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…taking Argentine tango lessons, because I like Astor Piazzolla and why not, and a random person showed up to check out the lessons one night, and now we’re married, have a kid, and have been together coming up on 20 years.

And I took another break at 31 to go teach a course for fun, which turned into a second career.

And I took another break from work to record The Broken Mirror of Memory and tour it with Pat O’Keefe.

And another to spend •real• time with my new infant.

And and and…

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If I’d taken hustle-bro-dude’s advice and done nothing but “work my butt off at the beginning,” everything I love most in my life — my kid, my spouse, my music, my teaching, my creative software work, all of it — would be…well, it wouldn’t be.

Thank you so much, younger me, for giving me the life I have now.

Thank you, younger me, for living as if life’s not all work.

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My anti-hustle-bro advice for folks at the starts of their careers, in case anyone wants it:

• Your job is to live. Make your life your priority.

• Unfortunately, yes, living involves money — and much of early adulthood is about cultivating a healthy relationship with money. Greed is not healthy. Spite is not healthy. What is healthy? Having an “enough.” Knowing what “enough” is for you, and being practical about it.

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• Set healthy boundaries around what you give of your time, energy, health (physical and psychological). Sometimes it can be fun to go hard, to dig in and do the crunch — for a job, for a personal endeavor, whatever! Just be mindful. Know where your boundaries are. Figure it out. They’re a whole hell of a lot easier to set when you’re young.

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• The best financial advice I ever got: As people earn more, they tend to take on more non-discretionary expenses. Those box you in, because they’re hard to shed. If you’re short on money, you can just stop eating out so much, but you can’t just stop paying an expensive mortgage. Live like a college student for as long as you can! If you have the good fortune of extra money, use it to pay off debts.

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@inthehands having gone back to college at 30ish and had the “poor student diet” literally almost kill me, I don’t think living like a college student for as long as you can is a good idea

@ShadSterling Ha, well, maybe not in the “bad diet” sense, nor the excessive drinking that so many think is the point of college

@inthehands I mean, if I could spend most of my time learning things again I might, but there’s nothing else about living like a college student that I’d go back to. Definitely not taking on that kind of debt again. Or the maniacal deadline schedule.

Tho for me, the closest I could get to taking a break from having an income was to go back to school and take on potentially crippling debt. I didn’t even learn the skills I now use to pay off that debt

@inthehands I’ve attempted college twice. My first attempt, when I was 18, my life was simpler because I was still largely dependent on my parents. I doubt many people can just choose to continue that, esp. with health insurance, and for those with the option there are still good reasons not to.

My second attempt, when I was ~30, my expenses were only lower because I still couldn’t afford to live without roommates and hadn’t yet developed any expensive health problems.

@inthehands I guess for me I had to keep up the part about not spending money unnecessarily because I didn’t have any to spend, and I think that’s by far the most common case. Now I have more money, more out of luck (and other peoples prejudices) than any increase in ability, and the overwhelming majority of what I’ve been spending it on is catching up on things I had been neglecting. The only thing I’d want to go back to is being younger and more resilient