I really love my work. As with any job, a certain amount of repetition is involved – that’s necessary to actually build expertise. I write about the same subjects every day, but the specifics of each piece, the details, vary.
Creating content is awesome. But really, what am I contributing to the world by sitting at a computer all day?
By first world standards, life in NZ can be tough. The cost of living is so high, the property market is insane, it’s a struggle to get ahead. Yet compared to some in the world we have so much.
The part about travel that depressed me the most – and really started to grind on me towards the end – was visiting countries and realising, every time, just how their civilization was built upon slavery, oppression, war. The same was true the world over.
I’ve been working my way through this book on Somalia - very slowly, because it’s not an emotionally easy read. It enrages me and depresses me in equal parts. It’s just unfathomable what some of our fellow human beings have to endure simply for being born in the wrong country.
Like Her Every Cent Counts, right now I’m struggling to reconcile those feelings with my own desire to get ahead in the society I live in. I feel like a terrible person for not wanting to read more books like this (despite the fact that I can’t resist memoirs like Escape from Camp 14) for that reason.
I realize this is all sort of pointless. Even if I was to go work at a nonprofit, my job would still consist of sitting at a computer because that’s where my skills lie.
/end ramble
This week’s links
TRAVEL
Besudesu Abroad interviewed me for her weekly blogger series – head over to read about our travel budget, favorite destinations and my love/hate relationship with the beach
Ashley sums up all my feelings about the Grand Canyon (like her, I heard mixed things about it but was blown away) and astutely observes that “we romanticise travel when so much of it is completely unromantic” (um, see this post on all the unglamorous stuff we don’t like to write about)
Beverley is missing Auckland badly – a post I never expected to read anywhere online (people do NOT write yearningly about my city!)
Yes and Yes shares a few things you probably didn’t know about Alaska
WORK/MONEY
Her Every Cent Counts argues that most stock options are BS
Hilarious ways to quit your job and life working on on a cruise ship, via Budgets are Sexy
Alicia ponders the reality of being a solitary woman in a sea of men at work
LIFE
Frugal Portland ponders the phenomenon of celebrity
Newlyweds on a Budget are in the same boat as us when it comes to house buying
Fun date ideas from Well Heeled (2013 was a year of limerence for us, but even so we still need to shake things up once in a while)
The problem with the stories we tell ourselves, from Minimal Millennial
And my post on surviving a layoff was in the carnival of personal finance
Happy weekends! Looks like I’m going to be cooped up inside – there’s a bit of a rainstorm going on out there.
