A Glorious Scattering of Money
Last night, I logged onto Amazon with the intent to buy something, anything. I flipped through screen after screen, adding things to my cart and then later pulling them out. I closed my browser nearly a hundred times.
And opened it a hundred and one.
I now own 4 different tea infusers. And I feel like shit.
One of the consequences of being biploar is compulsive spending.
“the lifestyle of the manic-depressive who is in a high tends to be a glorious scattering of money” — Dr Ronald R. Fieve, Moodswing
I have been part of companies that have raised more than $350mm. Of those, the exits equal more than $200mm. What do I have to show for it?
4 different tea infusers.
This isn’t a new thing for me, I have always been an “early adopter,” a “gadget whore,” and a collector of things. I often just give most of them away (I don’t think my sister has bought a laptop in ten years) or throw them away (nothing like the freeing feeling of throwing a $2000 receiver in the trash).
Living in the most expensive region in the world, the San Francisco Bay Area, doesn’t make it easier. It seems with the increase of cost, the need to show how little money matters grows.
The excess in Silicon Valley has gotten to the point where we are all drowning. Even the rich that look at money as not only their net financial worth, but their net worth to the world, are in an unwinnable war against perception.
In the past couple of months, I have been offered more than a few jobs paying significantly more than my gig at AWS. Each time, I feel the pull of perception.
But it makes no sense. I love my job and the life it affords me to live. And each time I think about making more money, I think to the times when I made less. A lot less. My first job out of college paid $19,000. I lived in DC in a shitty part of town, in a shitty apartment with a bunch of shitty roommates. But I was neither more, nor less, happy than I am now.
The amount of money never affected my happiness; how I used it did.
So why am I telling you all this?
Every night I assess where I am in life. Am I doing good? Am I doing well? What should I change? What should I keep?
I thought about how well my Year of Boring was in helping me uncover what actually mattered to me, and how I hadn’t picked a theme for 2016.
I looked over to the cup of tea I had made, and it dawned on me. 2016 is going to be my Year of Nothing. It is going to be a year that when given a choice, I will always choose the most frugal path.
Not pinching pennies, mind you. I once tried to live on $200 for ten days. It was hard, but not impossible.
As I get ready to (finally) move to LA, I am thinking through all of this. Whats the smallest place I can get and still feel comfortable? How far away from the office can it be? What about my things? What about the new iPad being announced in March. (Stop it, Micah, focus!)
To get there, I am going to do four things:
Focus on paying off all bills, until my (significant) debt is at zero.
Enjoy people, places, experiences, not just things.
Find a different outlet for my compulsive buyer behavior when it hits.
Hopefully, like at the end of 2015, when I was ok with just being; at the end of 2016, I will be ok with being a not have in an industry where having is almost more important than creating.