It's a minimalist Monday edition of Optimal Living Daily episode 1788, an excerpt from the book, Adventures in Opting Out, by Kate Flanders, and I'm Justin Molick, welcome to Optimal Living Daily or the OLD podcast where I read to you from some of the best articles I can find with permission from the authors covering personal development or self-help, minimalism, anything I think will help you lead a more meaningful life and add some good thoughts for you every day. Occasionally, I read book excerpts, and that's the case today. Kate Flanders is a friend of the show, I've been lucky enough to meet her, and I have an excerpt from her new book, Adventures in Opting Out, so let's get right to it and start optimizing your life. An excerpt from the book, Adventures in Opting Out, by Kate Flanders.
So what happens if you don't opt out, if you ignore the signs and whispers and continue to believe the stories I tell you to live a certain way, if you let your fear outweigh your excitement forever, if you decide not to follow your curiosity, what happens if you choose to stay on your current path, aside from living with the pain of ignoring the whispers which will probably become internal screams? The first and most obvious answer I can give you here is that the way you move through this world will essentially say the same. You will continue to make decisions the same way you have up to this point, and you'll do things the way you've always done them, and I know I said this earlier, but maybe that's fine, maybe you could have a fine life, you might even have a good life, or better yet a great life. I'm not here to say that Opting Out is the best way to live, I am saying that it is one way to live, one path to choose, but you can absolutely choose to stay on the one you're on.
If I'd stayed on some of my old paths, here's where I might be today. I might have married one of my ex-boyfriends, we might have had two kids together and bought a house in Victoria and stayed in that city forever. I probably would have kept working for the government, been stayed working there for 35 years so I could collect my full pension one day, then we would have retired and maybe traveled a little bit. We would have gone on tropical vacations, not because we necessarily wanted to, but because that's what our friends did.
When we were home, we could have picked up our grandkids from school and watched them for our kids. That might have been okay. In another life, I might have bought the condo I was looking at when I was 22 years old. Instead of backing out of the deal at the last minute, I might have bought it and lived in it for five or ten years.
I probably would have sold it when the real estate market was up, made a decent profit, and used that to put a down payment on my next home, or used it to buy an investment property. Maybe real estate would have become my side hustle, maybe I could have bought one property, then another, then another, and rented them all out or turned them into Airbnb's. I think it's safe for me to assume that I would have kept my stable government job to be safe, but maybe I would have become a real estate investor on the side rather than a writer. Financially, it probably would have paid off.
I'm sharing these hypothetical situations with you because these are two scenarios that were painted for me through stories and suggestions from family and friends and society. They're great paths for some people, but they were not for me. One of the most basic principles of personal finance is that everything is a trade-off. Unless you have an endless supply of money, you have to choose how you want to spend, save, and invest.
Every financial choice you make, you're also choosing not to spend, save, or invest in other things. We can't have it all or do it all. We have to make choices. The same goes for how we live our lives.
You can't have it all or do it all in one lifetime. There is a cost to staying on one path, especially if it doesn't feel like the one you should be on. But there's also a cost to walking away and venturing into the unknown. The real question is, what price are you willing to pay?
If I stick to my current path, here's what I could miss out on. It's likely that I won't settle down somewhere, or won't choose a place to settle in until I'm entering my more senior years if I'm lucky enough to see them. Because that reason alone, I may never own a home, and I probably won't get married or have kids, which means I may never get to experience what it means to be a wife or a mom. Some of these outcomes were once decisions I was scared to make, some I didn't even know I was allowed to make.
I'd always just assumed I would get married and have kids. Then one day I realized I had a choice. I could choose to get married or not get married, and I could choose to have kids or not have kids. I could choose which paths I went down.
As of right now, I don't want to go down those two paths, and those decisions are intentional. There is a purpose behind each one. I'm absolutely open to the idea of having a partner for life, but I'm not at all interested in getting legally married unless we are from different countries and would help us be together. As for kids, I'd rather be Auntie Kate.
I know there are trade-offs and I'm willing to pay the price, so I could be sad that I'm going to miss out, or I could be grateful for the life I would get to live. I'll choose to be grateful. I'm a big fan of Cheryl Strade's work, particularly her old deer sugar column and later podcasts of the same name. My favorite was her response to a man who called himself Undecided.
Undecided wrote in to explain that he wasn't sure if he wanted to have kids or not. He could seem self-being happy either way. He shared that he was exploring the ideas of what both paths might look like, and he asked Cheryl how one might decide, and how to not make a decision you will regret. The entire column called the ghost ship that didn't carry us, which is brilliant, could be summed up in her closing paragraph, quote, I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose.
We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful, and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore. You just listen to an excerpt from the book Adventures in Opting Out by Kate Flanders.
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Right now, it's just $199. And head to superpower.com and use code old at checkout for an additional $20 off your membership. If they could get Kate, the book came out only around six weeks ago in the US, also available in the UK, and coming to Australia December 1st, you can find it at kateflanders.com, also at Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, of course. It's highly rated there.
A great excerpt because she's not here to push anything onto you, and I hope that when I read minimalism content for you, most often on Mondays, that it's also not feeling push on you or any of these posts for that matter, because I'll basically defeat the whole purpose of this podcast, which is a curation of so many different voices where you can hear different sides, personal stories and anecdotes, some of which may seem strange and bizarre, but others might feel like home. It's up to you to decide and choose which ultimately better your life and end up being the ship that you want to be on. So choose that ship wisely with the information you take in, and I'm sure you'll be on the right one. I'll see you on that ship tomorrow, where you're optimal life, and wait.