Sometimes, all I wanna do is escape the jail of capitalism, escape the gray life here, buy a campervan in the south, and enjoy some minimal life.
TIME AND
AND working full-time (AND overwork)
AND working out (swimming, gym, running, yoga,…)
AND investing time in my projects
AND reading & learning
AND spending time with GF
AND cooking, supermarket shopping, laundry,...
AND headspace moments (thinking, writing, wandering around, drawing thoughts, hiking in nature, me-time,…)
AND social time with friends
AND sleeping 8 hours
AND personal care (things from shaving to tooth check-ups)
AND having time to go out
AND following the latest developments
AND
AND
AND a hundred other things I wanna or should be doing
There's never time left after a workday.
How do you manage to do all that without having every minute of your day planned out up front? (I love to keep a natural flow.) I don't even have kids yet. I have to manage at least three things at the same time constantly.
There is this constant overload of content, stuff & things to worry about all around us. I miss the worry-free moments of skipping high school. I had time back then to think, walk around, and have all that fresh space in my head.
Who is happiest? the hunter-gatherer or the factory worker?
I work full-time. I work from 7 AM to around 6 PM from Monday to Friday.
When am I supposed to do all this stuff? After work? I am so tired when coming home that I often sleep for an hour. I am not in a mood to do productive work. Even when I do work in the evening for a few hours, it becomes late quickly, affecting my sleep; I have to wake up early the next day. I have to give up sleep to find some time for myself. The weekends are filled up with basic household stuff for which I have no time in the week. There are no time blocks available in my calendar. I don’t find time anymore to find myself. The two days I have on the weekend are not enough to charge my battery for the week. This is a system that’s draining people's battery.
When can I work out, for example?
After work? ➡️ So tired; my body feels empty from the long day at work. You could argue that I should have discipline, but the truth is, I feel that my body & mind need rest at such moments, not a workout at all.
Before work? ➡️I don’t have any evenings if I have to wake up early. There is no social life anymore.
My whole life is about work. I like my job; it is just that I do not have time outside of work to do the things that are important to me.
When do I get a minute left to read a book? When do I plan upcoming events? When do I have space for my headspace moments? When do I have time to discover myself? When can I be social? When can I build projects? When can I work out? When do I keep up with the latest developments? When can I spend time with GF? When do I analyze the corporate market?
Above all that, I only have a dozen days off in a year. I already need many of these days for practical stuff (dentist checkups, corporate events I am following, shopping for basic needs, etc. ).
Time is one of your most valuable assets. You can't buy more of it when you're older.
This TikTok video that went viral explains very well how I am feeling.
Walden, questioning capitalism, some questions & notes in my head
David Thoreau sits at his home along the lake. I feel so many similarities in his thinking. Sometimes, I want to build my own hunter-gatherer house and escape this life I have—this capitalist trap.
As I read Walden by Thoreau, I was thinking about the whole question of capitalism. Questions are popping up in my head, and I am questioning my own life and actions.
Can we find a way to live sustainably with capitalism?
Are you one of the 3 who have success or one of the 97 who go broke?
Can you escape capitalism? what is the line between that and a homeless person? It is handy to have money to see a doctor when you're sick
clothes are false skin; back in the day of hunter-gatherers, everybody was dressed more or less the same; now, we have so many options, and clothes are important status symbols
universal knowledge needed for managing a business; since the Industrial Revolution, complexity has increased, traders are working full-time, around the clock to trade their goods, having no life -> is that worth it?
what are our basic needs? what can be seen as EXTRA (luxe, more adventurous living)
basic needs. food, shelter, clothing, fuel, health, etc.?
problems generated by one generation are passed to the next
money above the person?
making ourselves sick so we can spend the money to cure ourselves?
a search to escape the known world toward 'a different world'
Sometimes, all I want is to live like the people in these stories:
I want to be a hippy from time to time. Escaping this nonsense life I am living.
Western society has become one giant factory. Constantly striving to be productive. Everything is a transaction. Everything is money.
How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so? -charles
In a hurry to work, in a rush to the supermarket. Coming home after work, tired, with just enough energy left to drop onto the sofa. Every morning, I stand in traffic jams, in gray weather, and in terrible smog air from the cars standing still on the street. Every morning, I regret the time I went to bed the night before. I tell myself every night tonight will be different, but there's always something coming in between. The 7 am to 6 pm workday I am having is a hunter-gatherer's worst nightmare.
I took this image this morning in my car, rushing to my first client. It is dark, cold, gray weather; it rains, and I am standing in a traffic jam. 'what a great day.'
Out of the fact that we have basic services around us like food and shelter, are we happier?
Capitalism has its great points. As for example, not having to spend the whole summer on the land or having more advanced healthcare tools.
Yet, we are also getting burned out and making ourselves sick in our only created factory. We need a new form of capitalism.
Life, sometimes, it is also a sad joke. The art is to find a balance between capitalism, the environment, and personal well-being. We must remember that money only holds value as long as we assign it value, as it stays a human creation.