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For the past few days I have been interstate for work. I don’t mind travelling for work – it’s something that I’m prepared to do while I am young, but something that I know I’m not interested in doing once we have kids.

It’s easy to see how people can enjoy travelling for work. Let me set the scene…

Sunday afternoon my chauffeured car arrived to drive me to the airport. At the airport I meet my workmates, we check in, and then head to the Virgin Lounge for some pre-flight drinks and something to eat, all complimentary of course. Just before the flight boards, we drop through Travelex to withdraw our meal allowance in cash, then board our flight. It’s only a short flight – around an hour, and after we arrive we continue to drink at the casino, grab some dinner, then head to another pub to finish off the drinking.

Monday morning rolls around, and we all meet for breakfast at the cafe across the road. Normally the three of us avoid buying food for breakfast or lunch, but when you have a large allowance for food, it’s a lot easier to justify spending the money. The day is a fun day of catch-ups with team members from interstate, a few activities, and before we know it we are eating an expensive meal at a Greek restaurant – drinks included, and we don’t have to pay a cent for it. While half of the team go home, the other half hang around and go somewhere else to drink. Before we know it, it’s bed time at 2am and we’ve all clearly had enough for one night.

Tuesday is a very slow day, half of us are hungover, and it’s all a bit of a joke. The boss doesn’t mind – after all, most workplaces are a bit of a boys club, and realistically, alcohol does make you some friends in the workplace. When the day is over, we jump in a car and head back to the airport, hang around in the lounge for a few hours, and then fly home.

All in all it’s been three days of fun, free everything, and you can’t complain. Or can you?

While I’m mindful of only looking on the negative side of the trip (I’m not – I did enjoy the trip), I wasn’t at home to support my fiancee while she could have done with the support (her work is very busy at the moment). In addition to this, my diet suffered big time during the trip, as well as my exercise and my sleeping pattern.

I suppose I am always conscious of falling into the trap that so many others fall into – thinking that their life is great, just because of the luxuries that they have. Climbing the corporate ladder, going to free dinners and travelling around the world has some obvious attractions, but I believe it’s important for people to think about what they might be sacrificing by living that life. If they can truly justify it, great, but if they can’t maybe they need to consider their options a bit more before making the decision to climb the corporate ladder, rather than enjoy other aspects of their life.

Last night one of my close friends came around and I fixed his laptop for him. It took a good 5 hours and was a great catch up in the mean time.

He’s recently had a son, and while absolutely stoked on being a father, money is now a major concern.

You know those people that always need more? He’s one of those people, and he admits it openly. “I need to write a book”, he said, “I’ll call it Getting the f*ck over it“. It’s good that he can see where his hangups lie!

Here is a healthy mid 20′s male, engaged to an attractive woman who has just given birth to a healthy baby boy. They live in a nice house, and are financially safe from what I can tell. Aside from money, he is the sort of person who can see the bright side of everything.

My only words of wisdom to him were “you can never win when comparing yourself to others by income, but you can with happiness”. Don’t get me wrong, money is nice, but in the end it doesn’t make you truely happy. If you were just happy, all day every day – you can’t tell me you wouldn’t be a happier person than the remaining 90% of the world.

Choice is such a nice thing to have, but it can also be a curse. Many people choose to want more than they can realistically achieve, and their entire life just becomes one big frustration.

Choosing to enjoy your life and not comparing yourself too much with others is a step in the right direction. Live life how you want to, and not how everyone else is. Follow your dreams, and don’t listen to others’ negative opinions.

I’m planning on living the dream next year. Only 8 more months of saving and preparation!

Last night I was talking to my fiancee about our parents and the similarities and differences between ourselves and them. The conversation moved to our parents’ decisions in life and how they had affected us.

My parents split up when I was 13, and they argued in the years leading up to the split. As a kid, I was mindful of having a dad that was frustrated all of the time by a wife that wouldn’t talk to him and a mum that had some sort of underlying mental issues.

While for my whole life my mother has been there for me in one way, she has never been there in another way. If I need my clothes washed, she will wash them. If the dishes need doing, she will do them. Any sort of cleaning or task that needs to be done for me and she will usually do it without me even knowing or asking.

On the flip side though, she has never been a strong person that I could rely on. Mum’s first husband passed away about a year after my sister was born, and I don’t believe that she has ever dealt with his death. While she would never admit it, there is obviously an underlying guilt or something that she blames herself for, and it has affected her since he has died. As most children argue with their parents over trivial things, I have certainly had my fair share with her. Most parents shrug it off and deal with it, while my mum will go and lock herself in her room and cry about it for a while. Whether it’s a deliberate attempt to make me feel guilty, I don’t know, but others have said similar things about my mum, including my cousin who once said that “she likes to be the victim”.

My father is an emotionally “strong” person, yet very selfish. When I was around 16 he finally bought a house and I was able to move in with him. At the age of 16, he made me aware that it was a privilege to live with him and in the years following always implied that I somehow owed him for staying at his house and eating his food. I suppose the alternative would be quitting school and getting a job, yet neither of my parents would let me quit school and I didn’t want to either. It’s one of those catch 22 situations where you can’t do anything right.

After finishing school and starting university, I made the choice to quit uni. I wasn’t cut out for it at the time and the degree that I was studying was irrelevant to what I really wanted to do. Rather than encouraging me to do what I wanted to do, he just labelled me a failure. At the age of 21 it was satisfying to earn more money than he was at 50. In contrast now, one of my friends who has the same attitude to uni now as I did years ago is going on his seventh year at uni trying to do the same three year degree that I was enrolled in. That is a huge debt and a huge waste of time. Only now does my father admit that I made the right decision.

My father has always been reluctant to let me work on my cars at his house, let alone help me with working on them. He’s always looking out for number one (himself), and concerned about me messing up something about in life. This “something” might be as simple as putting a tool in the wrong spot in his shed, or as major as allegedly ruining his relationship. (Which I later proved was just a stunt on his behalf to guilt trip me into something, but that is another story).

A less resilient person would feel like a burden with a dad like mine. When I was 10 he would tell me how we would buy an old car and restore it with the money in my trust fund. After the marriage break up the money in my trust fund was gone, and to this day I’ve never had a good project with him. It’s not about the money, it’s about the time spent together working on something with each other. Recently I asked him to help me with some welding that I have been doing as a bit of a project to do some father – son bonding. In his traditional fashion, I had to force him into committing to help me out with the project, and since then he has barely spent a full day with me on it. “I’ve got a few other things on today sorry mate”. No biggie, I know how to weld now and the rest I could always do myself.

Finally there is my sister, who I know is always there for me, but is on her own journey. Remember that her blood father passed away when she was one – she has never known her real father, and has a mother that isn’t able to talk to her about what has happened in her life. She has her own battles without me burdening her. A few years after our parents splitting up she moved to Queensland, and is now married and having a child of her own. I have never really had to rely on her, and don’t think I will ever need to rely on her, although I love her very much and appreciate that if I need her, she will be there for me.

Since the age of 13 it’s been myself making the effort with my parents, not my parents making the effort with me. My school asked me to see the councillor at school who spoke with me for one session. At the time I completely disregarded everything that she told me, but nowadays the only thing I remember her saying was that I was “carrying” my family, and was very resilient. It’s amazing to think that it’s taken me over ten years to truly realise what that meant.

While this all sounds like a sob story up until now, it’s quite the opposite. Unable to rely on those close to me for so long, I am now able to shrug things off and as a result those little negatives in my day rarely affect me. It doesn’t take much to put a smile on my face, but it usually takes some serious shit to get me down.

Resilience is something that has made me who I am today. I feel as though my career has been “easy” because of my resilience, amongst other things of course. I can’t remember ever being emotionally affected by work and there has certainly never been an “issue” at work involving me. From the point of view of a boss, someone who isn’t ever involved in stress or emotional issues at work is great. If you don’t cause any issues for your boss you’re already one up on the people that do.

Nowadays I know I can always rely on my fiancee . While it’s rare for me to be in a really negative mood, it’s great to have someone who I can tell everything. I know that I have her unconditional support, and that is all that I need.

My fiancee and I were at my dad’s place for dinner last week. My father has remarried and is pretty much happier now than I’ve ever seen him, although the combination of his viewpoints and his wife’s ranting make them a force to be reckoned with. These nights usually go the same way – we sit down before dinner and all catch up, have dinner and then the conversation ends up being between my father and his wife while my fiancee and I sit there and listen to them get frustrated over something trivial.

On this particular night they were whinging about one of their typical gripes… “Dole bludging scum from Elizabeth”. In their view, these dole bludgers get money to get drunk and have more kids that they don’t take care of, while the harder that my father and his wife work, the more tax they pay. A harsh view, but after working out in that side of town for quite some time now I have to agree with some of their gripes.

They get pretty aggravated while having these conversations and I usually just end up butting in with a “hey, you’re living in a nice house, eat good food, and drive new cars… life could be worse”. Getting aggro about these sorts of things is just added stress that nobody needs.

During the car ride home I was talking to my fiancee about where your viewpoint in life can be, or where you make your comparisons from. I have always found it easy to look at the bigger picture. Life is amazing when you consider that in Australia we pretty much all eat well, sleep in a warm bed and on the whole have a lot of “stuff” – compared to that of a starving child in the cold in India, I’m living like a king! In a global sense, not very many of us have something to complain about.

But really, it’s hard to make these comparisons sometimes. While I am quite a happy person because of this “bigger picture” view, sometimes you do need to compare yourself to those in your locality. For example at work, if you are working in a team of equals, comparing yourself to others is fair. If you are in an environment where you are forced to work fives times harder than everyone else in your team, and you live with it just because of starving kids elsewhere, you’ll end up becoming very frustrated and probably end up quitting or stressing out.

I think it’s important to have a healthy balance of both. Considering everything in a worldwide perspective is a great way to appreciate what you have, even if in a local perspective it’s not very much. It keeps you happy about what you already have and often negates your need for more “stuff”.

On the flip-side, while staying happy about what you already have, comparing yourself to others directly related to you keeps you in check and ensures that you’re standing up for yourself. After all – in order to live in the global world, you have to live in a demographic somewhere, regardless of what that demographic is.

Ok, so not the roses as such, but riding to work this morning I saw what I usually do – some very dodgy driving because someone was obviously in a rush.

I’ve always found that riding to work is an excellent way to slow down your life. The time doesn’t just fly by as much as it does when you’re driving a car. You’re actually taking things in around you, seeing the interesting, beautiful and often hilarious things that are happening in the world.

As I mentioned, this morning I saw a very near miss of a car crash. Last week I saw a motorbike try and overtake a truck on the footpath, then almost stack it into a light pole after literally skidding to a halt and letting the truck past. I know what it’s like to be behind the wheel in peak hour – frustrating. Changing lanes to pass the slow driver in front of you, having someone cut you off, and always trying to get through each light before it goes red.

Obviously this extends much further than driving a car. Slowing your life down has many positives. There is just so much going on in this world, it’s really cool to take it all in rather than being involved in it all.

A few months back I was catching up with some friends in the city for a drink after work. I was about an hour early so I just decided to grab a beer and wait for them outside on a chair in the sun. All sorts of things passed me by and it was a really enjoyable experience. Nice looking girls, those pierced goth types, a couple of homeless people all walked past. A truck did a reverse parallel park into the smallest parking space I’d ever seen! Pretty much everything I saw was interesting in some way shape or form. Maybe I should start doing that more often instead of watching TV for entertainment?