( I finished my missions for this week and felt like the exercise worked well, so I've set more for next week )Despite being quite busy with family-time, I've also spent some time reflecting on where I am in life right now. Looking for jobs helped with that. I don't want to work doing something I don't care about. I don't want to work doing something where what I've been doing for the last few years is irrelevant. I want to teach, and research, and write, and do activism. I've made up a budget and the teaching I'm doing now is enough to support me, if I'm not extravagant. Living on a budget is a constraint, but it's far less of a constraint than working in a job that I don't want to do. I'll try it out for the next couple of months and see how I go and whether I end up eating into my savings. I'm going to keep looking for and applying for jobs and I hope that I'll find something, but I'm not going to work just for the money. In the meantime, I'm going to use the time I have free to get more of my thesis published, to fix people's bicycles, to work on the issues I care about, to write fiction, learn greek, practice ukulele and accordion...
I've also decided this in part because I've been reading
Prosperity Without Growth, which has been a good reminder that ultimately we need to work towards a system where people make less money (evening out inequalities and moving towards an income that allows for happiness, but not overconsumption) and spend more time on activities that don't put a burden on the planet.