if I were a moderately well off person...

Nicoleandmaggie over at grumpy rumblings have a post up asking what people would do if a) they didn't have to work (were financially independent) and b) for some reason had to cut all the ties with their current job/line of work. It's an interesting version of my usual conundrum, the question of what my alternatives are if the unpleasures of my particular job and its effects on my health come to consistently and noisily exceed the pleasures, noisily enough that I really have to face up to it?

For the sake of this thought-exercise, I shall assume the financial independence to be comparable to my current standard of living - enough not to need to count every penny and allow the occasional impulsive amazon-raid (oh kindle, you are so good at inciting those...), but not enough to finance a round the year round the world cruise or require/allow one to spend most of one's time looking after the money and finding good causes for it to support (which would be kind of scary, at first at least, I think).

I anticipate 6 months to a year of simple 'recovery time' - reading all the unread books, knitting, getting the house in order, watching dvds, catching up with friends, hopefully developing a better, healthier pattern of sleeping and eating and exercising which would generate a less substantial JaneB with fewer joint sulks and back aches. But after that - ah, that's the question.

The thought experiment stipulated that one should assume that for whatever reason one had to cut ties with ones current profession - I assume that means both academia and beach studies. My rather childish impossible dream would be to carry on studying - to do maybe a couple of degrees, to do another PhD in a wildly different discipline (dead languages or linguistics has a lot of appeal for various reasons, not least because the small, highly select (and highly eccentric) group of students taking courses like Anglo Saxon at InternationallyRenownedUniversity always seemed to be having so much fun. And I love to teach, despite the bureaucracy, but I'm not allowed to stay in the academy - so maybe I'd find a mix of volunteering or very casual work in some kind of training role (maybe with a gifted children's programme? or as a maths tutor? maybe tutoring home-educated kids in science?) and learning some other skill that I could teach, maybe knitting or T'ai Chi, something I could do with small groups.

I really like MarketTown, NorthernCity has many pluses (even for a non-city person like me) and I like living in the north. But would I stay here? Probably not - freed from the tie to the academy and to NorthernUni, I'd probably feel almost obliged to move towards my parents, to a distance where a day-visit is feasible. That would leave me in landscapes I don't like much, but near cities with good libraries - near rather than in given the budgetary constraints I've chosen, because the other criterion for a move would be to find a house with a little more garden and with a layout conducive to having two or more cats - aged about 8, I once solemnly told a teacher that I wanted to be an English Eccentric when I grew up, and Mad Cat Lady seems almost obligatory. If I'm only working short hours, I might consider having a dog too - something cat-friendly and low-exercise-demanding like a retired greyhound.

In the inevitable future which I try not to think about too much when my parents are no longer alive, I guess I might move again to a landscape I prefer. Perhaps to FavouriteIslands? Being an incomer would be a disadvantage, and most of my friends, my sister and niece and brother-in-law, would be a trek away. I wouldn't really want to be a dual home owner, but that might be the practical way to be. More likely, I'd just move back northwards, to hills and sea and sky - if I could afford to have somewhere which permitted me to continue to have cats, and to stroll to the shops/station/drs/other necessities when I didn't feel like using the car. That was a surprisingly coherant vision for me...

The purpose of this sort of thought experiment is to encourage you to work out how to incorporate some of the facets of this 'dream life' into the every-day now. For me, that's where the problems arise. I don't have the energy at the moment - whether this is a chronic health issue, that is that I'd always have less 'spoons' than the average person regardless of occupation, or related directly to my current line of work and stress levels I don't know, but I do know that doing enough to earn a living in this profession takes pretty much everything I have, and also makes me unreliable. A volunteer or evening class teacher or student needs to be able to do certain things at certain times every week regardless, and I can't. Some weeks, sure, others... no.

That uncertainty about my own consistency would determine what I'd do with myself after the few months of 'yay! Read All The Books Clean All The Things!' catch-up and holiday, in the end, and makes it hard to know what might work and what might not.

In fact, you know what I'd rather, if I had the income but not the 'cut ties with current employment' condition? I'd like to work maybe 2, 2.5 days a week, at my current uni or elsewhere. It'd be even better if I could earn 40-50% of my current salary, and turn 40-50% of the private income into a research fund - or be paid in research support rather than salary even, a PhD studentship or funds to buy research assistance as needed and travel and buy analyses and the odd bit of kit. Now THAT would be delightful - freedom from grant applications! Or at least, the knowledge that an absence of grant success would not prevent one from doing fun stuff...