Time, money and energy

A friend once told me a short adage on why life sucks:

When you’re a student you have all the time in the world, lots of energy, but no money.
When you’re working you have enough money, quite some energy, but no time.
When you’re pensioned you have the money to spend, all the time you might wish for, but no energy.

A lot can be said about (and against) the above, but without at least some time, money and energy, life is not particularly enjoyable.

Every new phase in life brings with it a searching for a new balance between the three. For me money has in general not been the limiting factor (I was raised to enjoy whatever you could get). Energy was also always in ample supply (getting a consistent 8 hours of sleep per night really helps there!). Time however was something I was scraping for. With work, friends, hobbies and whatnot, there was not a lot left for new things.

But lately this has been turned around. Being unemployed and / or self employed (without an assignment to be working on right now) gives lots and lots of time. No fixed structure (wake up, go to work, work, get home, eat, have some fun, sleep, do it all over again) to tell you what to do at what point of the day. Instead you have to figure it out yourself, almost from moment to moment. And I was trying to build something up (my own company), which takes a lot of thinking and creates a lot of newness.

Both of which cost a lot of energy. Add to that not getting a consistent 8 hours of sleep per night (due to having fun, alcohol and thinking a lot) and I’m left feeling somewhat jaded at the moment.

Luckily structure will re-assert itself soon enough (in the form of an interesting (nine-to-five) assignment). Goodbye to sleeping late, reading for hours on end, meeting up with people every night. And welcome steady working hours, cooking at fixed times and falling asleep exhausted at 10 o’clock at night (so we can do it all again the next day!).

Yay to a “boring” routine!

For a little while…