The sheer amount of free time I have allows me the opportunity to ponder the world and my place in it. I watch people go by all day, some of them, presumably to their occupation of choice. It makes me wonder how much choice there really is in the matter.

There is only so much time in a lifetime and so many of us trade a substantial percentage of this time for money. I’ve given decades to this trade and managed to lose decades in the accounting. Where’d the money go? Primarily to places I can’t even remember, a gigantic list of unremembered waste.

So what value did the money have?

I can feel the loss of time keenly, as though I’ve lost a family member. When I try to focus the same energy on the money I feel contentious toward it. I took the bait and got fileted. This makes the idea of spending any more time pursuing money feel like voluntary torture. The tangled web that money weaves around every aspect of life makes it impossible to remove entirely from the picture.

As much as I might be better off losing a few pounds, I enjoy eating. My life has been made better experientially by food and the savoring of it. I’ve yet to find a way to get my food for free, but if I could, I’d probably die 10 years sooner, happier.

The greater focus of this ramble is about the never-ending quest for a sense of purpose. If I abandon this quest in favor of the practical, I will lose my time and much of who I am. So the quest becomes how to achieve the practical along the path to purpose. As it sounds, it’s nearly impossible. The world rewards the uneducated peanuts for meaningless work. That is what is available to a person like me. For all of my bitching about this, I have at least avoided the leviathan that is student debt.

I’ve had a conversation with myself about education and it’s a dead end. The formality of it all puts me off completely and the debt is one I will not saddle myself with for life. I accept the fact that despite wanting the knowledge, I don’t want to deal with the process and bureaucracy of it all. I will never stop trying to learn more and become a better person, though.