I have been adulting for nearly a year now, and there are so many things that could have been taught in school that weren’t addressed. These really are life skill lessons that I needed, and not understanding the origins of coffee beans, or the Pythagoras’ theorem.
There is no such thing, as free money
No matter how you try, there is always a transaction of work for money. Even the lottery, except you don’t work, you just put money in, to try and win a larger amount. It’s not free. A refund is not free. You had to either take the item back to the shop, or post it back. It’s costing you time in your day. It’s not free.
I got my final tax rebate as an adult, and it felt like bliss. A tax rebate is when the tax-man, pays back the amount of overpaid in tax in the last financial year. I had plans that the money would go into my savings, since I had just spent about £2k moving out of my nightmare house. Turns out the universe had other plans. 2 weeks after that payment of ‘free money’ my car breaks down into a state that it requires about £600 to fix. At this point I was stuck in a dilemma:
My Dilemma
I was currently saving up to buy a new car at Christmas. I am 4 months before my intended deadline, when my car breaks down. Do I pay the £600 and hope the car to lasts until Christmas? Or do I get a loan to help me get my new car, and lose the old one?
I chose the latter. My reasoning? My old car was 18 years old. I had it for 5 years, it was my first car, and had 6 repair incidences in the last 8 months. I could not guarantee that the £600 would be my only investment between now and Christmas. So, I got a loan and bought a new car. It was the second most stressful purchase I made. After, paying my deposit for the nightmare house. The tax rebate money went into that car. It wasn’t even free money; was contrived to come in, before my car broke down.
You get to do whatever you want, whenever you want
No, you can’t. 40 hours a week I am at work. If I sleep 8 hours a night (which I rarely do), that’s 42 hours a week, gone. A week is 168 hours, so I have spent nearly half my week, either working or sleeping. The other half is spent on making sure I am healthy, happy and loved. And that is my responsibility. Cooking meals, going to the gym, doing extra-curricular activities (this blog), therapy, the list is long. Then you have to clean your place, your dishes. You also want a social life, schedule in a movie night, some drinks, maybe you’re dating.
Each second is assigned to something, and if you don’t use it accordingly, then you have a constant to do list. Your time is not truly yours, and that fact truly sucks. You realise very quickly, that your life is this cycle, until you retire. You react one of two ways:
- You’re happy with this way of living and you accept that reality
- You try to start thinking of ways to get out of this reality (which adds more to your to do list).
Life can never be constant
It’s always changing. You can’t keep trying to keep things the way they were. No day is the same as the previous one. No week is the same, as the one before. So why try to keep things being the same, when it’s designed to constantly keep evolving.
Accepting that, can be really hard. The only constant you can accept is that nothing is ever the same. Things begin to surprise you a lot less, when you accept that change will happen. It’s not bad that its changing, its progressing, and most likely it’s character building for the future.
This first 10 months of adulting has really drilled in this point, and at the beginning I really tried to fight it. All my life, I thought I could, but I can’t. None of us can, and that’s perfectly reasonable, because if we could, it would be boring. I have had a very eventful 10 months, and this is only the beginning. My adulting life so far has felt incredibly inconsistent, but it’s created the stories I share on this platform. So, being inconsistent hasn’t been a bad thing.
Moral of the story:
- There is no free money– It sucks, but to get money, you need to make a transaction, and the cost isn’t always the same
- You can’t do whatever you want all the time– Your time is not truly your time. If you’re happy with that fact, that’s fine. If you’re not, what are you going to do about it?
- Nothing is constant– Everything has an end, embrace the change, and make the most of the time you have.
