a meaningful life
Come on a journey with me for a moment. You are 15 years old. You are sat in your school library looking up university prospectus books hoping to stumble upon your dream job. You know that you like numbers, so you zero-in on finance and accounting.
Decision made, you spend the next 10 years of your life studying. Firstly for the entry-level qualifications for a position at the most prestigious university in the city. You take out an eye-watering student loan, move into your student accommodation and attend freshers week where, for the first time, you truly discover alcohol, drugs and casual sex. And so for four or so years, you spend your life scraping by your classes, focusing more on your social life than on your future.
Eventually you graduate university and land the dream job you have been aspiring to for the past 10 years. You've finally made it. So you move out of your university accommodation and into your first apartment in the city, just a few streets away from your new office. You complete the induction and for the first week you are eased into the job, heading straight to the pub on Friday night with your new best friends.
You blink.
Suddenly, 10 years have passed. You are rolling a cigarette at your desk, the very same desk you started working at in your 20s. You make your way downstairs to smokers corner. Shouldering your way through the front door while scrambling for a lighter, you spark the cigarette before the door has even clicked shut behind you. You stand in the rain with the city noises in your periphery, wearing your thousand-pound suit that you are still paying off, smoking the same brand of cigarettes you found yourself addicted to in the first year of university. You take a long drag from your cancer stick and you realise something. You have wasted the last 10 years of your life sifting through receipts, expenses claims, overtime forms, purchase orders and invoices, all to balance the books for an executive team that still don't know you on a first-name basis. Some of them have never even met you. You have spent every month-end since your first week on-the-job processing the pay checks of people who are paid ridiculous six-figure salaries (head and shoulders above you) plus massive annual bonuses that could buy over the coffee shop in the lobby. In the pursuit of more, you find yourself feeling worse than ever - you have made yourself miserable. You extinguish your cigarette and flick it into a storm drain muttering, "fuck this" and stroll back up the stairs to type out your resignation letter.
In this scenario, the pursuit of a particular lifestyle has only led to you coveting even more. From wearing clothes you have on finance, to picking up crazy bar tabs on your second credit card; to smoking cigarettes on every screen break talking about how shitty your job is. You realise that your hours spent cramming for exams were all in the pursuit of someone else's dream. Sure, you may have a few more zeros on the end of your pay check than you did at uni, but you don't feel any richer. In fact, you're heavily in debt. Not just with student loans, but with credit cards, store cards, car finance and a mortgage on a house bigger than you actually need. A house which you instinctually fill with arbitrary things you don't need either. Your big fat pay check is met with bigger, fatter bills every month. Looking back on your student life, you had fewer responsibilities, less stress, debt and discontent. You were looking forward, not backward. Hell, you even had more disposable income. You were happier. Yet we treat this as normal these days. We say it's merely because we have grown up now, that we'll be happy one day, that we can sleep when we're dead. Surely there is another way?
Enter minimalism, from stage-right.
Hear me out, you! There are stereotypes and myths and un-niceties associated with minimalism - as well as a whiff of pretentiousness, so let me debunk some of them for you. The goal of minimalism isn't to have an echoey home with some Scandinavian furniture, a sparse wardrobe and no TV or internet. In fact the minimalism itself isn't the goal at all. It's certainly not a life of organising either. Being good at organising doesn't really make you a minimalist, as much as it makes you a tidy hoarder. Think about it and be honest with yourself, how much shit do you find yourself "organising" through, realising the last time you saw this shit was the last time you apparently "organised" it. If that sounds familiar, then yeah, you're a hoarder - sorry! But if you are bored of that cycle, then maybe minimalism (less the cliches) is worth a shot. The true goal of minimalism is to ditch all that excess that clutters our home, our cars, our minds - to free up our time for the important things, so that you never need to get good at organising it all.
Simply-put, the trick is to loose that craving, that itch, that need for things you can't actually afford and which don't actually satisfy you as much as you thought they would. Once you loose that, you loose all the debt that comes with that shit you don't need. When you loose that debt you have more agency over your finances than you did before. Rather than sending your pay check down the financing blackhole every month, you have the freedom to save and invest. With your overheads lowered, you have the option to spend your time how you see fit - not how your boss does. You have more time for the important things in your life, the people and the things which align perfectly with your values. The accountant who earned upward of £60,000 but who was heavily in debt and was discontented with his lack of personal growth. He could become a Personal Finance Advisor, earning around £30,000 by helping ordinary people every day - while actually feeling richer than ever before. For many, that may seem like a non-sensical step down the so-called career ladder. The truth is that a big stressful job with a big fat pay check every month is only worth it if you decide that your discontent can be bought. The only person standing in the way of your own liberation is you.
~ Aedan.