There’s usually a profound shift that takes place as you age. You begin to value things differently in life. At 20, all that mattered was how cool you seem to your peers. At 25, I’d say the same thing was salient in my mind. At 30 though, this is where so much begins to change. You know longer care how much others think about you but how you think about yourself. At this age, most of your peers are getting married, having kids, and their careers are usually taking off. And just like everything with time, the good or bad decisions become apparent. At this age, people begin to wonder, is now the right time to have kids? Is the person I’m dating/married to the person I would like to have kids with? These are all important questions and decisions we must make carefully. Recently, I was talking to my sister about whether it was time to make a change in my career. It’s not that I felt stuck or anything, but maybe it was time I took some risk. Funny enough, yesterday morning after watching Manchester City lose to Liverpool, one of my favorite authors, Morgan Housel, posted his blog titled, Staying Put. If you have the time, I would encourage you to read it.
You see, when I think about the motivation for moving, it’s pure. It’s not money related. It’s more of, well, I see other individuals moving around, so should I be? But then I think about what Morgan said in his essay, that there is something you trade off when you move constantly. The compounding effects of relationships and trust. As I read and watch all forms of media, there is a theme that constantly overpowers everything. It’s the saying that relationships are the currency to life.
Balancing the scales is important. Should I over index into a job with more money and restart the clock of trust and prestige or should I stay but and let the compounding effects of what I’ve started 6 years ago take hold? The problem with forecasting is that the future is still unknown and the truth is that while there is never really a right answer, the best answer is what results in your happiness, it’s sui generis. A lot of people feel the existential dread of age, each birthday shifts from a celebration to a memento mori, and that’s ok. Life is finite and short (link to Paul Graham’s famous essay), but at the end of the day, if you make the decision now to invest in memories and relationships, you can be satisfied that life’s brevity had meaning.
la vie en rose,
Daviel