life – Page 12 – Wild Rain

Musings on working in London

I’ve worked in IT for the best part of three decades and somehow during all that time I’ve managed to avoid working for a company based in London. I’ve been there for several interviews and many meetings but I’ve never had to work there.

It wasn’t on purpose, it just didn’t happen. And I’m ok with that, now.

Don’t get me wrong I do like to visit London. Piccadilly Circus, the Trocadero, the underground. Over time I’ve come to appreciate living and working in the countryside. As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to enjoy the gentle ebb and flow of life outside the cities and major towns of England. It’s nice on occasion to go into London for a meeting or event but that’s it. I find it too.. peoply.

I like people and the intenseness and craziness of cities, but in moderation. I don’t think I could live and breathe that amount of people and activity every day.

It helps that I live so far from the nearest city and that the trains are so expensive as both combine to supply me with the perfect excuse as to why I can’t work there. The maths just don’t add up. The cost of train tickets and travel time make such a commute too expensive. You end up giving a huge part of your income and time to just getting to your desk each day.

During the pandemic I got used to life in my village. After the pandemic I joked that I had become village agoraphobic, in that I rarely left the confines of the village. It is a pleasant existence. It also saves on fuel costs and car insurance!

So despite the younger me anticipating a busy life in the city, the older me has come to appreciate the calmness and slowness of life in the countryside.

When things don’t go to plan

When things don’t go to plan.
When a spanner is thrown into the works.
When people let you down.
When it’s one of those days.
When the brown stuff hits the fan.

It’s easy to become depressed, trigger anxiety, and become stressed out. It’s a natural reaction. Yet the more you feed that particular reaction the stronger it will get. The trick is to grow thicker skin. What doesn’t kill you and all that.

Life is complicated. Plus the more technically advanced we become as a species the more complex the problems will get. The more big things you own like cars, houses, and businesses, the more problems you are likely to face. Renting properties? You have to deal with lettings agents, tenants, and contractors. Own a business? There are customers, suppliers, employees, lawyers, accountants, and so on. You get the picture. The more you take on in life the more opportunities there are for problems to occur.

When life knocks you down the trick is to get back up, brush yourself off, and get on with it. Grow thicker skin. You will have to deal with idiots, incompetence, plain stupidity, angry people, delays, wear and tear, the economy, inflation, greed, and many more variables that shape the world that we live in.

Each day that you wake up, think that today will be a good day, but I will probably have to deal with people who are lazy and incompetent, or mean, angry, or just generally having a bad day. I may suffer losses in terms of time and money but I will survive this thing called life.

This problem that is stressing you out right now; you won’t remember it in five years time. Maybe not even in a year. So why stress about it now? Resolve it as best as you can and move on. Learn from it, grow, then let it go.

Things don’t always go to plan, so plan for them not to, and then you won’t be so stressed when the inevitable happens.

Embrace the wild rain.

Hustling

Instagram is full of people pushing products and trying to show complete strangers how amazing their lives are, but there are some nuggets of wisdom on the platform. I don’t post myself, I just have a sock puppet account I use for OSINT purposes, which if I’m honest I may also use just to browse.. on occasion.

One thing I’ve learned from Insta is how much some people really hustle. By hustle I mean work hard at promoting their brand, their products, their whole reason for being.

For example just look at The Rock or Mark Wahlberg. They both post multiple times a day pushing their products and movies. If you didn’t have Insta you may only hear about their occasional movie and catch a snippet of news about them and probably think they have it easy, make a movie, collect the millions, repeat, right? With thanks to Insta you can actually see how much they are hustling. Up in the early hours each day hitting the gym, then promoting their clothing / alcohol / sports nutrition products, then doing interviews and photoshoots, followed by attending events for further networking opportunities. It looks exhausting!

These two are constantly hustling. And they are not the only ones. Check out Arnold and Stallone. Both in their 70s still hustling like crazy. Like a duck swimming we have this picture of these celebrities in our minds that everything is easy for them on the surface, but Insta pulls back the curtain and shows us how crazy active these people are underneath, working at maintaining their image and brand.

Take a look at sports personalities and fitness models. In the gym multiple times a day, promoting their classes or courses, doing photo shoots and training videos, attending events and working hard to promote both their image and what they are selling.

It may be full of cat videos but there are still nuggets of wisdom on Insta.

Losing your mojo

Losing your mojo: Losing your ambition, your purpose, your reason for being. A general feeling of being lost without aim or goals.

Losing your mojo is no joke. It induces a feeling of anxiety and stress with an overlay of depression. For those of us that thrive on ambition, losing your mojo is like a derailment of sorts. You no longer know in your mind what the future holds for you as you feel no sense of purpose or direction. It’s like your strings have been severed and each day feels.. samey.

Therapists will tell you that with CBT you can train yourself to be ok, to not need your mojo, just live your life and enjoy each day as it comes. It does work in that you feel less depressed, but your loss of mojo is merely stifled. You know the loss is still there under the surface. You yearn for the you that you once were. Thriving on ambition, knowing where you were heading and how you would get there. Now you are just driving a car with a broken GPS. You can go where you want and enjoy the journey but there’s no overall destination in mind.

Getting your mojo back is challenging and requires a lot of self analysis. What matters to you in life? What makes you happy? Given where you are now, your interests, your passions, where do you want to be? What really really drives you?

If you can figure all that out then you may just get your mojo back. In the meantime try new things and experiment. Maybe you’ll trigger something that will spark an idea, a passion, a driver.

Good luck.

Sorry for your loss

It’s something we say when we don’t know what to say. Someone close to you has passed on. Words can’t make it better. We want to express our sympathy but words fail us so we rely on the old faithful:

Sorry for your loss.

You’ve lost a friend, a good friend. Someone you’ve known for years. Someone you’ve had adventures with, been through stuff with, experienced life with, shared secrets, and dreams. You’ve celebrated their birthdays and anniversaries. Spent time with their loved ones. Had many beers with late into the night, discussing anything and everything.

And now they are gone. Just like that.

Sorry for your loss.

As you get older it happens more and more. You are going to more funerals than weddings and celebrations. You hear it more and more. Loss. Your loss, their loss.

Sorry for your loss.

Don’t ask do

Sometimes you just have to make decisions, take the initiative, go with your gut. Don’t live a life in the shadow of others, asking what they are going to do, what are their plans, what are they going to wear, what time they are planning to turn up, and so on. Be the leader, the doer, the ones others follow.

Create your own mantra.

Take action, make decisions, don’t wait on others. Don’t ask, do.

Throw away culture

I was watching a documentary where people in countries like India and Egypt had lots of these one-person businesses specialising in one thing such as motorbike exhausts, metal cooking pans, mobile phone repair, etc. Where everything was recycled or up-cycled. Nothing was thrown away or wasted. Another person’s trash was something they could re-use to turn into a product or part of a product.

It was fascinating. We have such a throw-away culture here in the UK. It’s far cheaper to buy a new device than attempt to repair the old one, partly due to the cost of spare parts and labour costs plus taxes, and partly because many manufacturers don’t support their products for long and access to spare parts can be limited, if they are available at all.

Yet in this documentary these individuals made their own parts or harvested them from other devices. There was less going into landfills.

This inspired me. I have this all-in-one printer that is sitting at the end of my desk no longer working properly. I had started to research new printers to see what I would buy next. But I really liked the one I had. I could get ink cheaply for it. It had a paper feeder hidden underneath rather than those top-loading ones where the paper can flop awkwardly forwards and needs constant reloading. The scanner worked smoothly and it was a great photocopier. Plus I didn’t want to toss another device in a landfill.

Inspired by the documentary I decided to see if I could repair it myself. I did some online googling and watched a few YouTube videos and then bought some stuff online.

Once it all arrived it took an hour or so but I’m happy to say that my printer now works like new. Everything I bought is either part of the working printer or can be used to repair it in future. I did not consign another electronic device to the local dump.

There’s nothing for you in the past

There’s nothing for you in the past. It’s worth repeating that to yourself once in a while. There’s nothing for you in the past.

Many of us spend way too much of our time thinking about things that happened in the past. How we could have done this or that. Maybe if we made this decision, or chose that job, or that friend. Or maybe we reminisce on the good old times. Ruminate on what it would be like to bring something back, or to revisit something again.

It can become self destructive and can hinder both your direction in life and your mental health. Stop living in the past and live in the present. The past is a lonely place full of memories where nothing can be changed. Move on with your life, focus on the present and the future.

The town centre

It’s nice to have a change of scenery once in a while, especially when writing. Looking at the same surroundings day after day can become somewhat dull after a while. To shake things up I like to hop on a bus and travel to a high street in any nearby town, find a coffee shop or bar, find a seat by a window, unpack my mobile office from my go bag, and start writing.

Over the past few years I’ve noticed a real change in the high streets I visit: less big chains, more empty shops, and more of a diverse specific set of shops.

It may be different where you live but I’m seeing more vape shops, nail and hair salons, foreign supermarkets, tattoo parlors, phone and gadget accessory shops, betting shops, and cheap shops (known as pound shops in the UK).

Supply and demand would indicate that there is a need for these stores if they are thriving. I believe that these are not new shops, just new to the high street. Maybe they were once down a side street or high street adjacent.

With the big chains going into administration or reducing the number of stores they operate, we are seeing more space opening up on the high street, and nature abhors a vacuum, or at least commercial landlords do. Rents are negotiated downwards, government initiatives are introduced around business rates to encourage entrepreneurs to take up the opportunity, and voila! We have shops that usually occupy an off high street location being relocated on it side-by-side with the few remaining big chains.

Don’t get me wrong, I think change is good. I’m all for a diverse high street meeting the needs of the people. I’m just curious to see how it evolves further.

What are your thoughts? Do you still visit your local high street? Do you think the high street has a future in our evolving culture?

Dead zones

I like to write when I’m out and about. Cafes, bars, anywhere with a table and seat. Somewhere that I can unfurl my bluetooth keyboard and just start typing, downloading my thoughts into the cloud.

Occasionally you come across dead zones. Places where there is no phone signal or wifi. Your device cannot talk to the cloud. Sure you can type, but you can’t do any online research and you can’t save to the cloud.

Dead zones can be peaceful. Just you and your thoughts and your unconnected device. You can still write. You also have the added advantage that no one can reach you!

In some places there may be no phone signal but there may be wifi, but do you trust it? When I find a comfy spot that is in a dead zone I sometimes move to an area with signal and download everything I need then return to the dead zone to work, free from distractions. Bliss!