends on how old you are and stuff. I don't know. I'm practically a senior citizen now, so...
For sure sone people identify too much with it, often why they don't change too. This client is just over 30, super bright, so just getting started. He is also very balanced in his approach to life, but was already suffocating where he was.
I wish I was in a 20 year job. I was hoping my last job would see me put, but it wasn't to be.
Oh yes then, he has lots of time ahead of him. My job I pretty much knew there was no room for upward mobility, but I didn't really mind. I'm more of a settler though!
It is a luxury. I haven't had the opportunity in Finland, as it is a constant chase for any work, rather than being able to settle into something decent.
I'm sorry, that is kind of sad. I know some people probably find energy from that, but not me. I also know you would probably prefer it wasn't the case.
Age isn't just a number at all, it really represent the person and his abilities; a man with over 40 years of age have lot of experiences in life while someone like me who is in 30s yet have many things to experience;
Age isn't just a number;
Non of us knows how many more hours we have to live or to joy, so saying this "There is always tomorrow" totally wrong concept. We must spend our parent to live well enough.
When it comes to experience, an older person can have very little, a younger a lot - it depends on many things. The assumption that age goes with experience doesn't hold a lot of the time now, because so many people hide their lives behind a screen, experiencing very little first-hand.
Hmm, interesting fact many are wasting their golden time behind the screens by scrolling on social medias, but still they have bit more experience than young guns ...
Yes, because they lived before screens. Anyone who spends too much time on screens, is limiting their experience.
Like many of youngsters, somewhere I am doing the same.
I hope that I will not live much past 60. I imagine that if I would live to be really old I would feel constant pain. Or even worse lose my memory/ get paralyzed or decrepit. So I would like to die around 60 just like my dad died.
In Lithuania some people had their money in something called pension accumulation(?). They were recently allowed to take part of that money out. On the news I heard that many of those people were buying things like jewelry and spending thousands on them. I am not sure if that is smart or dumb. Sure it is at least better than losing money to phone scammers. But I still think that money would be safer in the bank than in a form of jewelry.
granted I would likely just put those thousands into Hive and hope for the best...so I guess I am not much better than those jewelry people in terms of investment...Not sure how old you are now, but 60 is not much more than a decade away for me :D
I have no idea about the future of the various retirement funds, because the math currently doesn't look good for them.
34 so for now that seems quite far away.
Time flies :)
pretty flowers! :)
that's funny cuz i was just complaining about paying $40 for Denny's yesterday.. but actually, eating 'healthy' to me means chowing down on good, clean home cooked meals like roasted chicken with tatoes and corn. (or similar) and I feel the dopamine with every forkful I shove into my face..
Simple home cooked foods are great. Nothing too fancy, just the flavours of the food.
I bought SOL this year, invested. I only bought Samsung shares yesterday. In the first five months of this year, SOL's price has fallen 35%, while Samsung's shares have risen 150%. How foolish I was to miss the obvious—the rise in stock prices of AI RAM manufacturers.
Does it ever get tiring tying everything to trades?
This is an image. Looking back six months, we can also look back 20 years and think how naive we were. In many areas of our lives, we failed to notice the obvious.
I often find myself caught in the comfort zone, but I think taking risks could lead to greater rewards in the future.
What kind of risks have you taken in the past and did it work out or was it a big mess?
I took the university entrance exam again for waiting one year to study what I would like to. However, today I am not that brave :)
I think that there should be a balance, we should be spending some to live in this moment and investing some for later. Because you never know if later will get ruined by something and your investments will be in vain...
As I was saying to my client today, one of the fallacies of working for the future is that the present moment is lost. It is not true. We are always acting now so there can be immediate experience value in acting now, for the future.
The joy of gardening is an indication of this. Digging into the dirt, not knowing if the seed will ever hear fruit - but the journey is still enjoyable.
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We are wired to value immediate rewards more highly than delayed ones, that's why spending feels satisfying right now while investing feels like deprivation. The pain comes from resisting that intuition, because investing requires faith in an uncertain future.
The dahlias are pretty! And I'm sure there will be a lilac post in the near future :D
J has changed jobs numerous time (much to his parents astonishment/dismay/etc as they do come from a "loyal to the company" part of the generation) either because the one he was with were steadfastly refusing to give anyone promotions/pay rises for any reason or they wanted a very specific type of work done with zero deviations and he got bored and someone likes the constant challenges and various problems to solve.
He's happy in his current one though as they let him work from home.
What kind of ceilings and roadblocks are you feeling like you're hitting? Were you also resource limited at the time you made the decision that you thought was good at the time but think otherwise in hindsight? If you can explain generically/are comfortable of course. Somewhat curious as I think J is feeling in the same boat as you, he would have liked to make some bolder moves when we were younger but we were very limited by the resources we had at the time and I think he was playing it safe a bit because we had kids relatively young.