Why I choose slow living over the hustle culture

I've never had traditional career goals. I didn't want a corporate career and have instead been drawn to working with non-profit organisations. However, this doesn't mean you don't feel tempted to get drawn into the career ladder. After university, I had big plans. I wanted to rise up the ranks as fast as possible. I wanted to be the one to make the important decisions. I idolised being busy and gave up any sort of hobbies. My life was my work. Then, lockdown happened. My workload diminished significantly. I couldn't fill my time with seeing my friends or going on walks. Not one to waste an opportunity, this is when I started my blog, Hit Behind the Living. I never knew then how much this small decision would change my life. I remember the day I sent in my request to go part-time for my wildlife conservation role. I agonised over this decision. I couldn't shift a sense of shame and failure. Why did I start this career if I didn't intend to rise the ranks? What was it all for? I had imposter syndrome with my blog, thinking that this would never come to anything and why would I even try? Never did I know that this was one of the best decisions I've ever made. Not only have I built my creative side hustle, I have a fuller life now and I'm so grateful that I was brave enough to make this decision. It is my intention to live a slower life now. I know I'll be so much happier for it. I already am. I've been reading this book recently and I've been really enjoying it. I've almost finished and thought it speaks to the kind of stuff we're talking about in this week's video. It's basically about lagoon. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly but it's a word within the Swedish culture and it's basically the description is the Swedish art of a balanced life. So it's all about balance essentially within your life across all different aspects. So from across how we work, how we eat, how we dress, how we style our homes, relationships, everything. It's a beautiful book as well. It's absolutely stunning. It's all gorgeous photos and stuff on the inside. So it's a very quick and easy read that I thought I actually got from the library but I might have to buy myself a coffee because it's so gorgeous. But yeah I think for me there's been so many changes within my life and within how I'm viewing my life since I've made that decision to go part-time with my role and it's only now that I'm kind of allowing myself to really slow down. As soon as I finished, not finished, as soon as I went part-time with my other role I found myself filling that time with my content creation, my heavy-handed living work which wasn't a bad thing in some ways because you know one of the main reasons I didn't want to drop my hours with my conservation job was to spend some more time on this but I didn't want to spend all my time on this. I also wanted to just have a bit of time to myself and it's difficult because I find so much enjoyment in this creative career that it genuinely doesn't feel like I'm working for a lot of it. I know a lot of people say that and I'm always like oh is that true but for this is probably the first time in my life that that's completely true like there's some things I do and it's just you know like today taking you guys out on a beautiful morning in one of my favourite places in the world you know it's it's just a joy so and it overlaps with that hobbies and it actually gets me out and about more doing this career, this guy pottering in so yeah so it's still it's still a work in progress for me and trying to slow down and to get that kind of balanced life but it's something that I want to lean into and I want to focus more on and put some more of that kind of content on this channel as well and I wanted to film this video to help anyone out there that maybe is wanting to slow down a little bit and say you don't have to, you don't have to live a certain way that society expects you to. I think I was I've chatted to a friend recently how a couple of friends actually in a similar position that they've been asked or suggested that they go for a promotion in their line of work and one in particular was tempted because it's flattering you know and it's you know more money and your status goes up and it's only human to think oh this could be a good thing, promotions are a good thing but she'd just come out of another job that was quite stressful and she didn't really want to be promoted she kind of just wanted to do the job that she barely started anyway and do it well and focus on her life as well because I don't believe that you know work should be our life, I think we should have a life and work is part of it. So we were having that chat and I was like yeah no you don't, just because you could get a promotion don't do it you know unless you want to of course, if you want to then that's fantastic and it's great news but you shouldn't do it just for the sake of doing it and that's something that I still catch myself you know and it's like with my creative business I've been evaluating a lot recently it's been been a month of thinking, sometimes I go through phases where I just re-evaluate my entire life and it's definitely been that for the last month and I am re-evaluating quite seriously how I spend my time in this business and there are going to be some quite big changes coming up in the next couple of weeks so I'm not ready to chat about them yet but I will be chatting about them so make sure yeah you stick around subscribe if you want to hear about basically how I'm not firing the status quo, stepping away and going to be doing a brand new venture within my business so yeah but these YouTube staying as it is just to reassure you YouTube is one of my biggest passions now so I'll definitely be keeping up with the weekly vlogs but anyway I hope you enjoyed you know a little bit of a nature ramble a little bit of chat with me today I'll link that book down below in case you want to check it out and if you have any other similar books that you'd recommend on slow living that kind of thing then do drop them in the comments because I'm sure we'd all appreciate it anyway I hope you've had a beautiful day and I'll see you guys next week