Working to Live, or Living to Work
Get ready y’all… I’m is about to take the limitless pill and unload some deep thoughts on you people!
The adage “Are you working to live? Or living to work?” Has been uttered by people since the caveman days, although they probably just strategically grunted and pointed at the mammoth carcass that they hauled in earlier that week. While it seems cliché, it is truly the question we have to ask ourselves when we get up every day, and as of late, the question has been changed to a question of “Work/Life Balance”. When planning family travel, like we do, it is a constant struggle of “2 weeks of vacation”, “that’s right after bonus time, so we should be able to swing that”, and the constant anxiety of coming back from a 2-week vacation, or even take a few days off, thus making me question, am I working to live, or living to work.
Some of the things that no one sees when we post, or when we make videos, is that we ARE just normal people, with normal budgets, normal problems and the normal pursuit of happiness, health, and success. Working IS a necessity in our house for us to be able to continue pursuing our passions of traveling and seeing this big beautiful world that God gave us. You won’t see us off in Bali for a random 2-week trip, or just picking up and flying across the world to eat at some fancy restaurant on the edge of a mountain, we have to plan. We have to spend weeks planning, even 2 weeks’ worth of travel, and it takes months of consistent and disciplined saving and remembering wants vs needs, to be able to fund our passion. We aren’t digital nomads (and I don’t have any hard feelings against digital nomads, we just aren’t those people) and we don’t have fully remote jobs (even though I have some freedom within a certain geography). I am lucky enough to be in sales in the outdoor industry, and Brooke in a GM of our families Florist business (Shoutout Midwood Flower Shop). We are BLESSED to be in a league of humans that are gainfully employed, roof over our heads, and food in our bellies, and we take a lot of pride in being able to provide for our family, and to strive to be the top of our professional fields, and we don’t have the ability to just give that up at the drop of a hat. Does this mean we are “Living to work”? Not in my opinion!
Living to work, is the mentality of placing your entire personality and self-worth into professional success… and I have been there before. In a previous career, I was a young, ambitious salesman with a very large fortune 500 company, and I undoubtedly fell into the attractive trap of attaching everything I was to the career I had chosen. I pushed for years to be the best of the best, even to the point of forgoing pursuing passions in the name of “putting in the hours”. This led to reaching a point in my life where I was the youngest, and least tenured person, at my position in the company, a comfortable living, and I was miserable. I’ll never forget; Brooke and I got married on a Saturday, Sunday we took the day to regroup and cut our hangovers, and Monday we boarded a plane for our first trip abroad. While on a layover at JFK, I got a call that I had gotten a promotion, and while the pure elation swept over me, a piece of my mind lingered on the fact that I couldn’t be there to quickly integrate into my new role. Let me put that a different way, on my honeymoon, I was thinking about how to work. I look back on that day and I rue the fact that I spent even one moment on Brooke and I’s first excursion into the world of travel (which we now know is much more than a hobby to us) thinking about professional advancement. That, to me, is Living to work.
I still find myself slipping back into that mentality from time to time, however Brooke is a master of knowing me, better than I know myself. Brooke can see from 10 miles away when I am “Living to work”, and calls me out on it. Ever since we made the commitment to enter into this endeavor of Regular People Travel, I have been able to compartmentalize my passions in my life. I also want to make something very clear; it isn’t a problem to strive for success in your professional career, and also strive for success in your passions. I still get up every day and put on my polo, and go out and sell products on behalf of my company, and ensure that the guys and gals I sell to are taken care of. That being said, I do that not for personal validation or self-esteem, I do that to take care of my family and put us in a position to be able to chase our love of traveling together. As I said before, Brooke and I are BLESSED. We are blessed with a wonderful life, a beautiful baby boy, a fat dog, a messy house, and a love that cannot be compared to anything I have ever experienced before. Brooke and I are blessed to be able to come together and plan these trips, and were blessed to be able to have conversations about saving money to fund our endeavors. We are blessed to look at each other and agree that we officially “Work to Live”.