I Don’t want an easy life

Things I Don’t Want To Get Used To

Christina and I have been trying to take a vacation since March.

We finally booked a week at the beach for November, just before Thanksgiving. By the time we get there, nearly eight months will have passed since we first started talking about getting away. We both wanted to go, but between our schedules, responsibilities, and everything we’re working on, we never seemed to get around to making it happen. We could probably debate who was responsible for getting the trip organized, but the truth is that neither of us did a particularly good job of making it happen.

We’re both in the middle of building businesses. Christina is building her real estate business and rehabbing our first rental property. I’m building Eastwood Strength while continuing to work my corporate job. We’re both working harder than we ever have, and we’re both genuinely enjoying what we’re building. Much of that work is intended to create something we’ve wanted for a long time, greater financial independence and more control over our time.

Which is what makes the vacation interesting. We’re working incredibly hard to create more freedom in the future while struggling to make room for some of that freedom now.

I’ve been thinking about that contradiction because it isn’t really about a vacation. The vacation just made something visible that I’ve been wrestling with for much longer.

For most of my early adult life, I understood the path in front of me to be pretty straightforward. Get an education. Find a good job. Buy a house. Raise a family. Work hard, save for retirement, and hopefully live long enough and remain healthy enough to enjoy everything you spent decades working for. It’s the path a lot of us inherited, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with the individual pieces. My career has allowed me to provide for my family, while marriage, raising children, and the responsibilities of building a life together have required sacrifices I would willingly make again. Those weren’t years spent waiting for something better. They were meaningful parts of the life I was already living.

What I didn’t question much when I was younger was the assumption underneath the plan. There’s a reason people call it the rat race. Follow the path, keep moving through the maze, and eventually you’ll reach the cheese. For most of us, the cheese is retirement, enough money and enough freedom to finally decide what we want to do with our time.

That began to change for me in 2008. My parents had a successful real estate investor friend who attended their Bible study and offered seminars to help people interested in real estate learn and grow. That was really Christina’s world, not mine. She had been dabbling in real estate while managing our home and homeschooling our children. I wasn’t particularly interested in becoming a real estate investor, but I was interested in what investing might make possible.

We attended one of his seminars called The Secret Sauce. What caught my attention wasn’t real estate as much as the way he thought about money, work, and time. For the first time, I began to see that there were other routes through the maze.

His ideas continued to grow beyond real estate, eventually becoming Lifeonaire, a mastermind community built around people helping one another pursue success in business, life, and relationships. Christina and I eventually became part of that community, and over the years it challenged a lot of assumptions I hadn’t realized I was carrying.

One of the biggest was my understanding of the cheese.

I still wanted financial independence, but I no longer saw financial independence or retirement as the reward. They could give me greater freedom over how I spent my time, but what I did with that freedom was what actually mattered. I didn’t want to reach some arbitrary age, stop working, and declare that I had finally made it. I like meaningful work. I like building things, solving problems, helping people, and being useful.

Even my feelings about corporate America are more complicated than simply hating my job. I do hate the rigidity of the system and the amount of life that gets organized around someone else’s schedule. At the same time, I love my team. I value the relationships, collaboration, and camaraderie we’ve built. The actual work is what it is. What I want is greater agency over where my time goes and what my work is for.

Over time, the question became less about when I could retire and more about something I hope I’ll be able to answer much later.

What did I do with the life I was given?

For me, a good answer to that question won’t be measured by how much money I accumulated or how much fun I managed to squeeze into my life. It will have much more to do with relationships, service, meaningful work, faith, the people I was available for, and whether I used my time in ways that reflected what I said mattered to me. There will be things I wish I had done differently. I think that’s unavoidable. A finite life means every yes eventually requires a no somewhere else. What matters more to me is whether the things I chose to give my life to were worth what they cost.

Nearly eighteen years after The Secret Sauce, I’m still growing into some of what I first began learning in that room. That doesn’t bother me the way it might have when I was younger. Anything worthwhile takes time, especially when the growth is happening in the middle of a career, marriage, raising children, bills, responsibilities, and ordinary life. Understanding something and learning to live it aren’t always the same thing.

Lately, I’ve found a name for one particular pattern I’ve been examining for a long time, normalized postponement.

I don’t mean delayed gratification. There are plenty of good reasons to sacrifice something today for something worthwhile tomorrow. Raising children requires it. Building a business requires it. Saving money, developing a career, caring for people, and keeping commitments all require us to give up things we might want in the moment. Those sacrifices aren’t necessarily taking us away from a good life. Much of the time, they’re part of one.

And this isn’t some “YOLO, take the vacation” philosophy either. As entertaining as that might be, choices have consequences, and other people often depend on us.

What I’m questioning is whether the things I postpone are still being postponed intentionally.

I’m finding better words for something I’ve been wrestling with, and probably practicing both consciously and subconsciously, for a long time. There seems to be a meaningful difference between intentional postponement and habitual postponement. Sometimes I know exactly why something needs to wait. I’ve considered the tradeoff and decided that something else matters more right now. Other times, I’m not sure I’ve made a decision at all. I’ve simply become accustomed to putting certain things off.

That can happen quietly…

When the kids are older. When work slows down. When there’s a little more money. When this project is finished. When the business reaches the next level. When life settles down.

Someday.

Most of us probably don’t consciously decide to postpone our lives. We make reasonable decisions. We fulfill responsibilities. We take care of people. We pursue goals that matter to us. Then we make another reasonable decision tomorrow, and another the day after that.

That’s where this becomes personal for me. I’ve been examining this tension in my own life for a long time. But as the circumstances keep changing, the question remains.

Am I still choosing the sacrifice, or have I simply become accustomed to making it?

Building Eastwood Strength has made that question particularly interesting because I genuinely enjoy the work. That doesn’t mean it can’t become overwhelming at times. There is always something else I could be doing, and because the business matters to me, it can be difficult to decide when enough is enough for the day.

My corporate job has a gate. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good at driving through it at the end of my shift and leaving most of the work behind. Eastwood Strength lives in my house. There’s no gate to drive through, no physical separation between where I build the business and where I’m supposed to stop building it for a while. The unfinished work is always nearby.

That’s part of why getting away matters so much to me. A week away from the house creates a separation I have difficulty creating while I’m sitting inside it. And maybe that’s why taking eight months to schedule this vacation has frustrated me as much as it has. It isn’t simply that I want to go to the beach. I know I need some distance from the environment where I’m constantly reminded of everything I could still be doing.

Maybe your version looks nothing like mine. Maybe there’s no business you’re trying to build and no corporate job you’d like to leave. But I suspect most of us have some version of when things settle down. The next promotion. The house project. The financial goal. The kids reaching the next stage. The responsibilities that are very real today but that we assume will somehow create more room tomorrow.

Some of those things genuinely need to wait. There are seasons when not now is exactly the right answer. But how many things have we consciously decided to postpone, and how many have simply remained in the category of someday because we never stopped long enough to reconsider them?

Maybe this is where margin matters. Not as another productivity strategy, but as enough space to notice what I’m choosing. When every available hour is already spoken for, it becomes difficult to ask whether the way I’m spending my time still reflects what I say matters to me.

That question feels particularly relevant in the season Christina and I are entering. In a few months, we’ll make our final college tuition payment. It will mark the end of a long season of carrying the financial responsibility of raising our children. At the same time, we’re building businesses and entering a season that could give us more choices about what comes next.

Those are real changes, and I’m excited about them. But I also know there will always be another goal, another responsibility, another opportunity, and another future worth building. If I keep waiting for life to reach the point where there is nothing competing for my time, I’m going to be waiting a very long time.

That said, our vacation is finally on the calendar, and I’m looking forward to getting away with her. I’m looking forward to the beach, but I’m also looking forward to closing the door on the house for a week and creating some distance from everything that constantly reminds us what still needs to be done.

I know we’ll come home to plenty of unfinished work. The businesses will still need our attention. My corporate job will still be there. A week away won’t change any of that.

Nor do I want it to.

I’ve shared a lot of good life with Christina. We’ve raised a family. I’ve built friendships, grown in my faith, helped people, trained, worked, learned, and continued becoming the person I want to be. I want more freedom over my time, and there are things I wish I had made more room for along the way, but that doesn’t diminish everything that has already happened.

There will also be more things I miss. More opportunities I have to turn down. More moments when something important has to wait because something else matters more. We don’t get enough time to say yes to everything, and I’m not sure a life without regret is possible.

I just hope that when my time is done, the things I chose to give my life to mattered more than the things I missed.

Not because I managed to collect enough experiences or squeeze every bit of enjoyment out of life. I hope I gave my time to the people who mattered. To work worth doing. To opportunities to serve. To experiences that brought joy. And sometimes to things that required sacrifice because they mattered more than whatever I was giving up.

Maybe that’s ultimately what I’m trying to protect when I think about the things I don’t want to get used to. I don’t want to become so accustomed to postponing, producing, or preparing for what comes next that I stop noticing what the life in front of me is asking of me now.

Someday I’ll reach the end of the maze. I don’t think I’ll care very much how much cheese I collected along the way.

I just hope I can say I did something worthwhile with the time I was given.

I hope I made a difference.