Note 5: When do I have enough?
I don’t know if I subconsciously created my midlife crisis myself, or if I simply (subconsciously) anticipated it. I want to say it started in mid-2017, but naming the month when it started is like trying to pinpoint which exakt minute a storm really started. Sure, it felt as if it came abruptly, but I remember asking myself a series of questions back in 2013 that became very important for my process. They still are. It started with “when will I have enough?”
I was heading back to Sweden after a period working abroad, and decided to freelance. It wasn’t because I knew what I wanted to do, it was more because I had such a hodgepodge of skills that I didn’t see any role in a large organization where I got to use them all. From the start, I had a one year contract for 50% of my time with a client, which allowed me to look around for other gigs. I figured I’d take on all jobs, even those I didn’t enjoy, or worse — didn’t believe in until I had “enough to spend time figuring out my thing”. That led me to the question “So, when will I have enough?”
The biggest influence here was the fact that I had gotten rid of pretty much everything I owned when I decided to leave Sweden. I sold my condo, and all the stuff in it was either sold or given away. There were some things I thought were important, and I stored these in three boxes. When I opened the boxes a year later, the only thing that still felt important was the photo album and some other childhood memorabilia. This process gave me an ‘aha’ experience: I loved the home I had, but if I could get rid of all the stuff and not really miss it — what worth did it really have?
I can honestly say that I still don’t have an answer to the question “when will I have enough”. I’m beginning to think it has no answer. It’s a moving target where each answer redefines the question and makes it more complex, and forces me to recalculate the whole equation. Perhaps it is because I need to try the answer out, rather than take it on its theoretical value. My first attempt at finding an answer was giving myself a salary of 470,000 SEK/year (to give foreign readers some idea: this placed me somewhere in the 75th percentile for men). It turned out this was a comfortable level. I could probably have been as happy with less, and anything more would not add much to my overall happiness. Not on this side of the 1%. But “when will I have enough?” was important, because it became a tangible and practical way to explore the theoretical “what do I really value in life?”
The note here is: I think that there are questions that act as airbags when the crisis hits. They don’t make the crisis easier, but not having thought about them will make the crisis that much more complex. Don’t let the fact that there is no easy answer deter you, because that often means that the process of searching that is the answer.
