Nobody Warns You About This Part of Opting Out

Nobody warns you about this part. Everyone talks about escaping the nine to five. Nobody talks about what happens after you do. Think about what a normal day used to look like. You wake up, eat fast, get ready, commute, go to work, come home exhausted, feed the kids, manage the house, the dishes, the laundry, the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. And then the day ends, and you do it all over again. When you do that long enough, it becomes a routine. And if you never question the routine, you never grow. You never change. For some people, maybe that's fine. For us, it was slowly killing us. So we changed it. But here's the thing you don't find out until you're in it. When you make those changes, once you actually escape that schedule, suddenly you're home a lot more. And there's all this time you're not used to having. And instead of feeling natural and stress-free the way it should feel, you feel guilty, like you're doing something wrong, like you're supposed to be somewhere, like a free day with no plans means you're failing somehow. It's this busyness, this need to always be moving, always chasing, always rushing toward the next thing. It's been baked into us since we were in school. School was designed to prepare us to be good employees, to get used to the schedule, to never question it. And even when you escape it, it follows you home. And there's another cost to all that busyness that I don't think people ever add up. When you're that busy, you never learn anything new. You don't learn how to fix the thing that broke. You don't learn to grow food or build or wire something or cook from scratch or raise an animal. All of that takes time, and time is the one thing that schedule doesn't give you. So you pay somebody every single time, and that's the trap right there. You work to afford the things you don't have time to learn to do yourself. And then you need the job to keep paying for all of it. I was that guy. Something broke here. I called someone. It never even occurred to me that I could just figure it out because I'd never had the hours to try. It wasn't until we slowed down that I started learning anything at all. We chose to homeschool our kids. Neither of us was homeschooled. Neither of us had any experience with it. We're figuring it out as we go. My wife and I are together basically all the time now. We moved away from the jobs that kept us separated. We chose this and it's still a learning curve we haven't figured out because there's another thing that nobody really talks about. We were raised to be separated. Kids were sorted by age in the classrooms. Adults going off to separate jobs. Everyone in their own lane. And now we're all home together all the time and we're clashing sometimes for reasons we shouldn't clash. What did we find? Not because something is wrong. Just because this is all new, this is different, and we're still learning how to be together in a way that most families never have to figure out. And lately, I'm just tired. This life I talk about building hasn't come without work. I actually work more now than I ever did at a full-time job. When I delivered mail, I came home after and I relaxed. When I worked with kids at a group home, I had a home to come back to and decompress in. There was an after. Now there's no after. You're just always here. And you see everything. All the imperfections. All the sounds. The sirens in town that never stop going off. You notice all of it because you're not distracted anymore. You're here and this is your life. And lately, I've been going non-stop. Filming the course, 3 hours of footage pulled together over 3 years, weekly videos on top of that, raising the meat birds and getting them in the freezer, getting the garden into the freezer and the pantry, and like I showed you last week, actually growing the feed for our animals ourselves. It's a lot. Maybe an unsustainable amount of things. And it makes you question whether any of it's worth it. Would it be easier to just work the nine-to-five for the security, drive to the store, buy the bags of feed, and have that peace of mind? Probably. Honestly, probably. Cool, that looks good. That looks good. And I still catch myself chasing busyness, even now, even after everything we've done to get away from it. There's still this pull toward filling every moment, toward having a plan, toward doing something instead of just being somewhere. And I despise it because I know exactly where it came from. My parents lived that way. Their parents lived this way. Everybody busy. Everybody rushing. Everybody moving from activity to activity and event to event and never asking why. We just want to rest. We're exhausted. And somehow rest still feels like something we have to earn. Some days we even wonder if we have been better off not knowing any of it. Not seeing the food dyes, the chemicals, the system built to keep us dependent. Maybe ignorance really is bliss. But we can't go back to not knowing. And we can't go back to the life we had. So here we are, in the middle. Can I sit down? But this is the mission. This is the calling. No matter how hard it is or how difficult the season feels, we keep going because we know this is our path and we're paving it for our kids. This is uncharted territory for us, it won't be for them. They'll be prepared. Oh yeah, it's going to be a good one. Oh, this is a really cool one. What? Oh, how did we miss that? Look at that, it's red and black. That's cool man. It's kind of powerful. Is it? Yeah see? That's awesome. And I know we will figure it out because we have to. All of this is for them. We don't have it all figured out and I want to be honest about that. We know what we want. We know the life we don't want. Knowing that doesn't make every day easy. It just means we know which direction we're pointed. But if we don't try Nothing ever changes, it only gets worse for us, for our kids, for the people coming after us. So, we keep going. Going back isn't an option anymore. I refuse to play the rigged game. This is my solution to the problem. Live a life counter to the noise and create the peace right here. You can't really reach it yet, can you? That's too bad. I've seen what you chickens do. I know what you do.