Inertia Creeps

A comfortable salary, a nice house and a german car parked on the drive.

Suddenly you begin to notice a spare tyre starting to accumulate around your mid-rift as your days become more sedentary and inactive as you become tethered to a desk and keyboard.

Your weekends become about anaesthetizing yourself with alcohol ready for the start of a new working week.

The surplus from your weeks of toil is plundered to buy the latest and greatest to elevate your social standing amongst your friends and peers.

Five years earlier I’d returned home with less a thousand pounds to my name after two glorious years spent dirt bagging around South America.

Returning to the UK, I’d returned with a hunger to top up my bank account and leveraged my skills and flexibility to carve out a comfortable position.

At the time I reasoned I’d spend a year and top up my funds, that year turned in to a second and then a third and a fourth.

Yet as COVID hit, and the reported number of daily deaths went up, and up, deep down as human beings we all faced some sort of existential crisis.

The things we took for granted got stripped away, suddenly when faced with weeks furloughed from work, or weeks of work confined to your spare bedroom or kitchen table our carefully crafted personas slowly began to slip away.

Deep down I’d known for sometime that I was unhappy, I’d gone through the motions and contemplated leaving my job before.

A cursory look at the jobs market every now and again confirmed to me that I was overpaid for what I did, not to mention the potential loss of my management options I’d worked so hard to achieve. Golden handcuffs well and true locked.

As the years pass by those carefree and adventurous ideals slowly begin to erode.

Inertia begins to creep in, as you begin to think about the number of years left of work and the mortgage payments you need to make and the pension you need to top up.