You get a job. You show up for work. Immediately you’re given a series of tasks to complete – the responsibilities of your role. And over time, you learn how to prioritize. You learn which requests should be dealt with first, which ones can wait, which ones can be completed in a short time frame and which ones will require more effort. I think prioritizing is a learned skill, but one that can indeed be nurtured with time.
But how do you apply that to life as a whole?
As I write this, I’m 25 years old. At 25, there are a lot of items on my to-do list for the next, say, 10 years. And after reflecting on it for the past while I’m starting to realize that by not prioritizing the things I want to accomplish/achieve/experience, I’m merely staying in neutral.
I want to get into a career that I genuinely enjoy. Call me a princess but I’ve had the experiene of waking up in the morning and wishing I was going in for dental surgery rather than going to my job, and I don’t particularly want to find myself in that situation again. I’m starting to get an idea of the sort of career I might really enjoy and succeed in, but it’s not something that happens overnight. And it could involve working for years at quite a low rate of pay. But then I have to consider what’s best from a purely financial perspective. While we lead a relatively comfortable lifestyle, my husband and I have financial goals we haven’t met yet. Financial goals that would benefit from me making as much money as possible in whatever sort of work I can find, even if it’s just to pay the bills and isn’t what I really want to do. So right off the bat I have career dreams conflicting with financial goals.
Then there’s geography. I don’t want to keep living in the same city – the same 15km radius – that I’ve lived my whole life. My husband and I want to move abroad. Which, of course, is a huge financial concern in its own right, and obviously affects our careers as well. On one hand it would be more financially responsible to stay put in this city where we already own a condo and have established roots. On the other hand, the idea of staying in this lifeless city with barely a fledgling cultural scene feels like it’s stifling me. The idea of waking up at age 40 still here in this city makes my stomach turn.
And then you add kids to the equation. My husband and I both want kids someday. Although we’re both quite certain that today isn’t the day for that, we’re aware that it’s something we’ll have to start thinking seriously about within the next five years or so. And kids affect all of the above considerations: career, finances, and geography. If we’re going to move somewhere we will want to be financially stable and settled before having kids. But we don’t exactly have all the time in the world for that.
Career, money, kids, geography. All important, all interconnected. How to prioritize? I don’t want to stay in neutral, but I’m also not ready to accept the idea of settling.
