The following is an email I sent earlier today to a friend of mine who is about to turn 40 and recently emailed me saying that they are feeling like they want to do something different with their lives. My reply does a fairly good job detailing my views on these issues so I thought I’d share it on my blog. But other than the fact that my friend is a practicing attorney (shocker), I’ve edited the email to remove any identifying information. Also, I am not sure why but I used a lot of cuss words in my reply. Maybe I get passionate about these issues – quit your job! yay! – so I tend to cuss more? Not sure what that says about me as a person. Regardless, for those of you with tender ears I’ve carefully replaced the cuss words with other non-cuss (non-cuss?) words that START WITH THE SAME LETTER AS THE ORIGINAL, OFFENDING CUSS WORDS. You can probably figure out what the cuss words were. Here goes:

[WARNING: THIS IS PROBABLY THE LONGEST EMAIL YOU HAVE EVER RECEIVED. SORRY FOR THAT. I'VE REALLY THOUGHT A LOT ABOUT YOUR EMAIL AND I HAD A LOT TO SAY. AS I'VE TOLD YOU BEFORE, YOU WERE A BIG INSPIRATION TO ME IN GETTING OFF OF MY [ANACONDA] AND ACTUALLY MOVING TO SOUTHEAST ASIA AS OPPOSED TO JUST CONTINUING TO TALK ABOUT IT. TRYING TO RETURN THE FAVOR. PERHAPS FAILING MISERABLY. BUT TRYING.]

Hey [PERSON OF NON-SPECIFIC GENDER], sorry it’s taken me a while to get back to you. I’ve actually sat down and started to reply to your email several times, but I wanted to wait until I had enough time to write a thoughtful response.

When is your actual birthday? I thought I had it on my calendar but I don’t.

For me at least, I don’t think turning 40 will bother me anymore than turning 38 did or turning 39 does. It’s just another number. But what does bother me is that, regardless of what number it is, that’s one more year of my life that’s gone and that I can never get back. Or, to put it another way, I’m one year closer to being dead.

I don’t know if you and I have ever talked about mortality – we probably have given all of the [SALAMANDERS] we’ve talked about over the years – but my mortality is something I’ve really struggled with in the past. It’s easy to walk around knowing in the back of your mind “Yeah, I’m going to die. We all die. Whatever.” But if I really stop and let myself think about it long and hard and really, truly realize that I, Hank Webb, am really going to die – as in completely cease to exist, as in disappear and never even know that I ever existed, or that any of the people I love ever existed, etc. – and that it’s really going to happen and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it – that scares the [SYMBIOSIS] out of me. Especially when I think that I’m about to turn 39 and if you double that to 78, that’s already right at or older than the average life expectancy for a man (and that’s in the U.S. – I’m sure it’s much lower in Vietnam). Meaning that right now I’ve probably already been alive longer than the amount of time I have left before I am dead. And these first 39 years really seem to have flown by.

So I used to drive myself crazy thinking about it and being scared and reading about various religions, etc., to try to figure out if there could possibly be any way out of it. And I basically concluded that there isn’t, and that other than being aids to comfort us and make us feel better – and to control us as you’ve always pointed out – religions are not anything we can ever really be 100% sure about and so they don’t really give me much comfort. So that just leaves me as a biological animal that’s going to die just like every other animal and I figure I have two choices: (1) to continue to dwell on it and freak out about it and scare myself, etc.; or (2) to just try not to think about and to try to enjoy my life as much as possible.

I’ve been fairly successful going with the second option – I basically don’t let myself think about it anymore. And I do try to enjoy my life more. I will never say, like some people do, that I “live every day as if it was my last,” etc. If that was true, I probably wouldn’t spend 3 or 4 hours a day surfing the [FRANGIPANI] internet reading about technology and sports and politics and other meaningless [SHADRACH]. And I probably wouldn’t get angry about stuff as much because what does it really matter if you’re dead tomorrow? You get my point.

But this whole move to Vietnam was really part of attempting to do just that – to try to enjoy my life more. And it’s been successful for the most part. [PERSON OF NON-SPECIFIC GENDER], you probably remember how miserable I was practicing law. And I think you probably feel that way sometimes yourself – fortunately for you I think you feel that way much less frequently than I did. But I was really [FORMICA] miserable. I hated that lifestyle with every fiber of my being and I pretty much hated everything about it. I hated the long hours. I hated the [ARTICHOKES] I had to work with – and that includes my clients, my colleagues, and opposing counsel. I hated the billable hour system that truly made me feel like I could never just chill and relax – that whatever I was doing I could have/should have been billing time, etc. I hated the fact that I was spending the majority of my waking hours working on a bunch of meaningless [BARNACLE] that I didn’t really care about for people that I didn’t really care about. I know I’m putting about as negative a spin on it as one can, but that’s really how I felt much of the time.

And you’re right not to be too Pollyannaish about my move over here. It’s not perfect. Vietnam is [FOOTBALL] up in so many ways that I frequently am like “What the hell [DO I REALLY NEED TO REPLACE "HELL"? COME ON PEOPLE, YOU CAN HANDLE "HELL"] am I doing here?” But then I stop and think that America is also [FLARED] up in its own, different ways. And so is Canada. And so is probably every single place in the world. Human beings are [FACTORY] up and we do [FASCINATING] up things – and so to think that there is some place, any place, in the world that is inhabited by people and is not going to be [FINICKY] up is just wishful thinking. So it’s not like moving to Vietnam has been the answer to all of my problems simply because it’s Vietnam. I think I could have moved a lot of places and been equally if not more happy.

But here are some major things that have changed in my life:

(1) I work a hell [IT'S JUST "HELL" PEOPLE] of a lot less and so I have so much more free time to do whatever in the hell I want to do. I remember when I was working hard and I’d stop in Starbucks and there were all those [FINGERS] in there at 11am or 2pm or whatever just sitting around surfing the internet on their laptops, reading the newspaper or a book, chatting with their friends, etc., and I was like “Who are these [FRIENDS]? Don’t they have jobs?” Well now I am one of them. And the answer is yes, they (and I) have jobs – they just don’t have jobs that consume every waking hour of their lives. They have jobs where they can get done what they need to get done in a few hours a day, and where there’s no such thing as the billable hour system to monitor how they spent their time in six-minute increments. So when they’ve accomplished what they needed to for that day, they can go chill out at Starbucks for a while. (The only problem with that scenario is we don’t have Starbucks in Vietnam. Yet. So I’m chilling out in Huong’s House of Ca Phe or whatever, but you get my point.) (Another thing I like about teaching is everything resets every few months with the start of the new semester. You don’t have these projects, cases, etc. that drag on and on – you teach a semester and it’s over with and everything resets and you move on to another batch of students and have another shot to teach the material again. So it’s at least a little different every few months.)

(2) I make a lot less money but it is more than enough to live well on here. Yes there are times when I wish that I made more money – especially now that I’m married and thinking about having kids, etc. But money goes a lot further here since everything is so cheap. And given the drastically less amount of work I have to do for my salary, I’ll take doing what I’m doing now and making that salary in Vietnam over doing what I did in Atlanta and making more money any day of the week. Also, it doesn’t feel like such a big hit for me because even when I made that salary in Atlanta I was in the midst of either paying off my student loans and so sending a lot of money to pay off my loans each month. So my lifestyle now is truly not that much worse than it was then.

(3) I stress out about [SEAMONSTERS] a lot less. I still stress out about stuff – don’t get me wrong. And I still see people doing dumb [STEREO] and think to myself “I should whip your [FRENCH] [ANTICHRIST],” etc. But it’s not the same type of serious, wake up at night and can’t sleep stress that I used to have. Basically my attitude is that barring death, serious injury, or imprisonment, no matter what happens to me here – no matter how bad it is – all I have to do is take a 25-minute cab ride to the airport and I can be on a plane home a couple of hours later and I can leave all of this [SERENITY] behind. That will change a little bit now that I’m married and will probably have kids, but that’s a very freeing feeling to have. It’s kind of like all of this is just a dream and I can up and leave any time. So stuff just doesn’t seem like such a big deal. (And the reality is – back to the mortality angle for a moment – everyone can and should have that same feeling because everyone is going to die at some point and none of the pointless [SCINTILLA] we spend our lives stressing out about will mean a damn [I THINK "DAMN" FALLS IN THERE WITH "HELL" - I CAN SAY THIS] thing at that point anyway.)

(4) My life is interesting again. Prior to moving here, the most interesting time of my life was actually law school. Not because I was studying law, but because I had just moved to the Pacific Northwest which, as you know, is a lot different than the rural south where I grew up. Prior to 1993 when I moved to Portland, I’d never lived in any city with more than 100,000 people (and most of the places I’d lived had far less than that). Moving to the northwest really opened my mind up to so many new experiences, types of people, etc. It was just an extremely interesting time for me. And since graduating from law school in 1996 I really missed that. I still lived in the Northwest for four years after that, but I was working all of the time so it wasn’t the same. I always used to say that when you work as much as lawyers in big firms do, it really doesn’t matter where you live – an office inside of a building that you basically never leave is pretty much the same in Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, Detroit (well maybe not Detroit), etc. Since I’ve moved here, my life has become interesting again, and that has a lot of value for me.

There are a lot of other things that have changed in my life too, obviously, but those are four big ones. And I know that this is a novel-length email already, but here’s my point. None of those things required me to move to Vietnam. Number 1 is basically “Work less and in a job without billable hours.” (*Notice – it doesn’t say “Find your dream job,” or “Find something you’re passionate about so it doesn’t feel like work,” etc. That would also be great, but I think the more important thing for happiness is to just work less so you have time for the other things you happen to be passionate about.) Number 2 is basically “Live somewhere where your money goes farther and be willing adjust your lifestyle downward a little bit if necessary.” Doesn’t have to be a foreign country – could be a smaller town in the U.S. where [SHELTER] just doesn’t cost as much. Number 3 is “Chill the [FELT] out.” No further explanation needed. And Number 4 is “Find a way to make your life interesting again.” Again, doesn’t have to be by moving to a foreign country or anything that drastic. And actually Number 1 – working less – will probably make your life more interesting just because you have more time to do the things you’re actually interested in.

I’ll wrap this up like this: Only you know whether you’re happy or not. And only you know what would make you happier. But if you’re not happy and could be happier, then figure out a way to do whatever it is that would make you happier. We are 40 now and it’s not a [FLEMISH] joke anymore. These are our real lives – we’re really doing whatever it is that we’re going to be doing – it’s not a dress rehearsal. It’s going to suck if we’re 75 or 80 and looking back and saying “I wish I’d done this or that but I never did. I was too busy.” And [PERSON OF NON-SPECIFIC GENDER], don’t try to wait until [YOUR CHILD OR CHILDREN - ALSO OF NON-SPECIFIC GENDER] go to college. There is no guarantee that you’ll even be around 15 years from now – who knows what can happen? (It’s like that partner I worked with once who was going to retire at age 55 and then at age 52 got terminal cancer and died within a year. What the [FRACTAL] was he working so hard all those years for?)

Maybe climbing Mt. Everest or buying a boat and sailing around the world for a year are too extreme for [YOUR SPOUSE], but what about less extreme things. What about taking a year-long sabbatical and you and [YOUR SPOUSE] spending a season with your [CHILD OR CHILDREN] and snowboarding somewhere like [VARIOUS NON-SPECIFIC PLACES WHERE YOU CAN SNOWBOARD] and then taking your whole family to spend six months in [OTHER NON-SPECIFIC BUT INTERESTING PLACES] or wherever [YOUR SPOUSE] would be interesting in checking out? Even if it were only for a year, that would be an incredible experience for you and your [CHILD OR CHILDREN] – something you’d remember and cherish for the rest of your life. Or what about moving permanently somewhere like [SOME NON-SPECIFIC CITIES OTHER THAN WHERE YOU CURRENTLY LIVE] or somewhere a little more laid back and cheaper? Figure out some way you could telecommute, work for a smaller firm there, start your own firm, etc.? Maybe these things have no interest for you – I won’t pretend to know what would work for you – but something would. There’s got to be something that you and [YOUR SPOUSE] would both be interested in doing that would be a great experience for you and your family – figure it out and go do it.

I know I’ve probably written this as if you’re as miserable in your job as I was in my old job and as desperate for change as I was – and I know that’s not the case. But you’re clearly searching for something more or different right now and all I’m saying is figure out what you want to do and go do it. At every stage in our lives there are reasons – good, solid reasons – not to do anything out of the ordinary. But there are also ways around those reasons and plenty of people still figure out ways to do extraordinary things and to have extraordinary lives.

Jesus I sound like a bad Dr. Phil.

Later,

H.