Landmannalaugar, Iceland by Amy Hanley

(This is an experiment with including images from Unsplash.com on posts.)

I was looking for a good quote for this blog entry and came across this classic by H.L. Mencken. Not the message that I was intending to convey, but thought provoking never the less.

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.

H.L. Mencken

I actually wanted to talk about what I call the Escape Committee. By that, I mean the plans that we make in our own heads/lives or with our friend groups directed towards getting us out from the corporate life.

Oh sure, the corporate job sounded fun when we first heard of it, but after a while you discover that it's just doing stuff in an office, with harsh lighting, crazy deadlines and an eclectic mix of co-workers who seem like they were sent to your office from central casting. Don't get me wrong, some of that stuff is great when you're younger, but it doesn't take long for the sheen to fade and for you to realize that quantity replaced quality long ago and now you're just a really large hamster on a really large tread wheel.

My quarter of a century in the corporate mines was on the technology side. I have lots of horror stories that I could tell about that, but suffice to say that after my Silver anniversary of office work, I was quite keen to be somewhere else. My personal complication was that I also pastor a small congregation and while it does keep me busy, it doesn't pay more than a fraction of my family's bills and living expenses. Now that the corporate job problem has gone away, I am left with plenty of time to pursue one or more of my Escape Committee ideas to endeavor to not need to seek other work.

In my time I have thought of some interesting side-business ideas. The main criteria over the years has been something that I (or some other motivated person) could build gently in their spare time while continuing to work. This would enable the business to be built in a solid and sustainable manner until it got large enough that you would have to sadly let your employer know that the day job was getting in the way of your real income and you were going to have to let them go.

It is my intention to record some of those ideas here by way of archiving them for myself and making them available for my friends. This way I can easily point people at the Escape Committee category on my site and all of my suggestions will be right here for them. Look for these suggestions to start appearing on the site as I work my way through my backlog.

And I never did find the quote I was trying to think of, so I think I'll stick with what I did find.