–
Almost nineteen years into early retirement now, I’ve come to realize that the complete freedom of this lifestyle can be a double-edged sword.
You’ve already heard me raving plenty about the upside: having the freedom to raise a son from the day he was born to beyond his eighteenth birthday with no compromises. And then to put thousands of hours into everything else I value as well: family, health, friends, adventures, building stuff, and even writing the occasional blog post. No complaints about any of this.
But if I can indulge you to play me a brief Tiny Violin of First World Problems solo, even this perfect life comes with one flaw: I never have to do anything I don’t want to do.
To most people, this sounds like a dream come true. Especially if you combine total freedom with plenty of money, life is just a non-stop blissful playground of self actualization, right?
Well, maybe, but maybe not. In reality, the answer depends on who you are.
Freedom and money reveal a person’s true strengths and weaknesses, and the result is a spectrum with “Unlimited drugs and booze on the couch” at one end, and “Create and manage a series of nonprofit foundations which employ thousands of people to research and invest in medical advances and clean energy” at the other.
For most of my journey so far, I seem to have found the balance pretty naturally. My Dad job was very intense for the first decade, but somehow I also had time to build and restore quite a few houses in the neighborhood, take plenty of intense trips to interesting places, give some talks and make some videos, and still write a few hundred blog posts.
But in these last few years, I have started slowing