Why Is It So Hard To Simply Simplify?

One of the best things about being happy with yourself and your relationships is that it makes it easier to see what is making you unhappy.  When you know that your partner, and your friends, and your family, and your self aren't the root of your misery that pretty much leaves one thing. Your career.  

When someone makes the statement that they need to simplify it is usually for some selfless reason.  Like reducing their carbon footprint by not having as many things or saving money so they can stay home with their kids. The more time I spend at the cabin, or at the beach, the more time I spend wishing for something a little more simple.  When I spend two, four, six, heck ten days, completely unplugged it makes me wonder why I can't simply simplify.

When I say that I want to simplify I don't mean sell my stuff and reduce the clutter in my house.  I want to simplify my life so that I can spend more time unplugged.  I want to get a job that I don't hate.  When I think about the fact that I can't take any sort of pay cut without significantly changing the way that I live, it makes me want to change the way that I live so that I can take a significant pay cut.

I would love to live in a 800 square foot house, blocks from the beach, working a job that I don't hate.  I would love to make people coffee, or serve them drinks and burgers on the beach.  Granted I would love to do that more if I were the proprietor of the coffee/restaurant.  I want to deal with people who don't hate me because I make them follow the rules and pay their rent.  I want to be able to walk to the beach and relax.  I want to be able to wear long flowing skirts, do yoga, wear a hoop in my nose and dye a chunk of my hair pink.  I might not actually do those things, but I want to be able to.  How cool would it be to actually be that eccentric woman that you admire when you see her happily walking down the street?

That all sounds like stuff I should have done in my 20's.  But I didn't.  When I was in my 20's I was being a mom and a wife and figuring out how to support my family.  My friend Veronica blogged about the Quarter Life Crisis today and as I was reading and appreciating her blog, I think about my quarter life crisis, which consisted of realizing that I didn't get to have my 20's in the normal way.  Now that I am 30 something I should be able to live how I want.  A little more free and a little more careless and a little less stressed.

It should be a whole lot easier to realize the dream of living a more simple, happier, life than it is to get stuck in the hell that is the middle class 9-5 job that you hate.  I want to be one of those people that totally boycotts corporate America.  I want to remember what it's like to be creative and to make things with my hands and my imagination.  Somewhere in the hell that is my black and white, number saturated career, I don't even remember what creativity is.  I can't plan a resident event anymore when I used to be the queen of planning parties.  Heck at one point I wanted to plan weddings and sell wedding dresses.  The entire time I was in middle and high school I wanted to be an interior designer. I couldn't do that now without a huge lifestyle  and mindset change that would reconnect me to the creativity that I lost somewhere along the way.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be poor and struggle day in and day out.  I just don't want to have to work so hard at a job I hate, that my friends are worried is going to give me a aneurysm, in order to make ends meet.  I want to have the freedom that being less stressed allows.  Even if that doesn't realize itself in the beach dream it's going to have to realize itself soon.  Very, very soon.  In some form or another.