Diary of a future rentier (52)

There are times in life when all the shit seems to happen at once. It's as if the personal and professional worlds have decided to push you to your limits together. Usually, you have a haven of peace, in which you can recharge your batteries, but when both of them are pushing you around simultaneously, you have to have strong muscles to hold on.

When you wake up at 5am and go to bed at 11pm with just a few minutes to yourself in the middle to eat a sandwich, there is a problem. When you spend your lunch break on the phone to sort out family problems, not content with having already run like a hare all morning for work, there is something wrong. And when on top of that, after finishing your day of exhausted work, you still have to spend time on private problems, then you are on a slippery slope. A few days at this pace is fine, but if it lasts too long, it smells badly of burnout.

 It’s at times like these that it’s important to put things into perspective in order to keep going. If you’re running in the mountains and have been lost in a snowstorm for hours, you can quickly become overwhelmed by panic and despair. On the other hand, if you know you’re stuck just a few hundred meters from a shelter, you’ll just sit back, clench your buttocks, and let the deluge pass.

Going through a turbulent period in one's life is very different depending on whether one has a positive outlook on the future or not. If one is caught up in the lab rat race, with no way out for decades, then it's enough to shoot yourself. On the other hand, sometimes all you have to do is see things in a different way in order to emerge from new horizons full of hope. The path to financial independence is a typical example of an approach that allows us to grasp the often unpleasant reality of our world.