Being comfortable with who you are

As I get older in age, hopefully more mature in thinking, I realized that I'm more and more comfortable with being myself. When I was younger, there's a lot of insecurities because there's a lot of people that you feel that you ought to model after and ought to follow, maybe sometimes also to lead. I think I was young and likely impressionable, so whoever is successful in whatever ways, I would like to model after him or her. As a result of such imprinting in my earlier years, I've a mish-mash of characteristics that I think is good for me in my development as a human being. It's not always easy to change your own characteristics, because it takes a lot of effort to do so and requires a lot of change. And change always require much much more than just passively following, isn't it? It requires you to really want to do it.


But I'm getting more and more comfortable being who I am. I see less and less need to mimic others. This also comes about because I realized who I am and who I am not. What makes people happy might not truly make me happy. Now that is an important realization because the key to happiness is to know what makes you happy. Blindly following what makes other people just wouldn't cut it. This is, after all, a journey that you take yourself.


I don't have to keep on comparing whose balls are bigger and whose pecker is longer. I'm glad that my job don't put in a situation where I constantly have to prove to others that I've arrived. I sympathize but I can never truly empathize with people who are in the cobra-corporate world who always have to feign happiness and fake success. Is work all about getting progressively higher and higher pay, bigger and bigger bonuses? It might be if that's what makes you happy, but I suspect that for many others, it's not. Which is why we see so many people, in the midst of a successful track career groomed for all the greatness to come in the cobra-corporate world, suddenly come to a halt and switch to a totally different career. Mid-life crisis, they say. If that's the term for 'suddenly' realizing that what makes you happy is a total change in career, then so be it. I will welcome it with open arms.


I realized, surprisingly not too long ago, that I don't really talk much about retirement and having a passive income and all those fun stuff. It dawned on me that it's not really what I wanted in life. Is it sacrilegious, for a financial blogger like me, that it's not my goal to achieve this numerical value before certain age? Maybe I shouldn't call myself a financial blogger anymore. Just because I occasionally blog about personal finance and very occasionally about stocks (nowadays) doesn't qualify me as a financial blogger, just like you wouldn't call a cashier a financial guru because he handles money. Let me qualify it further - while it's not my goal to achieve financial independence, it's still something that's on my mind, specifically at the back of my mind. It's just that I no longer obsess over it.


Define obsession. Here's what I did in the past:

1. Read a book about stocks / personal finance / money for 1-3 yrs, about one book a week. I cleared shelves of books in my local library until it comes to a point where there's really very few books that I haven't read.

2. Keep on trying to squeeze more time out to do more work to earn more money to hit my savings target, broken up into annual, monthly, weekly and madly enough, daily targets.

3. Keep on trying to reduce my expenses by cutting on food, drinks, transport and what have you.


It's not making me any happier, I came to realize. I must have carried it to the extremes of my limitations, hence the fatigue and therefore the unhappiness. But obsession is important because there lies the motivation to go on fighting when others have long given up. However, like a horse, if you don't control the unbridled power of obsession, it'll consume you.


So what am I now that I'm so comfortable being? I'm not a perfectionist - It's okay if I fail to achieve my goals and lack the discipline to follow my convictions. I'm not always consistent - I'm bashing others over lack of discipline in some areas and I'm advocating others to be less disciplined. I'm idiosyncratic - I don't buy drinks when I eat alone to save money but I spend big bucks on gadgets to save time. I'm not a rational person but I'm a rationalizing person - I act on my right brain but use my left brain to explain to others what I did. I'm an idiot in life but I do pretty well in school. I can be jealous - I'm envious of other's success and sometimes explain the success by luck or more satisfyingly, by inheritance. I can be vengeful - in my mind's eye, people who crosses me had died by horrific contraptions to extort the most pain in the most vivid manner.


If you still like me, or worse, are like me, then good. We can drink, eat and be merry and occasionally talk about how we survive this crazy world at this moment and how we're planning to survive in the future. If not, farewell and be glad that our paths, though different, had a chance to mingle and criss-cross, at least for a while.


Life is just like this, isn't it? Beautifully repulsive, sickeningly attractive.