JONTILLMAN.COM | Part of the problem since 1976

At the end of this coming summer, I will turn thirty years old. I have spent most of my twenties wondering what was wrong with me and trying to beat myself into the “responsible adult” mold. I bought the Franklin-Covey planner. I read Getting Things Done. I made lists and prioritized them. I drank gallons of coffee every day, worked eighty hour weeks and got promotions. I bought expensive toys and went to overpriced restuarants until my credit card debt was almost equal to my mortgage. I travelled on an expense account and drank on the company dime at trade shows. I got married and played house. I fretted about “work/life balance” and made a thousand and one plans to better my situation, get out of debt, finally enjoy life. Last year, after half a decade of trial and error personal and professional growth, I sat down and built a very specific, very detailed plan for achieving the things I found most important in my life: a happy marriage, interesting friends, getting out of debt, investment income, early retirement, etc…

That didn’t work out so well. As 2005 wore on, I found it harder and harder to pay attention. First to personal stuff like when the bills were supposed to be paid or library books returned. Later it became impossible to pay attention to much of anything. I went to work in a daze. I sat at my desk, all day, in a daze. I went home in a daze. I ate dinner in a daze. I went to bed in a daze and woke up in a daze. Early in August the president of the company I worked for gave me the “talking to” that I knew was coming, and I tendered my resignation. I stopped showering. I stopped eating every day. I sat at the dining room table, in a daze, until late in November, when I finally had a thought: I needed to see a professional.

It turns out I was deep in a major depression. I began to see both a psychologist (for counseling) and a psychiatrist (for medication) on a frighteningly regular basis. After several months of intensive work and medication adjustment, I became somewhat able to function outside the confines of my house. Unfortunately, all my plans and schemes were now in smoking ruins at my feet. I had not gone to work in months, and things were starting to get a little bit desperate. So my wife and I sat down and tried to figure out how to achieve some radically different goals than we had before; goals that everyone we knew thought were crazy.

Our plan is to no longer have what a normal person would call a “job” and to, instead, spend our time pursuing those things we most enjoy, in a no-pressure environment otherwise known as our house. Through some creative planning and manuevring we are now in a place where we can survive on just her teaching salary. She will continue teaching until I have begun to generate enough steady income from my creative pursuits to replace her income, and then she will quit as well.

That is why this site (and several others) exists; to help us reach out and see if there are other people like us out there. So, if you are trying to make it without a “real job”, or if you are successfully doing so, we would love to hear from you.