Swimming Upstream To Go With The Flow

Yesterday, I asked you to think about the organization and the people who lead the organization where you make your living (i.e., secure a paycheck from your work for it).

Identifying the predominant motivations and what is rewarded in the culture was what I was hoping you could discern.

Here’s my perspective on it.

While there have been pockets of exceptions, in general, every for-profit organization I worked for before achieving FIRE had an extreme bias toward:

• Sustaining multiple goals, initiatives, and projects over deep-dive tendencies

• External evaluation and extrinsic rewards over internal validation and self-realization

• Structure and routine over spontaneous creative play

Sure, the other side of the spectrum gets used, too,

but in my experience, the buck goes to the person who can do the most, with the most breadth, who is perceived by others as the best, and who does it all like clockwork, with no surprises.

These organizations, at their core, are designed to run like command-and-control military operations, with hierarchical organizational structures.

There are pros and cons to this.

I don't mean this as a full-scale critique.

However, as someone who is post-FIRE, my desire to escape the grind was based on spending 75% of my waking life (or more) within these structures.

Now I want my post-FIRE lifestyle to reflect the other ends of the spectrums more:

• Deep dives over plate spinning

• Internal satisfaction and fulfillment over external praise or criticism

• Adventure and play over hyper-control and predictability

I still value variety in goals. Thus, I am more of a sequential deep-diver.

But when I worked in those organizations, that wasn't a real possibility.

There were always ten or more checklist items to attend to at all times.

I still value feedback and prefer and seek positive affirmation over criticism.

However, I want what I spend the majority of my time on to be more about my ongoing process of individuation, living authentically, and self-actualization.

And I came to love structure and routine as a result of my schooling and work experiences. It's how things get done.

I just don't want as much of it, and I want to question my motives for introducing more of it into my life.

I want to be very clear about when it is helpful, and perhaps even necessary, versus when it's my cultural conditioning taking over and making me act like a well-oiled machine.

There are challenges in doing this,

and I don't think I'm alone in facing them. I bet many people who read this article can relate.

For example, take deep dives versus plate spinning.

Whether you're pre-FIRE or post-FIRE, you'll likely still experience FOMO (fear of missing out).

It may sound something like this:

“If all I do is focus on getting in shape, what about all my other creative projects and lifestyle goals?”

Or take creating this blog as an example of something that is very much on the internal, intrinsic-motivation side of the spectrum.

At certain points, I do ask myself, “Why am I doing this when I am not marketing it or receiving monetary rewards for doing so?”

Fortunately, I find this less of an issue than deep diving versus keeping multiple plates spinning, and that's because I no longer require monetary rewards.

Adventure and play are extremely difficult for me to pursue post-FIRE.

This is at the heart of my feelings of freedom deficiency.

I have structured my lifestyle in such a way as to create opportunities to go on adventures and have plenty of time for fun in the sun.

yet I find I don't do it, or am not doing enough of it (i.e., having fun).

I find too much comfort and safety in structure and routines.

plus, I have made public and very definitive commitments about my One Hit Wonders.

And that is a catch-22.

On the one hand, I would not be writing and posting a daily blog article if I hadn't made this public declaration (which is a form of external validation, by the way).

Nor would I likely be getting up at 5:30 a.m. this morning to make sure I get an hour-long walk in before drafting this article if I hadn't made the same type of public declaration to sustain a 15,000 steps per day average for a year.

These Routines create some of the same anxiety and desire to escape that my working life generated.

It feels like something hanging over my head.

This reduces my desire to just go “be” a kid again.

Thus, I don't have this figured out.

I am more like Mike Myers's Saturday Night Live character, Middle-Aged Man, and his never-ending quest to reduce his beer belly.

“I’m working on it!”

Back tomorrow with some more details on how that is going.