take a moment to clear your mind

Like Clockwork

The ceaseless rhythm of life gives little time to consider breaking the slave clock. The master is our ambition, the slave is our flesh. The product is our creations. Struggling each morning is all we know. We strive to carve out a better life for ourselves, our loved ones, and perhaps leave something worthy behind to the generation that inherits our imagination. Short term survival may trump performing work aligned with our passion, but we can’t dream if we can’t eat. Any work that is a tax on one’s spirit must be carefully weighed. The cost of ill suited labor is not merely a handful of years, it may indelibly tarnish our enthusiasm.

Work and Save till Retirement, or Live and Love our Work?

There will come a decision making moment where we are forced to decide between rebooting our jobs, or towing the line until we save enough for retirement. You may be at that moment now, you may have made the decision long ago, or you may not be ready to face this choice. Regardless the decision will be made and its ramifications are long lived.

The idea of retirement is now more of a dream to most young folks. Many who graduated in the past couple of years from competitive universities have nothing to show for it except a large debt to government loans, and if they’re lucky a meager wage job. They’re desperately looking for work in a dwindling economy. The past couple of years have been rough on new grads and folks out of high school looking for work.

What I find humorous about this decision is that there really wasn’t one for me. Based on who I am, and what I hold sacred, working and saving for retirement at 72 or whatever the age is now is simply not an option. If you’re fortunate enough to discover a type of work you love, you can’t imagine not doing it. It’d be nice to have a totally flexible schedule, and that’s something that can be arranged long before the acceptable retirement age. The only restriction is that we design our work flow to compliment asynchronous activities, and ensure our financial needs are met. The balance between wealth generation and financial needs is the only real limit to our flexibility.

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  • Leland

    Yea… a degree is just a piece of paper. The lazy “human resources” division of many large companies is why university and college degrees are so crucial. Those HR teams don't want to spend the time to evaluate a candidate based on if they can complete a task or not.. they just want a piece of paper that says “this person has played the test game and succeeded (meanwhile paying us thousands of dollars of course)”. Fortunatly, the economy is swiftly moving more and more towards small businesses. :)

    I mean how hard is it to be an HR person when you have so much information at your fingertips? Honestly, interviewing is like a game. People work hard or not based on how you treat them in your company and what responsibilities you give them, not because of what their degree paper says they can do.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Right on Leland. The bulk filter of degrees is hitting a wall. It's our fault for propagating the “competitive learning environment” that isn't producing real work. Training is essential, but not getting paid while learning is a sure sign of disconnect between skills learned and value.

    Imagine a business that's optimized for homework, tests and eliteness as opposed to products and market results. Since when did a new employee anywhere not learn rapidly from their coworkers while leveraging previous work experience? I feel a little annoyed at the 6-7 (Physics/EE) years I spent money and more importantly time learning highly impractical info, while I could have been working and learning real world applicable skills at a job and at night reading.

  • http://steamcatapult.com/ Dave Pinsen

    Your optimism is like your dilithium crystals. I could use some more of that. But sometimes it helps to realize the psychological aspect of things, i.e., how are perceptions of our circumstances are shaped internally.

    After a long slog, I've gotten a couple of distribution prospects recently, and one in particular is burning up some cash in development work. It seems like the closer I get to making money, the more I have to spend. I can be discouraged by the cost, or encouraged by the prospect of a potentially good or great revenue source though.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Things are getting tighter by me as well. But I'm only burning a few k on the business cheap servers 800-900 a year,
    people are expensive 1400 for a week of freelance work,
    marketing is really expensive 700 on a mix of adwords and local radio ads and it's going to cost me more to get in the local newsday's classifieds and Yankee trader.

    This is all on the discovery the costs will ramp up rapidly if we hit on anything, but then it's a different story.

    My day job is having serious problems with keeping their direct rate high (it's a type of consulting services company that makes more based on charging contracts).

    We can be optimistic or pessimistic about our futures, but not let it affect our decisions too much. I comfort myself in thinking a thousand years from now who will care what I did with my time, very likely no one.

  • http://steamcatapult.com/ Dave Pinsen

    We should probably compare notes offline sometime (it might be helpful for both
    of us) but I think Adwords might be largely a waste of money (how many 1 second
    clicks do you get? Googlers have ADD). The best forms of marketing may be ones
    where you don't have to pay up front. Easier said than done, but I would try to
    think of some sort of affiliate relationships with widely-read bloggers who
    write about topics related to your products. I could probably use some tips from
    you on slowing my roll maintenance wise. Hosting/site maintenance costs for me
    are pretty high.

    That no one in a thousand years might care about what we do doesn't comfort me
    though.

    ________________________________

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    We certainly need to brainstorm.

    Hahah, that thousand year thing helps me put my “zomg everything is important” in perspective. Life's quick, best I enjoy every morsel.

  • Leland

    Perhaps we need a change in our education system that rewards “in-situ” learning and life long learning more then a set “4 year brick” of time set specifically towards something that you may never do again in your life.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Yes!
    That's a pretty big social shift though. It may occur quite naturally with economic reorganization.