Don’t sacrifice the wrong thing

I began emailing essays into the void on 30 May 2021, 53 days before Rebecka, our youngest daughter was born. This writing experiment has followed roughly the same trajectory as the baby. In 2021, Escaping Flatland's prime achievement was putting a few toys in its mouth (a handful of essays read by about fifty people). But then, around the time Rebecka got up on her legs and learned to talk, I found a voice and picked up pace.

I didn’t have any clear idea where I was going, as is evident by the name I picked for the blog. Flatland is a reference to Edwin Abbott Abbott’s 1884 novel about a Square who lives in a 2-dimensional world and makes contact with a Sphere from Spaceland, the 3-dimensional world.

I now recognize a deep longing in this name—to escape flatland is a dream of making contact with people and ideas that could expand and alter my understanding of reality into something richer, more full, more roundedly human. And the miraculous thing is that it worked! When Rebecka turned one, I had met several people through the blog, people who felt like spheres to me. First and foremost, Alexander Obenauer, whose writing I had admired from afar before I started the blog and who, when we became friends, gave me the courage to be more myself. But also Arnaud Schenk, Jamesb, Steve Krouse (for whom I wrote “Looking for Alice”), and later others. There are many Spheres in the world if you whistle in an orthogonal direction.

I can’t strongly enough recommend setting off 20 hours a week to work on a project that forces you to learn and grow and meet new people. Most of us are awake some 110 hours a week, so 20 hours is not impossible. But it adds up in a surprising way if you keep at it for 3 years. I feel like I've grown into my body. I feel fifteen years older. In a good way.

Of course, when carving out almost 3500 hours, as I have over these last 3 years, there are tradeoffs involved. The first winter after Rebecka was born, I hadn’t yet had time to renovate the rooms on the second floor so I had no office in the main building. I had to write in the stable. As the winter wore on and the energy prices rose, we could no longer afford to heat the room I wrote in. I would see my breath rise before me as I typed. I’m not saying this to make myself sound like a starving artist. I could have written less and done more consulting and we would have had the money to heat the study. The point is that confronted with this tradeoff, writing in a room so cold my fingers hurt was the better option. It was what I wanted to do. Not because I thought making a sacrifice like this would somehow pay off later. Not because I guessed that Escaping Flatland would one day take off and become a source of income.¹ No. Just because I wanted it.

In our twenties, Johanna and I stared for a long time into our souls and concluded that three things matter to us over everything else:

1. our relationship,

2. being able to honor our curiosity, and

3. giving our children the opportunity to do the same.

Getting clarity on our priorities has made it easy for us to say no to many things that we otherwise would have assumed that we needed to do, or have. If we have to choose between being able to afford a vacation or being able to write? Oh, let’s check the list. I should write! If we have to choose between spending more time with our kids or buying a car? We put the kids on the back of the bicycle.²

Two years after I began emailing essays into the void, I was contacted by the founder of a startup. He wanted me to write for them. He offered me $100k per year, which is about 5 times more than what I earn at the art gallery where I work part-time to pay the bills. I said thank you, but I wasn’t interested. He took that as a negotiating tactic. I played along. After five minutes, he offered me $200k per year.

“Well, that is interesting,” I said, getting carried away. “I’ll have to discuss it with my wife.”

We could fix the roof! I would never have to worry about money again! We could get a car!

I walked out to Johanna. She was in the vegetable garden, picking aphids off the artichokes. The children were playing with the soil between the planting beds. Halfway through telling her how much money I could make, Johanna broke me off, saying, “But why on earth would you accept that?” She was genuinely confused. She brushed some grass from her shirt, and said, “You wouldn’t have time to write.”

And by God—who cares that we can’t afford a car when I get to live with a person who says things like that? Of course, I don’t want $200k to write things I doubt the value of.

What is the opportunity cost? If I do this, if I go on this vacation, if I get this car, what am I turning down? By asking yourself this, and then consistently aiming to pick the thing that optimizes for what you most deeply value—it adds up. It makes life rich.

You don’t have to do things others do, or have things they have, at the expense of the deeper things you want. You really don’t. Almost everything is an option. You have full permission to ask yourself what really matters to you—whatever that is—and then optimize for that in all hard tradeoffs of life. You’re going to have to make some sacrifices anyway. Might as well not sacrifice the wrong thing.

As the blog enters its fourth year, this is what is on my mind. What is the deepest, truest direction I can take this experiment now? What is less important and can be sacrificed?

1. My salary from the blog is about $20k per year.

2. I’ve biked the equivalent of two crossings of the United States since starting this blog. You should see my legs.