to envy my friends stripped back life?

[lifeontheotherside]

I am just back from visiting my friend over the weekend and was struck by how lovely her life is compared to mine. She lives in an excouncil house in a semi rural area, with beautiful woods and countryside on her doorstep, she doesn't have a job but works from home part time on a hobby that also provides her an income. Her husband has a professional job, earns a good wage and they live well below their means so they always have money for treats and luxuries like a couple of holidays a year, nice skincare, books etc without buying into a lifestyle they don't want. She has quite a stripped down social calander and only makes time for people and things she really likes.

She seems to have the time to bake cakes, cook from scratch daily, read, exercise, have quality time with her husband. She looks about 15 years younger than me and I am the same age! I live in the city and juggle fulltime work, a 5 year old, my relationship, my social life, parents etc all on the fumes of my empty tank. My rent is very expensive for a pokey flat and even though I live in the city I spend hours a day commuting to and from work!

When I get home I don't even want to think about food so my diet is crap and I have no time for the gym. I feel like I am missing my son growing up and the stress of everything I have to do means I often don't enjoy my life very much. I can feel a sense of satisfaction if I meet a deadline or if my son seems happy but its mostly short lived as there is always something else to cope with!

My husband and I don't spend a lot of time together. I tend to veg out infront of some crap telly while he is on his laptop. We both like to be social and put pressure on ourselves to always be out doing something and challenging ourselves but again we just end up dragging ourselves through things we are meant to enjoy rather than truly enjoying it.

For many years I felt my friend was living a very limited life but now I can see that she was trying to make a life that would satisfy her and be a life she could actively enjoy instead of running around always on the go, too busy to really experiance it.

When I look around at my friends and workmates it seems like most people are just always on the go, exhausted, using or food to cope, not having the time or energy to enjoy their loved ones and children or to just be. I envy my friend her ability to see all that at a young age and take her life in a different direction but I think i'd be too scared to follow suit. I know I depend on my job for my identity and self worth, I worry that if our lives slowed down my marriage would fail or that I wouldn't have the inner recources to make a life for myself outside the mainstream life script.

I thought i was succeeding but now at 40 I wonder if I really made any choices at all. Does anyone else feel like this?

And having some profitable activity working from home is often brushed of as MLM.

I have mentioned before on the is website that I work from home, hours to suit me, I work part time, and earn more than my OH.

I have had some very rude replies- " don't listen to her it will be MLM" or " someone plugging MLM again".

It is possible to earn a decent income from home- even women can do it!!

speakout I have known a few women in my life that have set up home businesses and done extremely well out of it and they weren't mlm ones either. One women has always stuck in my head, she set up her own children's clothing website from home, sourced all the clothing and then sold it online. Her house was a tip because she was so busy with orders and making a really good wage from it. She had to have an extension built to create her own office for all the paperwork and one bedroom had been coverted into a shop floor so to speak, filled with mannequins for website photos, packaging and the actual clothing. She had a good lifestyle from it and it worked for her around her children and if she decided she was finishing work at 2pm that day then she did.

I think you're all missing the point though. Running a business, whether from home or otherwise, is hard work. It might be rewarding in many ways but it's not a hobby. The smug posters seemed to be denigrating the whole concept of work as the preserve of people who were too greedy or stupid to value the finer things in life. To which pickle said screw you,, and I think there's something in what she said.

I have the stripped back life the OP mentions. Even though it's full time I work from home, husband has a good job etc. But I'm seriously lonely and isolated - I didn't realise how much social interaction came from being in an office environment. I live 200 miles from family, and husband has a lot of personal interests which mean he is out at least 2 nights a week. I'm childfree but that adds to the isolation - my friends with kids all meet up together at various activity centres and locally these won't allow adults in unless you have a child with you. My other childfree friends are all working and/or dating, or have moved to the other side of the city, so it can take weeks to make a free date with anyone. I'm actually missing my frenetic life in my twenties when friends were around the corner and we all had the same local pub. Stripped back can be boring!

In fact does anyone ever have a "paid hobby"?

When you start to make money from your craft then it stops being just a hobby.
Whether you are a singer, a photographer, you make candles you write.

When your activity takes on a commercial angle you have other people's hoops to jump though.

You end up taking photographs at other people's weddings, you have to make a batch of 100 candles to fulfil an order, even the top earners world famous singers have to do a lot of other stuff to support their career- meetings with accountants, promoters, boring travel.

Making a few experimental candles a week or singing to the dog may be a hobby, as soon as money is involved you have to dance at least in part to someone else's tune.

I think we are in agreement speak out. If you can genuinely float about doing only things you want to do you are lucky and it's not the case that anyone could do what you do if only they "stripped back". That's not to say there's no value in reassessing your priorities to see if you've got your own personal balance right.

longestlurkerever

Agreed- how "stripped back" do we want though?

There is the financial aspect, but we still have to do stuff that we don't like in life.

Cleaning toilets, changing sheets. taking the dog to the vet.

For me the killer would be commute.

I haven't worked outside the home for 20 years.

I try to avoid going out at rush hour, but being stuck in lines of traffic every day would be soul destroying.

Luckily I have found it easy to make money from home.

I don't mind commuting particularly. I work from home at least once a week but like to go into the office on other days. I get the tube. It takes about 20 mins, plus another 20 mins walking.

When I first decided to become a freelancer it was because I moved to a new city where all the jobs were a 1.5 hour heavy-traffic commute away. No way I was doing that every day.

It's easier to not mind commuting when you have a great subway system!

Yes, but lots of people talk about the tube as the worst aspect of life in the ratrace! It's a squish but it doesn't ruin my day.

Yes, but lots of people talk about the tube as the worst aspect of life in the ratrace! It's a squish but it doesn't ruin my day.

Yeah, horses for courses I guess, but I always think most people would prefer a slight squish than hours lifting your foot on and off the clutch in a traffic jam! At least the tube is almost always on time, almost always very regular, and almost always gets from A to B in the same amount of time.

Very few places have a tube.

I know they don't. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. I wasn't being smug about my commute! Fwiw I used to have to drive to watford. It was expensive but you had personal space and the radio. I am not saying no one should hate commuting. I was just commenting that I don't personally mind it that much

longestlurkerever

Not making a point- sorry didn't mean to come across as rude.

Public transport is poor in many parts of the UK.

I can see how a commute in a city with good transport may be OK, for many of us it's not great.

Fair dos! Sorry, I wasn't trying to argue either. Just shooting the breeze

20 mins on the tube wouldn't bother me much either. 3 hours a day in traffic with a numb foot on the other hand.....ugh, truly soul destroying.

I do think it's interesting that when talking about the good life, commuters crammed on the tube is held up as the ratrace nightmare to avoid. Personally i'd vastly prefer 20 mins on the tube to 40 mins on a rammed A road to get from work back to my supposed country good life idyll. I know it's not one or the other, but imo poor rural public transport is vastly underestimated in peoples idealised vision of the stripped back country life. Sitting in a car to get anywhere is definitely not everyone's cup of tea - it certainly isn't mine.

longestlurker That's my point too. I have a business and I work as an employee. It's really hard running a business. DH runs a bigger business than mine but it's just hard work. I've continued working as an employee because I'm not comfortable taking the risk of being totally reliant on my business for my income. Also, working as an employee has meant I've been able to grow the business much much faster. In 20 years I've gone from £20k to £13.5m. It's been hairy at times and I've had to put additional money in to cover certain bills.

However, these people who have a hobby job do very much annoy. Jo Malone made a business from selling candles. My friend making beeswax candles for £95 is no Jo Malone nor will she probably ever get close to that. She spends about 20 hours a week on her business. I spend more than that on mine and it's a oiled machine at this stage. At the beginning I would work 24/7. I ate, breathed and lived building my business. It's my first baby.

I regularly have people laugh at my business. One of DHs friends thinks I am a virtual assistant. I've never corrected him. Back in Denmark, where DH is from, they are horrified that I work as hard as I do as DH earns enough. Apparently I should be doing some sort of low paid work. Why would I do low paid work when I'm capable of doing more? The best is that my employee job is being a CFO of a fintech company here in Manhattan. That attitude is misogyny. Someone pointing out that a MLM sales rep isn't a business and working 20hrs a week at a hobby you are trying to eek money out of isn't a business isn't misogyny. I'd be thinking exactly the same thing about a man doing the same thing.

weariness...

To anyone who runs a going concern from home, paying their taxes and paying their bills - be it macrameing big seat covers, dipping candles, sticking glitter on juju sticks, or writing Harry Potter books - good for you. Good for the SAHPs doing full time childcare, because that is work too.

I very specifically said that if we ALL decided to macrame AND we ALL aimed to earn only the most basic of incomes, economy and society would not be sustainable. It wouldn’t - there’s no arguing that.

Therefore, we can only afford for some people to choose to do creative things and some people (not necessarily the same people) to live on the most basic of incomes. Everyone else is going to have to work in jobs that keep the lights on - which involve going off to offices, warehouses, schools, factories, farms, hospitals - working full time, set hours, maybe night shifts or split shifts, commuting to work, nurseries, being someone else’s employee - things that various people on this thread have been so negative about, and which the OP had started to compare unfavourably to her friend’s apparently amaaaazing life.

My point is really that given this reality, it is phenomenally, outrageously, selfish to suggest that it is OK or even admirable to choose to become workless at the age of 35 or 40. And by that I mean people who choose to either do nothing or to do an absolutely token activity “to escape the bondage of having to work”. It is not OK. It is saying, in effect “I expect others to directly or indirectly subsidise me while I choose to be idle, and they are mugs for doing it”.

Only on MN could there be a thread where people engage in boasting about how little they or their friends choose to do/earn. It is so insulting for all the people who earn no or low income through no choice of their own - particularly because the “choosers” invariably have other stealth sources of income (spouse, property, DB scheme etc) to rely on.

Finally we don’t know what OP’s friend does as this mysterious stress-free part time creative hobby. But it’s interesting that among the list of activities OP’s friend does while choosing not to work, there no mention of volunteering in the community, or other charity work. Because “she only makes time for people she really likes”. Again, her choice, but just imagine a world where everyone was that self centred.

Pickle I disagree with you. If someone is able to work hard, save up and live frugally ( and so go without many of the things that many people who work could not do without) then yes, I do admire them for having the self discipline to create that life. I have to go an teach children every day, many of whom have not been parented properly and so present behaviors that are very stressful to manage as a teacher. Do I wish I had lived frugally in my 20's, gone without, save every penny possible so now in my 40's I could choose not to have to work 40 hours a week in a stressful job that many people simply could not do year in year out. You bet I do. There have always been independently wealthy people but now the ordinary people can choose to live a life that enables them to retire early and I do indeed admire them, rather than envy them. I accept I made different choices so now I must work full time till my 50's I imagine to have those same freedoms. Life is very short pickle- you choose to use yours to keep the lights on....as you said some people can choose to not do that so all power to them for putting themselves in a position where they can do that. I cannot understand why you have such a 'bee in your bonnet' for want of a better expression. You have one life Pickle.It might not be as long as you would hope because we have little control over that area. You keep putting those lights on every day.

For a better articulated account...
www.mrmoneymustache.com/2015/04/15/great-news-early-retirement-doesnt-mean-youll-stop-working/

That's all very well luckybird but who says hanging around in semi retirement baking cakes and so on is making the best of our one life either?

"So Here’s What Would Really Happen if More People Pursued MMM-Style Early Retirement

I find that when people earn their freedom from money constraints, they usually don’t stop working. Instead they start doing their best work. Looking at many of society’s highest achievers right now, the world leaders and founders of the most productive companies, I see mostly people who have already made it. And yet are still working because it means something to them.

Early retirement, according to this new definition, does not mean quitting work, even while it may well mean quitting your job. It means opting out of the bullshit portion of your work. The commuting, the politics, the production of inferior products just because your boss has found a profitable niche to exploit. When used correctly, a sizeable ‘stash can help you become a more ethical person.

Early-retired Doctors might set up smaller practices which operate without any pressure for profit optimization, and without patience for insurance company shenanigans. They might treat their medical staff better than the larger operations do.

Early-retired Attorneys might refuse all cases that are based on questionable ethics, and do only work that actually helps somebody.

Google engineers who retire early might still work or contract part-time, or feel compelled to create completely new inventions with their newly freed minds. If some of these inventions grow big and end up being acquired right back into Google, it’s just another dividend of early retirement and the cycle will begin anew.

How would you run your own life, with a continuing desire to create but no immediate need to make the next mortgage payment?

Early retirement also leaves much more room for family life, because you lose your fear of falling behind. Sure, I’m currently far less “productive” in conventional business terms than I would be if wasn’t a full-time Dad. In fact, before beginning this project I granted myself 20 years of slack time, just to make sure work would not take over. But who cares about conventional business productivity? There will be plenty of time in the second half of my life to embark on bigger things."

Mr money mustache.
www.mrmoneymustache.com/2015/04/15/great-news-early-retirement-doesnt-mean-youll-stop-working/

Longest lurker- my choice would not be to hang out and bake cakes but I respect the person who chooses that path for their own reasons that they do not need to explain to me.
Many jobs are a form of bondage and it is naive to suggest there is a nobility in doing them, when they make people less happy than they could be if they could spend less money and work less or not at all.
Of course I respect the person who works away at a job they hate to support their self and their family but I don't admire them or envy them, ever.
Much of our society is built upon the notion that if you get educated you can be paid better and build a better life for yourself and ultimately have more choices in your working life. If someone can work for 10-15 years and then live off their savings for the rest of their life they are genuinely free to use their time in a way that may well be philanthropic, or they may just bake cakes and I am relieved to live in a world where that choice is possible too.
The OP is envious because she is seeing what freedom her friend has compared to her own life and envy or certainly admiration is an appropriate emotion in such circumstances.