The Lowest Point In My Life and The Year That Changed It All
Hold my girl
This is the story of when I hit rock bottom.
It isn’t the story of a monumentally tragic event of grief, crime, or trauma. From an outsider’s perspective it’s not really a story at all.
And yet when I revisit this moment in my mind, it represents so poignantly the pinnacle of a life I used to know.
It was March 2020. I was walking home from the train station after a fraught commute from central London. Every journey was a mix of the bedlam you’d come to expect from working in the City, and an exhausted relief that the trains were even running at all through the onslaught of delays and cancellations. Even on a good day I could spend several hours stood idle at a platform, with nothing but my phone and the maelstrom of equally frustrated commuters to keep me company.
I had arrived at my station and checked the time; it was around 7:30pm — just around the time our infant daughter went to sleep (typically at least — it’s not an exact science!). If I ran, I could make it home just in time to kiss her goodnight before bed.
So I picked up the pace, and for the next few minutes my evening had become a Richard Curtis comedy; with me running back home in my suit and tie, seeing my breath in the cold evening air, with George Ezra’s Hold My Girl coincidentally playing in my ears as the soundtrack to my desperate attempt to make it back home so that I could hold my girl, however briefly.
I arrived home just few moments too late.
As I unlocked the front door, my wife was coming down the stairs having just put our exhausted daughter to bed. She could see the disappointment on my face. There, in the quiet still of the front porch, my rock bottom had whimpered into existence.
More than likely, this wasn’t the first time that this had happened. But it was the first time that it dawned upon me that this was going to be every time.
This was the reality of things. I worked in London. We lived within a commutable distance to have an affordable house. We had recently renovated that house through remortgaging, personal loans and credit (we had extended so that we could have a bigger space).
The train fares, the debt — and of course investing some disposable income on vast quantities of media purchases, hobby equipment and other collectible trinkets (justified with the evergreen “I work hard, so why not? Life’s too short!”) — all of these things required this lifestyle. This lifestyle enabled all of these things. Basic maths. A symbiotic relationship.
Most of my adult life had been spent this way; on auto-pilot, “progressing” through life based on the imported criteria of society at large. Doing everything I was supposed to do. A house. A bigger house. Promotions. Thinking success, satisfaction and contentment from life was right around the corner with just a little bit more of it all. Maybe another promotion or two. In my head, these things were inalienable facts; after all, everybody else seemed to be following similar pursuits. I didn’t even stop to think about whether I had consciously developed any values of my own, or whether I had a genuine choice in things being any different. What did I actually want from my life? To spend it frantically rushing around just to miss even a simple goodnight to our daughter at the end of her day?
These are all first world, privileged problems though, right?
I graduated from University, I work in London, I have a job with a fancy title that pays well, a roof over my head, a loving family, and my health. It’s not unusual for one parent to not be home for their kid’s bedtime. So who the hell am I to peddle some sob story when there is genuine suffering and strife going on in the world?
These guilt-laden, self-defeating thoughts are the things that I used to tell myself for years and used it to perpetuate what in hindsight was the frenzied, stressful, rushed and exhausting lifestyle that I had never stopped to actually acknowledge. They paralysed me from being honest with myself, and served nobody.
I’m not writing this as a judgement of how others choose to live; the problem I had was that this way of living did not align with what I had wanted my values and priorities in life to be. I kept telling myself that this wasn’t who I really was. The people I was pressed up against on a sweaty train carriage for three hours a day? The impatient, impolite, so-called important suits and ties? That was their lives, their values, not mine. But the odious truth was that my actions had proved otherwise; through my own choices and priorities, these habits had moulded my life into a set of values that I was invariably living by.
This was exactly who I had ended up choosing to become.
I wanted to be the dad who was there to read his daughter a bedtime story and kiss her goodnight. I wanted to be the husband who genuinely listened and was present for conversations with his significant other. I wanted to be someone at peace with themselves. I wanted to hold my girl. Instead, I was the father who left before their child woke up in the morning, and returned home after they were asleep at night. In a house that I barely spent any time in because funding it meant hardly being there. My weekday moments with my daughter were resigned to consisting of a cursory glance of her asleep in the cot, before quickly resuming work emails or social media, binge watching TV, scoffing down dinner and shuffling around the house as a bloated ball of lethargy who was struggling to find the time and motivation to moonlight as a composer, and continuing to senselessly accumulate piles of video games, movies and other collectible memorabilia that largely remained in their wrapping.
All as a way to pacify and distract from the latent feelings of discontent that I felt.
This was it. A so-called successful life.
And then the world stood still.
2020 vision
On 13th March 2020, our office was sent to work from home for two weeks as a precaution to let a mystery contagious virus blow over.
As those two weeks turned into two more, and two more after that, it slowly dawned upon us all that this was an emerging pandemic with no end in sight. Working from home was to become the new normal for an undisclosed period of time.
In the first few weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, three realisations transpired in my life.
Firstly, I quickly realised the seriousness of the pandemic and the ephemeral nature of mortality when my Nan, a great-Aunt, and a number of other extended family members passed away from Coronavirus within a few weeks of one another. It was a bizarre and harrowing experience as family were unable to comfort one another in person, funerals were livestreamed or recorded, and the entire grieving process was muted in such an unceremonious and remote way. These events changed my outlook on life. I have never taken a day on this planet for granted since.
Secondly, as I was sat at home working and looking around my stuffed-to-the-brim ‘one day I’ll get to this’ collection of things, I became aware of just how much stuff I had accumulated over the years. It was obfuscated by how neat and organised everything was. As I looked around the rooms in my house I could see years of accumulation that, in the cold light of day, were in fact nothing more than cluttered and suffocating mausoleums of (mostly) impulse purchases.
- I had hundreds of Video Games across numerous dedicated bookshelves. Unplayed.
- I had hundreds of Blurays and DVDs across numerous other dedicated bookshelves. Unwatched.
- I had mountains of memorabilia and sealed action figures in boxes. Unopened.
- I had shelves of comics, graphic novels and books. Unread.
- I had a trunk full of filmmaking and music recording equipment. Unused.
- I had wardrobes stuffed to the brim with clothes. Unworn.
And you know what? The thought of actually using any of this stuff just filled me with a dreaded sense of obligation and exhaustion. Why did I even have it? The ‘one day I’ll get to this’ opportunity was here. Now. And I didn’t want to get to any of it.
Thirdly, experiencing lockdown for a prolonged period of time had opened my eyes to all of the big and little things in life throughout the day that I had been missing out on. Because I was fortunate enough to work from home and I wasn’t commuting into London for several hours a day, I was able to have breakfast, lunch and dinner with my family every day. I was able to catch up with my wife for little moments throughout the day. I was able to participate in the bedtime routine and read our daughter a story before bed every night.
And yes, I was able to hold my girl.
I had been given the gift of clarity. The opportunity to stop and think. Everything I had ever wanted was already here in my life. It was just buried underneath so much other stuff.
Then one day I randomly rewatched a documentary called Minimalism: A Documentary about The Important Things. It explores a movement called Minimalism (also known as intentionalism, simple living and various other things). It interviews various individuals who have been pursuing this lifestyle.
Essentially, Minimalism advocates for intentionally embracing what you value in your life, and minimising everything else that gets in the way of that.
That’s it.
It’s the anthesis of the contemporary, more-and-bigger-is-always-better consumerist culture we find ourselves living in; the opposite of a lifestyle adorned with impulse purchases, upgrades, and acquisition-based ideas of success.
I had actually watched the documentary a couple of years prior and aside from a little tidying up and organising, I hadn’t really made any meaningful changes off the back of it. I remember watching it and having this visceral knee-jerk reaction to it. Thinking:
“I get it. These folks seem to enjoy living with no things, alone in a white room or whatever. It’s a little entitled and privileged. I don’t have the opportunity they had to make these changes. I like the things I own. I just need to keep going with it all and then I’ll be satisfied and start enjoying them.”
Thinking back it feels like cognitive dissonance on my part.
Whilst I decluttered a bit, thinking about taking Minimalism any further was just another item on my to-do list of things I’ll get around to looking at one day. But for some reason, in the context of lockdown, with time to spare and with these recent realisations in my life, it resonated with me on the second watch.
Something clicked.
In fact, as I understood more about Minimalism, it lit a fire up underneath me. It gave me a vocabulary to help me express how I was feeling. It gave me a framework to think about what I valued in my life and how I could actually make that a reality. I know this reads like hyperbole, but as I looked around my house, out to the world, and into my soul, I saw everything differently. I saw the opportunity to change things.
So I got to work.
I began selling, donating, recycling and dumping. Asking myself: does this item add value to me? Do I actually intend on using it? As I started decluttering, I felt a weight lift.
A more pleasing space.
Less obligations to clean, organise and maintain.
I came to realise that it wasn’t just about the stuff I was getting rid of; I had bought and kept so much because my identity was wrapped up in it. Removing it was more of an exercise in emotionally letting go than it was in the physical act of getting rid.
- I owned the video games because I told myself that I was a gamer and that’s what gamers have.
- I owned the books because I wanted people visiting to look at the shelves and see how well read I was.
- I owned the action figures because I told myself that it shows that I get pop culture.
- I owned the movies and filmmaking equipment because I was an aspiring filmmaker.
- I spent thousands on music equipment and software because it would make me a better composer.
I didn’t own these things because I actually got value out of them, but because I thought owning them made me that. I came to realise that for me, owning items was a false equivalency with having that identity. When in fact, it was how I actually spent my time that contributed to my identity, not what I owned.
As the weeks began turning into months, I didn’t just understand the benefits of Minimalism on an intellectual level, I could see them.
I felt them.
The implications went beyond the aesthetic impact from decluttering. Because we were housing so much less stuff, we simply needed less space than what we had. The money released from the things we chose to sell, combined with the vast sums saved that would otherwise be spent on commuting were used to pay off significant amounts of consumer debt we had taken out to renovate and furnish our home.
I use we because shortly after starting, this became something my wife and I started doing together which thankfully made the entire experience more rewarding, effective and sustainable.
We made the decision to take this a step further and prioritise our values for being close to family by moving back to our hometown (with the optimism that we’d actually be able to see family in person one lockdown had subsided) — we downsized into a smaller house — that came with a smaller mortgage — and with that we were able to pay off the last of our non-mortgage debts.
Not only this, but we applied a minimalist framework to our lives going forward.
When our car payments ended, we decided not to buy a new car and repeat that cycle of debt. When our phone contracts ended, we held on for a little longer before upgrading for the sake of it.
This isn’t to say we swore off purchasing anything ever again, but intentionality is behind everything we acquire and hold on to. We still engage in the practice of constantly reassessing our things in life to question if they are still adding value, and if not then letting them go.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still feel pangs of resistance as I do this (the fact that we had an entire room full of boxes when we moved which we eventually got rid of speaks for itself), but I can confidently say the impulse-buying-consumerist-splurges are unequivocally a thing of the past. In less than a year into the pandemic we found ourselves in a completely different financial position compared to the start of 2020.
As a result of paying off consuming debt, downsizing our mortgage, not commuting, and not financing a new car, we had reduced our monthly outgoings by over a third (even more in actuality if you take into account our new considered approach with purchases).
However, this was a means to an end and was not end itself. It meant we had opened up more opportunity in our lives to make new choices. If I were to take a step back and ask myself what my values were in life, I now had more clarity to answer that question:
- Quality time with my family.
- Living slower and deeper.
- Creating.
It was clear to me that if I were to make changes in my life to better align with my values, I had to go further. With all the positive changes I had made, I was still generally busy. I enjoyed elements of my work but I was still fixated on promotions as criteria for personal success. I still succumbed to a side hustle culture in order to freelance as a video game composer.
If I were to truly embrace the core minimalist philosophy to pursue a life in accordance with my values by minimising everything getting in the way of that, I had a big life choice to make.
A fork in the road.
I continued to seek ways to bring less into my life.
After summoning the courage to have some difficult conversations, and thanks to some incredible, understanding, and compassionate management at my job I was able to step back from the team lead position that I was previously in, withdraw myself from a pending promotion consideration, and begin working part-time.
I use the word ‘courage’ in a slightly tongue in cheek way because whilst it wasn’t courageous in a physical or literal sense, acknowledging to myself and others that I no longer aligned my values with the idea of pursuing corporate promotions and the lifestyle that entailed was one of those fork-in-the-road-moments that I decided to emphatically embrace with intentionality.
It proved to be the most rewarding decision of my professional life.
It gave me the freedom to pursue my creative endeavours without the burden of financial uncertainty, and it also made spending quality time with my family a permanent fixture of my weekdays. An unexpected but welcomed consequence that was under this new arrangement the elements of my career that I had enjoyed were amplified. I found myself embracing my working week with enthusiasm, energy, and dedication rather than busyness, obligation and resentment. A few months later, we welcomed our second daughter into the world, and our family of three became four.
Life had truly changed in so many ways.
After two years of doing this and saving enough money to cover expenses for a couple of years, we were ready to take a further leap of uncertainty. I was in a position to embark on a new professional journey by moving away from finance completely for the next couple of years, towards the flexibility and creativity of music composition and video game development alongside even more active parenting throughout the weekdays.
It is at the start of this new season of my life that I am writing these words.
It is not lost on me that this is an incredibly privileged position to find myself in, and that such opportunities are not available to everyone. It is easy to succumb to feelings of guilt because whilst so many were suffering (and continue to suffer) physically, emotionally, and financially, I had experienced two of the most illuminating years of my life and in many ways was able to use the pandemic as a period of personal reflection and change.
I’ve come to appreciate that it’s through the privilege of being in a position to “succeed” that prior way in life, that I was gifted the clarity of seeing that it wasn’t for me.
I found myself with an opportunity to take my life in a different direction.
And I took it.
As lockdowns began to dissipate and some semblance of normalcy emerged with coronavirus a part of everyday life, the zeitgeist was awash with talk of “the great resignation” and “quiet quitting” (presumably targeted towards individuals like myself who had also stopped to question the status quo they had previously found themselves in), and whilst it took me a couple of years after this period, I too had joined the ranks of this great resignation.
We still had (and have) ups and downs like everyone does, but more importantly I had gone through a period of great re-evaluation and had established a new framework for thinking about my relationship with what exactly a meaningful, successful life meant to me. And for us, Minimalism was a significant and foundational part of that.
Less stuff.
A less fancy job title.
Less hours commuting.
Less salary.
Less costs.
Less stress.
And conversely, more time.
More peace.
More moments.
More creativity.
More possibilities.
More life.
The level of personal fulfilment and growth in my life from embracing Minimalism is unparalleled. It has radically transformed almost every part of my life that I had previously felt any discontent with.
