Not sure I should attempt an answer at this, but what the heck, here goes. I’ll try to keep it short.
After 15+ years in US computer industry as technical writer, manager of publications, and manager of software engineering, including 9 years working for Sun Microsystems when I had offices in both Massachusetts and in Silicon Valley California & spent much of my life on airplanes flying across the USA, I quit the high-tech, rat-race life and moved with my young family to the rural (and touristy) island of Martha’s Vineyard, 5 miles south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts in 1993. At that time my children were around 5, 10 & 12 years old. Since then we’ve lived various places on the island, but for the last 13 years we’ve been in a small house on an unpaved road that dead-ends into a nature preserve. (Our children have long since grown up, although for health reasons our 28-year-old had to move back in with us 3 years ago. . .) Moving to Martha’s Vineyard was a total change in lifestyle for us and the reasons for it were complex. My intention was to earn my living writing technical books for publishers like O’Reilly. That didn’t work out so well. Over the last 25 years I’ve had one 2-year gig at a company in Cambridge, MA, and one 5 year gig at a company based in San Francisco. These jobs required me to rent minimal lodgings near Boston, but also allowed me to do some amount of work at my home on the Vineyard. Over the last decades I’ve also had dozens of short freelance technical writing contracts for clients all over North America; I did virtually all of that work from home, with the occasional trip to San Francisco or Palo Alto, etc. Over the rest of that period I’ve made my living as a manual laborer, including warehouse work, furniture moving, and construction labor. I’ve also written novels and stories and done journalism of one stripe or another. I’m sure that it’s my novels that got me onto Silklist, for example. My wife and I have become enmeshed in the island community. She runs the lecture series at our library, which brings in locally and sometimes nationally and internationally-known speakers, and she is also a prominent figure in fighting food insecurity here. http://www.vineyardstyle.com/marthas-vineyard.php/114/The-Serving-Hands-of-Betty-Burton <http://www.vineyardstyle.com/marthas-vineyard.php/114/The-Serving-Hands-of-Betty-Burton> I work with her on the food insecurity stuff and I’m also a volunteer firefighter. Here’s where I was last Wednesday: http://www.mvtimes.com/2017/01/18/chimney-catches-fire-vineyard-haven-house/ I still make most of my income doing manual labor. See for example http://eepurl.com/cxC4mn <http://eepurl.com/cxC4mn> It’s a far cry from Silicon Valley. I wish I could make my living as a writer. I still dream of that. I still work towards that. But it hasn’t happened yet. I do not miss the high tech/high stress life of Silicon Valley. I enjoy construction work, moving heavy shit from here to there, demolishing buildings, clambering up unsteady walls, swinging sledge hammers, and so forth. But the pay is crap and I’m not young. I’m strong and fit, but I’m 64 years old and I’m not all that stupid, so I know that some day, maybe soon, my body will give out and I won’t be able to do this kind of work any more. And then what? But as to lifestyle choices, my concerns are different from anyone considering a move such as I made who has financial resources. Things are so much different when you’re poor. For reasons I won’t go into now (children in health crises being a big part of it), money has always nearly always been an issue for us. For various reasons, even when I had high-paying jobs 30 years ago, money was an issue. I feel guilt over the stress my wife has endured, and especially for what my children endured, as we went from middle class to working class to poor. So why did we move to a remote island, where making money is hard to do, from mainland Massachusetts, where it was theoretically easier to make a buck? Again, the reasons are complex. They mostly have to do with complex medical situations. Why did I attempt to write novels instead of going back to make money in the computer industry, before age discrimination shut that door for me? That’s too hard a question for me to deal with right now. In retrospect I don’t know what I would have done differently. But I wish everything hadn’t been so fucking difficult. I wish it wasn’t so hard now. Maybe my next novel will bring a change in my situation. I have high hopes for it. But then again, I may be nuts. I realize that all of the above is likely Too Much Information, but I suspect that my experience with regard to the question below is about as extreme as one is likely to see on this list, so in that spirit I offer it as an anchor point. jrs P.S. I see that I failed to keep it short. Oh well. Believe me, it could have been much, much longer. P.P.S. Buy my books. > On Jan 22, 2017, at 4:18 AM, Venkatesh Hariharan <[email protected]> wrote: > > I am going through a transition into a slower pace of life. Knowing the > eclectic nature of this list, I wanted to hear from others who have "been > there, done that." After years in the corporate world, I decided to quit > the fast paced life anf become a consultant. My goal was to have more > control over my time, but somehow I found myself living an equally busy > life. > > I am now thinking of cutting down my consulting assignments and decisively > slowing down my life, to stop hopping from one task to the other like a > maniac, and to relish reading books and watching plays, and the company of > friends. To those who are ahead of me in this ambitious path, my question > is, "What do you.love the most about living a slower life?" > > Looking forward to the answers. > > Veny > > PS: Yup, confirmation bias :-)
