Who Built My Cage?

One week before I quit my high-tech, high-income job at Hewlett Packard, I sat in my chair contemplating what brought me to that day. It was a path full of fortune and luck, led by great mentors that shaped my success.

However, it’s only in hindsight I was able to acknowledge my incredible fortune. When I sat in the chair, all I could think about was the long hours of managing a global “always-on” website, leading a complicated project on top of it, all while managing a global organization of sixty people.

Ten years previous to this moment, it would’ve been a goal realized, but now, it was the cause of stress and anxiety, which led to my first anxiety attack. It was an easy target to blast my blame while ignoring the benefits. Here’s what I wrote in May 2016, a few weeks before quitting my job:

Look at my cage, isn’t it grand?
I can nearly see across the entire land.
The sunshine touches the indoor trees,
But my cage is glassed off, so no worry of bees.

It keeps me dry from the rain,
it’s surely the invention of a really smart brain.
A beautiful spring day does not distract me,
because my cage is a constant seventy-three.

If I stay here enough, I get well fed.
I get money for a car and a nice bed.
My cage protects me from uncertainties of life,
From scary people, unpredictability, or strife.
Within my cage, I’m allowed to be me;
well, at least the me they want me to be.

I could leave whenever I’m ready,
but my productivity must remain steady.
If I want to be at the top in the end,
These rules I must not bend.

Wait, what is it all worth,
this system I was thrown into at birth?
Why would I lead a life so controlled,
for distant freedom, only when I’m old?

My life worth living is not in a cage,
In fact, within me, I feel some rage.
I own my life, but I am not free;
I’m stuck in this cage, built by me.

When I was young, I worked in manual labor and retail jobs that ended when I left the job site. However, today’s online jobs, especially in the age of Corona, follow us everywhere we go with notifications from our phone spurring us to stay connected. Our cages have transformed from a physical location to a virtual construct which makes it even harder to break free from.

While that makes our personal lives even more challenging, anyone who has one of these jobs should feel fortunate that they have a job and are probably making pretty good money doing it. That doesn’t mean you can’t dislike and long for a change though!

Even though I felt like I was stuck in a cage, I was living in a castle. I was incredibly lucky to have such a great job and build relationships all over the globe, with paid-for trips to Singapore, India, Bucharest, and all over the US. I got to work with incredibly intelligent people throughout my career at Accenture and Hewlett Packard who made me what I am today.

It was unfair to take such a victimized approach to all of this. Poor freaking me.

However, we can’t always see the full situation when we’re in the middle of it, but hindsight opens up portals that were previously unexplored.

The feelings in my poem were raw and the blame might have been somewhat misplaced, but the sentiments were spot on. I was in a position I didn’t want to be in, and I needed to do something big to make a change. My life energy was over expelled on work, and my yearnings for the type of freedom when we traveled the world in 2013 could not be suppressed. It was time to make a change, and regardless of what spurred me on, it was successful.

Shortly after writing the poem, I quit the corporate world and high tech. We bought a vintage Airstream and traveled North America for a year, sold our house in Dallas, and moved to Southeast Utah, where we’re in the middle of everything we love doing – exploring canyons, hiking mountains, rafting rivers and enjoying scenic drives.

I had to tear my cage down to the ground and start over to rediscover how to live a life I loved. We brought intentionality into our lives, focusing on what we loved doing, and designing a life around it.

It took another couple of years before I fully found the path I want to pursue, which is starting Adventure Wealth Advisors and helping others explore their paths, and providing them with the perspective gained through my journey and knowledge gained through decades of studying personal finance and investing.

Once again, it’s a company designed with intentionality, allowing us to work from Europe once the pandemic subsides or take a day off if it’s especially beautiful outside. It allows me to work with a limited number of clients who I enjoy spending time with and look forward to meeting with. I love hearing their stories and learning from them and helping them build strategies to pursue their path as quickly as possible.

I don’t feel like I’m in a cage anymore. That doesn’t mean I don’t have any more worries in life, they’re just different now, and I’m excited about the path I’m heading down.