We’re taught all our lives that life is a ladder. Property ladder. Career ladder. A constant scramble to the next rung. The next promotion, the next pay rise, the bigger house, the wedding, the baby, the second baby, the dog. Then maybe a bigger house again. A newer car. A nicer holiday. Repeat.
And we’re told never to come off the ladder.
Never come off the property ladder, people used to tell me. Like it was lava underneath.
So one day I asked… why? What actually happens if I come off the ladder?
They didn’t really have a compelling answer.
I mean sure, it might be harder to get back on if the market runs away or if you spunked your deposit on a six-month trip through Latin America. But you can get back on (provided you want to, of course). It’s not game over.
The career ladder’s the same.
There was a time when the ‘perfect’ CV was ten years with the same employer, slowly climbing. A neat, linear path. One step up at a time.
But what happens if you look at that ladder and think… actually, I don’t want what’s at the top?
What happens when you want something different from life, that doesn’t fit into the typical narrative?
And don’t get me wrong, I love to work. I love to be creative, to build, to solve problems. I even tried proper travelling for a few months without working and you know what? I don’t like it. I just want a different balance and setup to how I live and work, I don’t want to work a rigid forty hours a week with half of them spent in meeting rooms, I don’t want to deal with office politics, I don’t want to go to networking events and, being honest, I just find offices a cataclysmic sensory overload.
A while back I was hiring someone and my director looked at a candidate’s CV and said, “hmm… looks a bit scatty. Two years here, 18 months there.”
But for me – someone whose own average stint is 2-3 years – I didn’t see the problem. I’d rather hire someone who moves every couple of years. Who learns, adapts, reinvents. Someone who’s hungry. Someone who knows when they’ve outgrown a place. And if they leave after two years? Good for them. I’ll find the next person ready to bring in fresh energy.
So… here I am.
Almost a year after coming off both ladders. Career. Property.
No house. No boss. No ten-year plan.
And don’t get me wrong – it is scary. It was scary then and it’s still scary now.
But I’m living my life for now and next year, not for some blurry idea of what I might want in ten.
We’re always told to think: “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
And I have no idea.
Did I see myself sweating through a heatwave in Spain, running my own marketing business again, two years ago? Absolutely not.
In fact, I swore I’d never go back to freelancing after burning myself out in my twenties. But here I am. And actually… I kind of love it again.
These days, I work from home, pretty much all day. I’ll have a quick call with a client or prospect and then just knuckle down. I’ll do three to five hours of deep, uninterrupted work for a client and then an hour of writing for myself (like this). To many, that won’t sound enticing in the slightest. But to me, it’s genuinely heaven.
The thing is, when you step off the path, the one everyone around you seems to be following so flawlessly, it feels like you’re doing something wrong.
It feels like you’re falling behind.
And it’s made worse when the people who love you; family, old friends, people who’ve always meant well, tell you that you’re making a huge and irreversible mistake.
That you’ll be lonely. That you won’t make any money. That you’ll be back, that old chestnut.
And, by the way, if you come back or change your mind or change your path… that’s not failure. Personally, I don’t think I’d ever go back to my hometown… but if I did… I haven’t failed, my wants have changed and my path redirected.
But in a world of 8 billion people, there are so many who are doing it differently.
People who get it.
People who don’t think it’s weird that you came off the traditional path and walked away from a “good thing.”
People who’ve already stepped off and are not only surviving, but thriving.
Find those people.
Talk to them. Learn from them.
Let their version of “normal” help you rewrite yours.
And remember: if your life looks a bit odd to everyone else, that doesn’t mean you’ve messed up. It just means you’ve chosen a different path, because there is more than one.
And that’s fine. Not everyone wants the same view from the top.
Some of us are just happy not being on the ladder at all.
Thoughts? Ping a comment below 👇
If this resonated with you, I’d thoroughly recommend this book, it’s what set my head straight when I doubted what I was doing. The Pathless Path is about finding yourself in the wrong life, and the real work of figuring out how to live. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries and the goodwill of people from around the world, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to the good life and all of the existential crises in between.
