by Marc Fisher
But not only do we not take frequent vacations, when we do take them, we are in an advanced state of exhaustion. That is, of course, if we do not fall sick on the first day (which is like dying during the first year of retirement!), because it’s the only time our overworked body feels entitled to finally relax!
If you still don’t have time, and if you still never take your time, then you are poor, it would seem. Yes, POOR, even if you have millions of dollars in your bank account, a huge house, and fancy cars.
You overlook the essential, the real beauty of life, and its true objective. In order to discover these things, and especially to be able to appreciate them, you need: time!
Time is your raw material, the substance by means of which everything is done, or undone!
It appears to me that you should spend a few hours of your life —at least one hour, at any rate: the time it takes you to read these musings —to ponder this issue.
Basically, your life depends on it. So does your health, and more importantly, your HAPPINESS.
Does anything else really matter?
With this brief and unpretentious tale, I will attempt to demonstrate to you that you can go against the grain of modern society, where progress, it would appear, has done some devastating damage.
I’ll give you a few more tips —which you can add to those you already have —to enable you to free yourself, to become the master of your time instead of its slave, and to be, to put it simply, always on vacation…
In my opinion, the first step in this major undertaking is to free yourself from the tyranny of work —this is the number one vacation antidote.
CHAPTER 2
FREE YOURSELF FROM THE TYRANNY OF WORK!
There are two major components of your life that are responsible for devouring your time, and they have one thing in common: they are unavoidable, or at least they appear to be…
The first is sleep, to which we dedicate twenty-four years of our life, if we sleep eight hours per day!
That’s assuming we live to be seventy-two…
The second is work, of course.
In general, work takes up eight hours of our day, to which we must add the hour (best-case scenario) that it takes us to get there and back…
Of course, it’s often much longer, because many of you live far away, because it rained or snowed, because there was an accident, even going the other way, that caused people to slow down or stop to watch. Sheer curiosity.
Which is dangerous, and sometimes causes another accident, only this time it’s on your side, which costs you even more time!
So nine hours per day, but in reality, it is often much longer, because we often bring work (and work-related concerns) home, and we allow ourselves to be disturbed on evenings and weekends for real emergencies. Or emergencies that are invented by an obsessed boss —who lives for his job —or who is paranoid and is afraid of losing market share. or his job!
And then there is the Internet, the cell phone, the BlackBerry™, all of which makes us dogs on invisible leashes: we can be reached anywhere in the world twenty-four hours per day. What glory!
But let’s say we only spend nine hours per day at work…
Yes, nine hours per day…
Five or six days per week…
All in all, if we really think about it, this is our biggest obligation, and we must think about it if we want to free ourselves from it!
In fact, these nine hours that you spend as a breadwinner, also represents the Minotaur that literally devours you in the labyrinth that is your life.
They represent more than twenty years of your life… (once again, if you live to be seventy-two years old).
That’s nearly one-quarter of your life…
So unless you are impassioned by sleep and work, you spend approximately forty-five years of your life either doing something that you really don’t want to do or simply being unconscious!
It’s starting to add up, isn’t it?
In any case, that’s why you don’t see the time passing, why you wake up one day and… you are old, very old, too old to do what you dreamed of doing while you were… less old —but now it’s too late!
You put everything into your work.
Not everything, but a lot.
Far too much.
At least in my opinion.
Think about it…
Nine hours…
And not just any hours!
In general, these are the best hours of the day, the ones when we feel at our best, our most energetic…
It’s a little ironic, and a little sad, to think that the best hours of your day, and the best of yourself, are being sold to a boss who often doesn’t appreciate it, because he only pays you a mediocre salary!
And why should he be overflowing with recognition? It’s a discount sale, a dumb sale that you agree to and trade your work for half, or one-tenth, or even one-thousandth of what you are worth!
Or rather what YOU deserve!
When you think about it, it’s also a little bit sad that you subject yourself to this for so many years of your life, the years that are called the “adult years,” but which should be called the “slave years,” because we suddenly realize that the only time when we were free was when we were children, and we have to wait until retirement to reclaim that freedom… In fact, that could be the reason why we say that the elderly regress to childhood! But there’s a catch: it isn’t even guaranteed that we’ll live to retire…
And it isn’t guaranteed that we’ll get there in the condition we hope to arrive in…
But it is guaranteed that we’ll get there in a slightly altered state, a damaged state, not quite whole…
At this highly anticipated age —anticipated for forty or fifty years —we don’t always have the drive, the energy, or the health to do what we have always dreamed of doing, but were never able to do because we were obligated to… work!
And why do we accept this?
Because we are like everyone else, and everyone says that. everybody must work —that’s life!
But should life “really” be like this?
Of course, if you love your job, if your job is your true passion, I’ll admit that you can spend the best part of your day doing it, because in general, that’s when most people are at their best…
Like the Buddhists say, we are in our dharma, or it is our mission, to use a trendy expression, which is actually a revamped centuries-old concept! I admit that we want the fun to last in that case, and therefore, we strive to delay retirement for as long as possible, because even though we are working, we are having fun…
Like a jester.
Like a wise man.
Like Warren Buffet, the second-wealthiest man in America, who at the age of seventy-four still heads Berkshire Hathaway Inc. —the company that he founded more than forty years ago —with a master’s hand.
Like Li Ka-Shing, one of the richest men in Asia, who at the age of seventy-six continues to oversee the operations of Hutchison Whampoa Ltd, a huge global conglomerate.
Like Sumner Redstone, who at eighty-one is President of Viacom Inc. Like Kirk Kerkorian, who at the age of eighty-seven continues to make waves in the business world, for example by acquiring an influential position in GM by buying 7% of the stock.
Like the incredible French writer, Henri Troyat, who at the venerable age of ninety-four recently published a five hundred page biography of Alexandre Dumas!
But if you are only working to earn a living, as they say, which in itself is a strange expression…
If you cross off all the days until Friday on your calendar, or highlight your two weeks of annual vacation…
If you patiently cross off the years until your retirement…
In other words, if you would immediately submit your resignation if you were to win the million (or at least five million, if you factor in inflation!), I think you should seriously think about these nine hours…
Because these nine hours are crit
ical, and in fact, they are the root of the problem…
You should put down your pen and seriously think about these nine hours, and attempt to see, with an open and determined mind, what you could do with them, and what I mean is how you could reduce them, not necessarily to zero, but at least considerably…
Better yet, how you could find a way to stop striking the days that separate you from your retirement off your calendar…
Because you could retire sooner than you think!
In ten years, or in just five years, by working in a way that is smarter and more profitable, by spending less, because quite often, our buying power is also the power that will send us to the poorhouse. And of course, by investing more sooner…
Yes, you absolutely must attack these nine hours per day.
Why?
Because they are holding you hostage…
Keeping you from your true self.
From your dreams…
From your wishes…
From your forgotten talents…
Because they are keeping you away and depriving you of those you love and those who love you…
But you can never see them, or see them only on the fly, and I’m not talking about your mistress or your lover, but your parents, your friends, your children…
Your children, who you see as strangers, and who are away from you five days out of seven, and who essentially grow up with strangers. We call them elementary school teachers!
Your children, who grow up without you, and as a result, whom you do not see grow up, and who often leave without even saying goodbye…
Yes, your children, those little wonders, those little treasures who you’re not really with, even when you’re with them, because you don’t have the time, because you are too busy or preoccupied, because… because “daddy has to work at home as well, and mommy has to work too, and because we have two cars and a babysitter, who are costing us an arm and a leg!”
The babysitter…
Another stranger who doesn’t have the time to take care of her own children because she is obligated to look after yours in order to earn a living!
Yes, these poor children, who are left to their own devices until we ask ourselves how they turned out so badly!
Yes, these nine hours, which are in fact nine bars on your prison cell —wouldn’t it be better to stop so that they can stop devouring our lives?
And maybe, in order to liberate ourselves (at least a little) from the tyranny of work, shouldn’t we begin to spend our hard-earned dollars a little more wisely, and thriftily?
CHAPTER 3
DON’T BUY UNTIL YOU DECIDE TO BUY
“When you finally manage to save enough to buy the car of your dreams, the one that I shot in my last campaign, I will have already made it obsolete. I am always at least three steps ahead, and I always make sure that you are frustrated. Real Glamour is the country we never find. I intoxicate you with innovation, and the beauty of innovation is that it never stays new. Another one always comes along to make the previous one obsolete. (…) In my profession, nobody wants you to be happy, because happy people are not consumers. Your suffering drives the economy. In our jargon, we call it “post-purchase disappointment”.
This is an excerpt from a novel called 99 F, a work of fiction that nonetheless contains some troubling snippets of truth, because the author, Frédéric Beigbeder, worked in a leading advertising agency for years before he became a novelist. He knows what he’s talking about.
This confession by an ex-advertiser has disturbing undertones, doesn’t it?
Do you have an insatiable hunger for the latest innovation?
Have you ever felt post-purchase disappointment?
One day, during the British Open in St. Andrews, Scotland, a commentator interviewed golfer Fuzzy Zoeller, a very nice man who had recently come from shopping at the lovely boutiques in the historical village. He had bought an antique, an old gold club, and the commentator congratulated him.
Zoeller lucidly admitted: “It will make me happy for five minutes!”
Isn’t that something that you have often told yourself?
Or maybe you haven’t had the honesty —or the lucidity —to say it to yourself?
Do you buy things (that you don’t need) because you aren’t happy, and because you are desperately trying to “cash in” on the five minutes of happiness that shopping gives you?
Do you buy because you are frustrated?
Because your boss or a colleague yelled at you?
Because your employee screwed up, because sales dropped, or worse — are in a free-fall?
Because your husband is ignoring you?
Maybe he lets you use his credit card because he is so busy working to pay off his debts…
Do you shower your children with gifts in an attempt to make them forget your extended absences?
Do you buy gifts that are beyond your means in order to impress those around you, your brother-in-law, your father, or to play “rich” with your friends who really are wealthy?
A lot of people shop the same way they eat.
They are ill.
Or they will become ill!
Like they say in philosophical jargon, they eat their emotions.
They try to buy satisfaction and happiness.
When we work hard, we get stressed, so we need to decompress.
And we need to be compensated.
We want fast and immediate compensation.
Fast-food happiness.
We want to reap the benefits of our work immediately.
Not next year or next month: IMMEDIATELY
Business gurus repeat: DO IT NOW!
So that you feel like you are a man or a woman of action, and that you are capable of making a quick decision. Your motto is: BUY NOW!
Why buy tomorrow what you could buy today?
We want to feel powerful.
And the most common way for this to happen, to feel powerful, is to exercise our BUYING POWER.
But if we stop to think, isn’t this really our way of helping major corporations get rich?
And even more often, in fact in 80% of cases, if we are to believe the statistics, it increases our ability to become poor and to sink into debt? Without over-simplifying it, I think that sometimes it is worth it to realize that we are all engaged in an endless war from a very young age: it’s US, with our more or less heavy piggy bank, earned with the sweat of our brow, against the ENEMY!
The enemy is a LEGION, a virtual army of soldiers, or mercenaries, to put it a better way, who all have the same mission: to get their hands on OUR dollars!
You are David!
Your enemy is Goliath, like in the Bible.
Goliath is everywhere in your life, on every street corner, in every store window, in every restaurant…
He is on every Website, leering at you from pop-ups, with his photo on every second page, and sometimes in the newspapers and magazines, unsuspectingly slipping between songs on the radio, following you to the cinema, where you go to try to forget everything: but don’t forget him, he is in the advertising banners, and he slips in behind Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts as they embrace in front of a Gucci or Chanel boutique! This is called product placement (it should be called product investment!), and it generates money for the movie producers.
Goliath harasses you on the telephone, in your mailbox, and of course, on television, where you give him ammunition and make his task easier by unconsciously letting him in for three or four hours per day. But fortunately, you have the remote control, which you can use to zap him during every commercial break!
Goliath also has all the smarts of the invisible man. He is even there when you can’t see him. And when you think he isn’t there, he is, sneaking around, refining his ruses, and fine-tuning his plans of attack. He is everywhere. The only person who is more omnipresent is God.
That’s no small potatoes!
He’s George Orwell’s real Big Brother.
Yes, he
is everywhere, especially in YOUR THOUGHTS and your “dreams”…
He’s also on the lips of your friends, your husband, your wife, your children, and your colleagues, who constantly mention him to you in all his forms, and topped with every sauce imaginable: “I’ve seen this, or that, or please! Daddy! Please buy it for me!”
“Yesterday, I bought myself this new gadget. It’s incredible. Do you have one?”
And of course, you must hurry, like any self-respecting lemming, you must conform, or how will you look? Like nothing, or like a “minus habens,” which means someone who has nothing. If you don’t buy immediately, you’ll look like someone who isn’t in the now, someone who is obsolete…
If you want to feel important, if you want to feel wealthy, or even if you want to look like you are when you aren’t, if you want to feel like you are really living, and if you want to forget that you will die one day, then there is only one cure: BUY!
Fast, and badly, and pointlessly, but buy anyway.
It will always be a matter of buying this or of buying that!
Buying in order to escape and to avoid thinking about your problems, about the void within, about the woman or man who does not love you back, about yourself, because you have never loved, maybe because the first person who should have loved you didn’t; your mother, or your father: shopping is your only hope!
What Goliath wants, and what he is prepared to use all possible means to get, is YOUR DOLLARS, and he is so used to taking them from you that he feels that they are ALREADY his, even while they are still in your pocket!
In his eyes, and experience —and the majority of people give him a good reason to think this —these dollars are only in your pocket for a few days, or even hours. In short, they are in transit in your pockets before they move to his!
It isn’t a level playing field. The game is lost before it even starts… And this is true for 80% of people who lose it, who lose their shirt in their youth and spend their lives trying to catch up…
But David, despite his small size, can overcome Goliath.