Why?

I've begun to try and reach escape velocity from the white collar factory of a Law firm that I work at daily for income generation.  This blog is part of the investigation of new directions and things.

Over the last 5 years or so it has become painfully apparent to me that accepting the promise of a steady job and decent retirement was a massive miscalculation on my part.  I blame the industrial revolution and the refinements of Henry Ford's assembly line for the perpetuation of this carefully crafted Faustian deal where your most vital years are spent doing the factory's (white or blue collar) bidding in exchange for a comfortable retirement in your old age when you no longer have the energy nor the capital (not necessarily monetary) to live your dreams.  As far as my choice of this path, the blame lies squarely on my shoulders.  Once I had lost half of my 401k to the whim of the stock market it was clear that this model of life would no longer work for me.  I began to think how to prepare myself for working into my elder years until death.  Thoughts of how a job at Home Depot or its equivalent could sustain me were bouncing in my mind.

I spent some time in denial.  Have you seen it?  It's so lovely.

Then, my doctor informed me that my health was such that I would likely not even live to old age.  I began to think about my family and what their elder years would be without the support that I would be able to provide.  I started to improve my health.  First by losing weight and then by gaining strength.  It was amazing to me how gaining my health changed my perspective.  I began to look for an alternatives to all manner of things in my life.  I started to read lifehacker.com regularly and through that source I discovered the 4-Hour Work Week, by Tim Ferris.

The 4-Hour Work Week (4HWW) was the first whack on the head that got me thinking about how to change my income generation method and improve the quality of my life.  It presented a plan whereby you could create your own income generation and take mini-retirements throughout your lifetime.  Sounds like a dream, right?  Too good to be true, right?  The more I read and the more folk I found that were living as examples of this lifestyle, the more I believed it might be possible.  What made it compelling to me is that each of the folk I read about approached the plan a bit differently and all were living vastly different lives from one another.  I thought that any plan this flexible with customizable outcomes should be useful to me in some capacity.

Part of the 4HWW plan was to create income generation "muses" that could basically run with 4 hours of work a week from you.  I'll likely talk more about what you do to achieve that in later posts.  This blog exists to help me find what those muses could be.  I'd like them to be things near my passions.  But what ARE my passions?  Depends on the time of the year, day of the month, time of the day, and the weather would be my stock answer to that question.  I'm blessed (cursed) with a dearth of things that interest me.  Another hope is that by writing here regularly some of those interests will start to float to the top of the list.

So enough back-story.  I will write, hopefully y'all will too, and I suspect we'll churn some brain cycles about what it means to be.