Sustainable Lifestyle
If you can’t tell by now, I love the word sustainable. It can be used in so many contexts. Today, I’m ranting on how sustainable your actual day to day life is.
My fiancee is a primary school teacher. While she does like the work, the workload is just ridiculous. When people complain about the amount of holidays that teachers receive, I get quite frustrated, as the majority of holidays that she takes are spent marking, or planning for the next term. It’s a 8am till 10pm job most days for good teachers. Full on!
Take last night for example. It’s a pretty standard night – we both get home at around 5pm, prepare dinner, eat, then clean up. By 6:30pm she is off in the study marking and planning until 10:30pm, then we go to bed. This isn’t out of the norm at all – it’s just day to day life. She has said herself, “I just can’t do this forever”. While I have spoken to her a lot about it and have encouraged her to entertain the idea of changing jobs, it’s nice to hear her actually saying, rather than me.
While she could technically teach forever, she would never have any hobbies, our lives will continue to be very separate, and in my opinion she would live a life of working and working only. No time for kids either!
The hobbies point has always struck me as interesting. I ride my bikes, I work on them, I dig trails, I work on computers at home, and so on. I’m always up to something, it’s what keeps me sane! Turn that around, and my fiancee has none of this. Obviously I don’t expect her to have the same hobbies that I have, but surely you need some sort of outlet for enjoyment and stress relief?
Next year is going to be a year of exploring. We are exploring the world, exploring our career options, and essentially exploring our lifestyle choices. With any luck we will end up in Whistler, Canada, working in jobs that are completely different to our current jobs. While they might not be our dream jobs, they will be different, and allow us to compare them with what we are doing now, and explore the options that we have for our lifestyles.
So have a think about it when you get some free time, can you keep up your current lifestyle forever? Are you giving much thought to where you want to go?