i hate making sacrifices

Now probably isn't a great time to blog anything, and not just because it's well past midnight and I have to work tomorrow (today, whatever). I'm not liking my life too much right about now. Some time yesterday was spent trying to guesstimate next year's budget for my "Poor Man's Personal Finance Package" spreadsheet, and...nah, that didn't go too well. So I revisited it today, and that didn't go any better. Seems that even if I cut way back on some things that I hold in rather high regard, and even after some unexpected slight windfalls, necessary expenses still chew up practically all of my paycheck, leaving little for savings and next to nothing for rainy-day stuff or leisure. And when you live in a ridiculously overpriced area like Maryland, or anywhere in the Northeast or mid-Atlantic for that matter, that's a very, very bad thing.

So...I look at the upcoming year and see little possibility of buying a house (meaning I throw away another several thousand dollars in rent), zero possibility of overseas travel, considerably scaled back prospects for domestic travel, very little investment for the future (retirement? what the heck is that?), not a lot of spending money, and potentially great damage from unknowns like car trouble or medical costs that could bite me at any moment and have before, and...what am I supposed to think? Other people somehow seem to pull off this whole life thing...how do they do it? I simply can't help but feel like a fish out of water. Whatever it takes to get somewhere, or feel like one is getting somewhere, I don't have it. I often wonder if that's due to my career, or region of the country, or lots of things, but who knows. Whatever it is, I wouldn't mind having it.

Invariably, I always end up at the same lingering question in times like this. After suffering through six years of engineering school, doing what I could to save money and strap myself with as little debt as reasonably possible during my college days, and approaching five years in the workforce, shouldn't my outlook be a little brighter than this? I mean, even just a little bit? What the heck is going on here? When a lot of your hope and drive is premised on the idea that things will get better with time, and then they don't get better...well, that sucks.

In light of that, it's very easy to see the appeal of just "disappearing to the world" somehow. My version of that bounces between missions work and expatriation these days. Though I'm realizing as I get older that I just don't have the tools necessary in the mission field and expatting would be a long shot given my circumstances, it's nice to imagine myself just somehow losing a lot of the strife I have now and getting to "hit the reset button" somewhere else where life wouldn't be quite as hard or depressing. How life would actually be is a huge unknown of course, but it's nice to think about nonetheless. Just the idea of trying something like that, for better or worse, is nice. It'd be even nicer if the chances of that happening looked a bit better.

It's also very easy to see why people become workaholics, or couch potatoes or busy-freaks. If you're always occupied with something that allows you to zone in on short-term goals or the here-and-now, you don't have to think about bigger questions that don't have answers. Methinks there's a great appeal to that sort of thing for people who would rather not confront beasts they can't deal with. After all, ignoring a problem does tend to make it go away for a while. And if there's no discernible long-term solution anyway and it's just frustrating to think about, then why think about it at all? Something tells me this doesn't work for everything, but something else tempts me to give it a try anyway, much more so than I do now.