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9 Nov 09 Poor decisions moved me closer to what I want
I’m a fortunate person, I’ve had a combination of good luck and skill in my life that has landed me in a relatively comfortable situation.
At the same time there are aspects that are sub-optimal from a lifestyle design perspective: I am burdened with a mortgage that given the house price crash is larger than the value of the property I own. It is the single biggest stone around my neck in terms of personal fredom. I don’t have a problem paying my mortgage, and as long as I need a “home base”, it’s not a problem. But at the same time I can’t just pick up and leave as I would have been able to a few years ago. To me, Location Independence is not so much about living as a “vagabond”, as it is about not being locked in or tied so you get “stuck” in a place.
From a financial perspective, buying a home in 2008 has to count as one of the biggest and worst decisions of my life and there are times I regret it. But at the same time, I believe it was a decision I had to make:
For years before, I had lived a life which ironically would have lent itself better to Location Independence than now. The only problem was I didn’t want location independence at the time, I yearned for having a fixed point in my life, a place I could call “home”. It was something I had always dreamed about.
It just only transpires that once I had it, it wasn’t all that I had thought it would be - more worries than benefits. But this is the big “but” in the whole chain of events: I needed to get to this point to work that out, get it out of my system and understand what it is that I really want.
If I had not made my momentously poor decision of buying a home in 2008, I would probably still have yearned for it, rather than moved on to the mindset I have right now.
I think this is the case with a lot of things in our lives: we need to make bad decisions, get ourselves into places and jobs we dislike, if only for the purpose of being able to say “been there, done that, didn’t like it”. By doing this we can use the process of exclusion to exclude the things we don’t want to be doing, the things we don’t want in our lives.
Poor decisions are better than no decisions, they move us forward in our lives (let’s just hope yours won’t cost £50000).
