[warning: this became another one of my rambling whinge posts]
The idea of this month was to be a big catch-up on all of the
weekend jobs that I've not been finishing for years. Mainly the
important ones. It's looking dubious because true to form I still
haven't got everything finished for my current business project
that needed to be done first, and then I need to tackle the yearly
mind and soul destroying task of completing my tax return before
the end of the month.
So my latest weekend to-do list is still only getting tackled on
weekends, with the aim to compensate by simply working harder. Then
I run into the issue like yesterday when I mess about with either
routine or planned weekend tasks all day, prioritising outdoor ones
during the daylight and since I wasted half of Saturday fiddling
around with limiting which accounts can send mail so I can access
some inboxes full of mailing list posts unencrypted from old
software without risking the password being used to send spam. But
after all that I was getting a headache by the time I got onto
checking some things online for my shares, with which I didn't
achieve much because the share management websites are abysmal (now
I've got duplicate accounts, one with and one without my middle
name, which from looking at investment forums is apparantly typical
and unavoidable with that management platform).
That of course guaranteed that I had a headache by the end of
cooking a late dinner for myself, and went to bed early at about
9PM, which was 8PM the day before due to daylight savings, a
practice which seems to be making less and less sense to me as I
get older.
So all my weekend computer tasks, like a year-long website project
that I've been working on mainly to benefit myself, didn't make it
to that evening either. It has happened that I've found energy for
those things on a weekday evening, but not much lately. But I don't
want to waste daylight, and frankly opportunity to spend time away
from the computer, over days on the weekend either. Half the effort
with that website is trying to design it in a way that it requires
zero maintenance so it doesn't take up time for me later, but does
that help if I never finish it in the first place?
Retirement is the prophesied escape from all this, conveniently
positioned in everyone's life at exactly the point where they're
too deprepit to do much of anything anyway, and busy spending all
their money on medical treatments to try and claw back some of
those abilities lost, before the end in some rip-off retirement
village and nursing home that grabs whatever money they have left
in exchange for treatment finally dismal enough to fill the
never-ending 7.30 report news stories about them on the ABC. Not
that anyone will live that long because the planet will have been
cooked in our own global greenhouse gas cloud by then anyway.
Or just give up now on the whole idea of making money. As I've said
before, it's easier said than done because most of what makes
self-sufficiency practical to start from scratch is achieved with
money - land, tools, materials, transport - and that includes
recurring costs. Still there must be some balance of 'economic
minimalism' that sets a baseline of how much one needs to make to
sustain a lifestyle designed for minimal economic involvement. Some
percentage of average income perhaps? That would have been a better
topic to write a post about than this whinge, but too late now, got
to start work.
