I hope all my U.S. readers had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday, no matter where you were, who you were with, or what you ate 🙂 I had planned to publish this post the day after Thanksgiving, on my usual Friday posting day, but instead I decided not to rush it or to worry about it on my holiday time off. It’s funny to think that I chose what was important to me at the time over publishing a post on the very same topic!
Even amidst all that is happening in our country and around the world these days, I’m finding myself ever more grateful for my life, my family, my friends, and my community as the years churn on. Having my connection with myself and my community provides a light in the darkness. In that spirit, I bring you some musings on the theme of importance.
There’s nothing quite like a worldwide pandemic to thrust us all into thinking about what’s really important to us. It seemed that the pandemic caused the majority of the world to take a good, hard look at their lives. Leave it to the threat of death, experienced by everyone around the globe at the same time, to shake things up and make people question how they’re spending their precious time.
But my theory is that since restrictions have been lifted, since the CDC declared COVID-19 to no longer be a public health emergency, the majority of folks are going back to how things were before. They’re doing everything in their power to return to some semblance of normal, whatever that meant for them. The majority are no longer plagued with thoughts about how they are spending their lives. Although this is purely my opinion, I believe we should be thinking about what’s important way more often. We should make it a practice to reflect on what’s important and to see if our daily lives are in alignment.
For folks in the FI (financial independence) community, and maybe especially for those of us in the slow FI community (who are choosing to use our financial freedom we’ve gained along the way to FI to start living our best lives now, not some distant day in the future), I think we are a little different. I think we’ve always been a little different.
For example, I think the majority of us in the FI space have identified that work is not, in fact, our life. But what it is, is a way to earn income, to be able to buy the things we want: time, things we value, experiences, etc.
These days, it feels like the FI community is split into 2 main camps: folks who want to be able to stop working entirely, as soon as possible, and so are grinding away in their full-time jobs to hit FI (25x yearly expenses) as quickly as they can, and folks who are ok with taking a slower path. Folks who maybe don’t hate their job, but just don’t want to work that hard, and want to find a happy medium between working and living life.
Both groups are obviously filled with people with different goals, different values, different ways of living life. But in my opinion, both groups can have people who struggle with knowing what’s really, truly important to them. Both groups have people who are crystal clear on what’s important to them, and people who are just on autopilot, chasing after the next milestone.
Which group are you in? And regardless of your group, do you know what’s important to you?
I’m currently reading a novel called The Measure by Nikki Erlick. The premise is that one day, everyone on the globe gets a wooden box delivered to their front door, with a string in it. The string represents the measure of your life. Not how long you have left to live, but the length of your entire life.
So far, I’m hooked. It reminds me of course a bit of the Covid pandemic (a time when everyone was contemplating the meaning of a life), but also of the Netflix movie Don’t Look Up (highly recommend), which I wrote about in this post.
One of my favorite parts of The Measure so far is toward the beginning, when the narrator is walking down the street and seeing that all these stores have closed since everyone received their strings. The closed stores have signs on the doors that read things like: “Gone to Live my Life”. “Spending more time with family”. “Off to make some memories”.
What would your sign say if you learned you had a short string?
In a sense, this exact premise is what slow FI is all about. Slow FI, or using the financial freedom gained along the way to FI to start living your best life now, not some day in the future, is for those of us who don’t want to wait any longer. Who want to be happy now. Who want to make changes to better our lives right now, in this moment.
And my point today is that this path becomes easier when we know what’s really, truly important to us. Why else would we make any big changes in our lives? Sure, we may be forced to make changes because we are burned out, because we get a divorce, because we lose our job, etc. But intentional changes can also come from figuring out what’s important to us, and making those things a priority.
Remember those 2 main FI groups I mentioned above? The sprinters and the walkers? If we know what’s important to us, we can actively choose to be in one group or the other. On either a traditional FI or a slow FI path, or somewhere in between.
If what’s most important to you is to be work optional as soon as possible, so you can travel the world and not need to be tied to any work, then a more traditional FI path might make more sense for you. Work to the max now to be able to be work optional in the future.
But if you have young kids who you want to spend more time with than you spend at work, or even older parents or family members who you want to spend as much time with as possible, it may make more sense to slow things down now. You can always go back to work later.
The key is first knowing what’s most important to you.
I’ve written several posts on how to figure out what’s important, if you don’t already have a clear sense:
- What I Would Do If I Wasn’t Working Full Time
- What Did You Love To Do As A Kid?
- What Sparks You In Work And Life?
- My Why For Slow FI: Health, Connection, and Contribution
But I’m writing today not just to help you figure out what’s important but also to try to convince you that this is something we should think about way more often than we do!
It doesn’t necessarily matter how often. It could be daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. What matters is that it should be whatever works for you, and it should be done consistently.
Because guess what, my friends? The truth is, the secret is, that what’s important to us changes all the time.
We are part of nature, and nature changes constantly. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that things change all the time in our lives.
Our kids grow up. Our older friends and family pass on (sometimes way too young). People fall out of love, they get sick, they get injured. For the most part, we have no control over what happens around us. How will what’s important to us change as our lives change?
This is why we need to reflect, and we need to do it consistently. So that when things shake up, which they inevitably will, we can be active participants in our own lives instead of letting things happen to us. Here are some of my own examples:
My PhD, my career as a professor, was important to me. It was my dream. But when it was clear that being a professor was not for me (for many reasons), I reflected on what else was important to me about the work I did, and used that knowledge to break into a new career (medical writing).
Volleyball was incredibly important to me. When I was plagued with knee issues and ultimately could no longer play, I had to lean on other activities that were important to me to 1) get through the mental anguish of giving up something I loved and 2) figure out what else I could do to exercise and move my body in ways that felt good for me.
We have a new niece – the first and maybe only one we’ll get. Now, new things are important to me that weren’t before she was born, like trying to visit her at least once a month (they live just over an hour away).
What are some examples you can think of, where changes in your life also changed your priorities, changed what was important to you?
Many times, these changes aren’t easy. Choosing to change my career, and having to adjust to not playing volleyball, were excruciating at the time. But figuring out what was truly important to me, eventually took a bit of the sting off. Helped me to adapt. Helped me to alter my mindset in a way that changed my outlook on life. In that way, I believe knowing what’s important to us is like a superpower.
Our lives are always changing, for better or for worse. The only constant in life is change. So why do we fight it so much? The only way through is to embrace it, and to figure out what is important to us along the way.
It’s ok if our priorities are changing all the time, because we are changing all the time.
Mr. Dink says that we humans are always becoming something else. It’s one of my favorite of his strong beliefs that he has. It’s the same in nature! Just look at moths emerging from their cocoons, hermit crabs exchanging their shells, starfish re-growing entire appendages.
For me and my type-A self especially, this notion helps me take things less seriously. I can get so worked up over everything being perfect, when really, we don’t have much control anyway. Life is constantly changing, and we are constantly adapting to these changes as best we can.
I constantly struggle with the push and pull between 1) life is short, so we have to “live it up” now and 2) putting pressure on myself to be as productive and “successful” as possible.
A small example of this push and pull lies in the never-ending house projects that loom over our heads. I get myself so worked up thinking about all the tasks there are to do. On the one hand, I want to push them off, thinking “life is short” and not be worried about them all the time. On the other hand, I want to be productive, and I know how good I feel when we get things done.
A big example is being scared of my goal to downshift to part-time work. On the one hand, life is short and I want to live my best life now. On the other hand, I have societal pressure coursing through my brain, telling me to make as much money as I can and work as hard as I can to be seen and respected.
It hasn’t been a fast or easy process, but over time, I’ve learned to slow down. I’ve realized (or come to terms with the fact) that we don’t have to get everything done. We can get some things done, and some will have to wait. There can be a balance.
I used to stress about these trees growing in our backyard. They started as just seedlings, and Mr. Dink said he would take care of them, but that was 2 summers ago, and (in my mind) they were getting so big. I couldn’t stop thinking about how soon they’d be huge trees that would need more work, perhaps even money, in order to come down. I’ve stressed about this for 3 summers now!
And can you guess what happened? This past summer, Mr. Dink took them down in a day. It ended up being NO BIG DEAL.
I could have agonized over the fact that I worried about this for 3 years for nothing. But my moral of this story is that I took it as a learning experience. I used this example as data that going forward, I don’t need to stress about every little thing. I can stop and smell the roses a bit. And by knowing what’s important to us (hint, NOT the small trees growing in the back yard), this can help with all of life’s little nuances, with all the changes that will inevitably arrive.
If we are clear on what’s important to us (and we can only do this by reflecting often, since things change so often), we are better able to handle life’s ups and downs.
Just like in The Measure, how the strings changed everything for the characters in the book, slow FI has changed everything for me.
Most of the things I thought were important in my life before I discovered slow FI, especially my career, are no longer as important.
My definition of success has completely changed after discovering slow FI.
Now, what’s most important is that I feel good in my body every day. And I make decisions to try to keep my body and my mind feeling good.
There’s a saying in The Measure that goes viral, and gets put on T-shirts, bumper stickers, and tote bags: “Live like your string is short“.
Isn’t that ultimately what slow FI is encouraging us all to do? Or at least to think about?
Are we living our best lives now? And if not, what are we waiting for?
Do you know what’s most important to you right now? Are you living like your string is short? What would you do if you knew the length of your life? Would you change everything, or nothing?
P.S. For one of my favorite posts on this topic, and one of my favorite posts ever in the personal finance blogging space, check out this article by JL Collins: Things important, and unimportant