bye-bye, rat race... or should I say, au revoir?

Rat Cage, a photo by deborah|silverbees on Flickr.

Well, I did it. I quit my job, which was making me crazy. Quit the rat race altogether, at least for a while.

I never planned to work until retirement age. The idea was to work for a while, accumulate a big nest egg, and live off the income stream from that. Some people appear to happily turn their lives over to corporate America. Not me. I have a ton of stuff I want to do, and I found the extent to which my time was wasted in a corporate job to be incredibly frustrating.

Well, I'm not getting any younger. And I don't have enough savings to live off of for the rest of my life. It was starting to look like I'd be working for another 10 years before I could be relatively safe, and who knows, maybe not even then. I finally lost my patience for deferring living. Fifteen days of vacation a year was not cutting it. I had to try plan B.

Now you hear about people who quit their jobs, and say it was a terrible mistake. And that kind of scenario ran through my mind over and over again as I made my decision. You unplug yourself from the Matrix, and you wonder if you'll ever be able to plug yourself back in again. Even if you don't want to, what if you need to? Yet somehow you can't... and then you're homeless. Big scary thoughts.

Well, I'm smart enough to quit with substantial savings. It will take me a couple years until I have to start eating into retirement savings. I have to trust I can find some other way to make a living before that happens.

So here I go.