Diary of a future rentier (38)

Stolen moments. The more time passes, the more I tell myself that our little moments to ourselves are increasingly rare and especially increasingly precious. When you're a kid, you enjoy life without asking too many questions, everything falls from the sky. Around your twenties, you become independent, but life is light, without many worries. We work just to ensure a minimum vital, that is to say to pay for food, a place to live, to get clothes and above all to have money to go out and party. We have time... In the evening after work, on the weekend... The world is ours.

Then you start to settle down. You have to make some concessions for your partner, but you still have plenty of time for yourself. You can have a quiet romantic vacation, you can enjoy leisure activities and go out as a couple, and you can still devote plenty of time to your own passions.

Little by little, insidiously, with age, you are given responsibilities at work and a salary to go with it. At first you think it's cool. More salary means more leisure time or more savings to become financially independent faster. But in truth it mostly means a greater negative impact on your peace of mind and your free time. You finish later in the evening, you have to start earlier in the morning, you ruminate outside of work hours. You never disconnect, even on vacation.

And then the kids come along. When you're not in it, you don't really realize it, but kids take up all your time. EVERYTHING. So sure, we love them and we have a great time. But we don't have any time for ourselves anymore.

Over time, your life changes to such an extent that at some point it no longer really becomes your life, but rather the life of others, your employer, your family, society. It is still you, interconnected in the middle of everything, but no longer the you detached from everything, without attachment, the you of your youth.

Stolen moments. These words have a double meaning. First, they are the moments that were stolen from you, the ones that belonged to you, the ones where you did what you wanted, when you wanted. The ones from your youth. The ones you would like to find again.

To find them, you have no choice but to take time for yourself. Take time. We often use this expression, it has become part of everyday language, but we have forgotten its meaning: taking time means that we are going to appropriate it, by all means, even if it means stealing it.

When you don't have money, you go to the bank or welfare. Or you go and steal it. Unfortunately there is no bank or welfare mechanism that can lend you money or give you time, so you have no choice but to steal it.

Stolen moments. These are moments when you have nothing to do, at least nothing to do for others. These are the ones you sometimes enjoy without really thinking about it or wanting to: a moment spent waiting in a doctor's waiting room, a car ride or a walk, a hairdresser's appointment, insomnia, a morning coffee... Over time, when we realize that these moments are increasingly rare, we learn not only to enjoy them, but above all to steal them, really.

We slow down the pace: we start walking more slowly, we drive less quickly, just to enjoy the present moment for longer.
Or we isolate ourselves somewhere, anywhere. We steal a little moment for ourselves during the lunch break, on the way home.
It's as if we had to make appointments with ourselves, just to find ourselves again.

Of course, all this is not normal. Having to steal time to appropriate it, almost secretly, is not in the nature of things. Explain this to a teenager or a South American and he will laugh in your face. But unfortunately, in our countries, where everything has to be done right away, and where both members of a couple work, this situation is far from rare.

So of course, we can continue to steal these moments. It allows us to recharge our batteries and keep going. But in the long term, it is better to take back the time that was stolen from us by making us return to "active" life, or rather should I say the Rat Race. And to free yourself from it definitively, there is only one way:financial independence.