I've spent a lot of time rambling on social media about what I want to do when I'm ready to retire, which may not be for a long time. The problem with doing that, is it there's always going to be somebody out there who's going to see what you were planning to do, try to do it before you did, and then publish about it. I found that out the hard way a couple of years ago when I had talked about going to Portland to do a craft beer bar tour restaurant tour. Then I had to have surgery, and scuttled that but another Houston-based food slash lifestyle blogger did it and published about it.
It was then when I begin to really understand why my great grandparents and parents and grandparents got put out if I or their kids/grandkids talked about something we were thinking about doing. I was verbally reamed for "telling other people our business." As a young kid this was very confusing to me. We weren't entrepreneurs and did not own our own business. I wasn't airing out some kind of dirty laundry about my family either. I wasn't sharing intimate details about Family Life Behind Closed Doors.
My mother told me about her grandfather and told her he was planning to build a small Playhouse. I think she was maybe five years old. She was very excited about it and told one of our two of her girl friends. Her grandfather was not happy she did that, said he was no longer going to do it because she'd told other people their "personal business" before he had a chance to get it done.
I always heard how Henry Andrew Aitchison was a very good man, but this seems to be unusually cruel to me. Very often a five-year-old old kid doesn't know any better, and even then what's personal business to one family is public knowledge for another. Again she wasn't telling her friends about what they had, or if they had some money hidden somewhere in the house or new personal dirty laundry.
However context is key. This was during the 1930s and 1940s. Great Depression era and thereafter. Though some of this is also crabs in a bucket as well I might add. There's often this belief among farming families and sometimes working class families, but if you make plans to do something to improve your life, that if you make plans to do something to improve your home, that someone is going to either try to beat you to it, or they're going to sabotage it. All the seems like a starkly negative view of the world, during that are I could see how it could be a reality.
And even today it is a reality. People are so much that they shouldn't are on social media. Over-sharing they call it. And I'm guilty of it sometimes. I've seen a number of media folks from the lifestyle media as we like to call it, get very competitive with each other. I've been guilty of it. And I've heard rumors of some trying to sabotage others. I honestly have no idea if all my talk about Portland didn't encourage that other lifestyle media person to look into Portland to decide "Hey this sounds good! I'd like to go there too!" Very often a whole group of Lifestyle media people are covering the same restaurant, the same Hotel, the same event and writing about it with different perspectives. And there's no reason to think we can't all write and post great photos and have a good time and be successful at the same time.
I also read from an author who does self-help books that telling people your your goals, especially on social media before you actually put them in motion, is more likely a way to not achieve them. Well that seems a little counter-intuitive to me, the author stated that often times people he praised on you, and that'll trigger a bunch of endorphins, that'll make you feel like you already achieved the goal when you didn't. And after having already gotten that mental payoff, actually put in the energy towards achieving it now seems unnecessary.
I guess I always thought to put in them out there would make people hold you more accountable. I recently said I was going to pull back from social media, minimize it. And somebody else, a colleague, thought that I said I was notgoing to be posting anything at all on Facebook, and called me out for it on FB. I mean seriously, did they even read what I actually wrote?
I do want to buy some land in between Houston and Austin to enjoy as I'm getting older. I do have a productive purpose in mind that I'm keeping to myself until it's well under way. I do envision a tiny house with a nice covered porch almost as large as the house with a bbq pit-smoker and grill, a nice craft beer stocked fridge, and Muskoka chairs for me, Uncle Tex and a few guests.
I've a few other things to get in order to get there. However, I'm working on it now, will try to not mention it again until it's much further along.
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