The money helped, no question. But I notice I come home with nothing left for anyone. Not asking for advice exactly, more curious whether anyone here made the same trade and how it went for them a year or two later.
A friend of mine has been quiet lately and I wanted to see what this place is like before sending him here. So far I like that you can read everything without an account and that posting anonymously is an option. If you have been around for a while: what made you stay?
It is not the body. The body you can see coming, and honestly the gym handles most of it. It is that you suddenly know how long a decade takes. At 25 a decade was an abstraction. At 40 you have watched three of them go by and you can feel exactly how fast the next one will move. It made me ruthless about who I spend time with. That is the only real change.
He took a job in Denver eight months ago. We text. We do the occasional call. What I did not expect: he was the only person I said anything true to. Not on purpose, it just happened over twenty years of sitting in his garage. I have a wife I love, a good job, plenty of people around. And I have not said a true thing out loud in eight months.
Dropped about 22% of my salary to go to a smaller company with real boundaries. Things I got back: dinner with my kids most nights, the gym four times a week, and the ability to read a book without checking my phone every eight minutes. Things I lost: a title nobody outside my industry understood, and a car payment I did not need. I am not saying everyone can do this. I am saying I could have done it three years earlier.
It started as a twinge on runs. I decided it was nothing because admitting it was something meant stopping. Two years of compensating with the other leg. Now I have a hip problem too. The surgeon was polite about it but the message was clear: this was a six week problem that I turned into a permanent one.