The boy and his leaky glass of water
This is a story about a little boy and a cup of water. But the cup won't hold water. It takes the boy a lifetime to figure out why
Let's start with an analogy about a cup. Thank of water as money and the cup is your bank account. Your objective is to fill it with enough water that you can take the cup to your favorite place and sip out of it for the rest of your life until you die. This is retirement. Whoever achieves the objective first wins.
Each paycheck you add water to your cup. "Great, the cup is filling up fast, soon I'll be able to take it to the new place, retire, and win." But there's a problem. By the time you're ready to add more water (next paycheck) you notice something peculiar: not all the water your added remains in the cup. In fact, almost none of it remains. How i this possible? You worked so hard to add water and it looked like the cup would be full soon!. You add more water and notice something horrifying. Almost half of the water you add doesn't even make it in the cup, it spills out immediately (taxes). But a lot of the water does make it, what is happening to it?
You watch in silence.. immediately, you see other people start dipping into your cup taking your water (bills, rent) They are taking a a lot of water, so you decide to get a better job that will give you more water.
So you and your cup move to a higher paying job. Great! The new paycheck adds a LOT more water. You're eager to find out at next paycheck how much water remains. To your horror, the cup is almost empty again. How could it be? You carefully pour water again and notice more water than before is spilling (higher tax bracket). But things are looking pretty good, a lot of water still remains.
Then in horror, you watch, as the more and more people are coming to your cup and taking more water then ever. It turns out that the place you took your cup to, with the higher paying job, is a lot more expensive. So everything around you is taking more of your water. At the end of each paycheck there/'s almost nothing left.
But like other average adults, you go on with your life, repeating this cycle. You stop noticing the water leaking. You start noticing your friends taking more and more water out of their own cup, and decorating it with diamonds and pearls. "Isn't the objective to fill with water as fast as possible? This is doing the opposite." But soon you too want a nicer looking cup. You use all the water in your cup, and even borrow more water from the water factory just to pay for the diamonds and pearls to decorate your own cup. It's ok you tell yourself, you'll eventually pay them back.
Over time, very slowly, more and more water builds up. You worked really hard, and after 50 years you FINALLY have enough water in the cup to take it to the place you picked out and live happily ever after. The pearls and diamonds on your cup are pretty faded, most have fallen off, you wonder why you put them there in the first place. It's just a cup. At one time they were nice, you suppose.
You proudly take your cup and go to your new place, an island in the Caribbean.You realize you don't need such a big cup with diamonds there so you trade it for a simpler cup. This smaller new cup is great, and get extra water back from the trade! Fantastic. To your amazement, even though you're not adding much water, the water leaking stops almost entirely and almost nobody is taking water from your cup. In fact, you can survive on just one drop a day.
"This is absolutely crazy". if you can survive off one drop a day, why were you filling the cup half full and emptying it every single week? You think of Eintein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
The inefficiency illustrated here is glaringly obvious. You're trying to fill a cup of water, but the place where the cup is consumes almost the entire cup every single day. It takes a lifetime to fill the cup.
What if you could make that one drop of water a day in the other place where you intended to end up in the first place? It is a frightening though, going to that place with a half empty cup.
But what if you found someone who started out there. And you told them to come to your place, where their cup must not only be refilled full every day, it will be drained instantly. They would think, "surely, you've lost your mind."
The horrifying truth behind the average adult's life
Everything we do has a purpose. You fill a glass with water so you can drink the water. Filling the glass itself is the labor, drinking is the reward. The glass itself exists just to hold the water, it is not reward in itself. if instead the glass was a magical glass, always full of water, you would not refil it.
Having a job is like filing the cup with water. It is the labor part. Where is the reward?
We spend 8 hours at the job, and 1.5 hours commuting, 8 hours sleeping, and a few hours doing chores..The weekends are full of labor tasks too. That leaves about 2.5 hours of reward time per day. Don't believe it? Keep a journal from waking to sleep and see how many entries are purely reward time.
2.5 hours is a small slice of a 24 hour pie.
Once a year you get a 3 week vacation. There is travel time involved and some labor as well, but for the most part, we can consider this pure reward time.
So in the average year of an adult's life, they get about 2.5 hours a day of reward time and 3 weeks of vacation time.
Eventually you get to retire. But retirement is not really a reward. It is a penalty when your body and mind become so weak they are no longer useful in the work force. So this does not really classify as pure reward time. You need to be relatively young and health to truly enjoy reward time. You cannot surf, or climb mountains, or write songs, or even have good sex when you to retirement age.
The math here is quite staggering. 1196 hours a year of reward time out of 5840 hours of potential reward time (Not counting sleep).
The reward comes in small pieces. Watching a movie. Listening to a song. Talking about you dreams with the girl or boy you love.
Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.
But.. I really like my job! It's important, and meaningful to me.
One thing that separates children from adults, besides how little reward time we have, are defense mechanisms. See this excellent blog about Abundance vs. Scarcity (Raptitude) and how adults develop defense mechanisms to shield themselves from the painful truth.
I believe that no for all, but for most people, it is not actually true that their job is so important. Try this simple test:
- If your job stopped paying you money, would you still go? (Probably not)
- When you look back at the past, how many of the memories start with the words "Remember that day at work.."
As frightening as it is, practice being honest to yourself about how you really feel about the time you spend at your job. Figure out the things which you would do without receiving a paycheck,the things that form long term memories. The easy, default behavior is to continue the day to day routine. But as a child, when your life just started, nothing was default or easy. So why settle into this in adult life?
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