The happiest year of my life

My first “real job” after graduating high school was working for Home Depot.

I had started in the plumbing department, then went to paint, then early morning inventory management, and my last job was in overnight freight. However, the overnights were causing me health issues and all of my attempts to get transferred back to a day shift proved futile. I was well-versed in all of the departments and thought they would work with me. Boy, was I wrong.

I started searching for another job and found something that piqued my interest, and in 2012 I started working a job for a company called Measurecomp where I would drive to houses all over central and northeast Washington to draw and measure the floorplan. (Ironically Measurecomp would be bought out by Home Depot at almost the exact same time I started working there so I still had to wear the orange apron.) Homeowners who wanted to install new carpet, hardwood floor, ceramic, vinyl, or laminate could have a technician come out to their house to measure and draw out the whole house.

The job itself was very simple. It only took me about a week or so to master. Within an hour I could draw and measure out an average house: a great room, laundry, kitchen, hallways, stairs, three bedrooms, and two bathrooms. It was just intellectually challenging enough to keep me occupied but not too much so that I could still go into a kind of algorithmic daze as I set about doing my work. It was a nice reprieve from the 6-8 hours a night on my feet slinging heavy boxes.

What I did not like about the job at the time was the driving aspect. Sometimes I would be sent to jobs that were a 3-hour drive from where I lived in central Washington, often for just one house. Long hours on the road by myself started to wear on me, there simply were not enough podcasts and audiobooks to fill the time. Still, it was difficult to complain about, as I was paid $120 per day regardless of how many hours I worked, plus mileage. When it was all said and done my weekly paychecks were about $1000 and I “worked” an average of maybe 10 hours per week, with another 10-15 just driving.

Life was good. I just didn’t realize it at the time.

As I alluded to before, there was something about long hours on the road that I found emotionally draining. You can only consume so much information (in the form of books and podcasts) at any given time. By the time I hit hour 3 on the road, I usually would turn off everything and just drive in silence. The lone exception to this was one audiobook that I listened to on repeat, the familiarity occupying just enough of my mind to concentrate on the road without requiring too much focus. What I didn’t realize is that we need to create just as much, if not more than, consume. My mind drifted towards infinite ideas and projects I could do. It was begging me to give it a creative outlet. But what kept happening is that by the time I got home from work, I was emotionally drained, my ideas were gone, and all I wanted to do was either sleep or hang out with my friends.

It also didn’t help that I had purchased a brand-new car when I was 18 that I was now putting nearly 1000 miles on every week. I was upset that I was being sent 150 miles one way for jobs that took me 20 minutes, which contributed to my emotional energy being drained. (Now in hindsight I also realize just how wasteful and bullshit this job truly was overall. That realization wouldn’t come to me for almost a decade, but that’s another story.) It wasn’t until a few years later when I was forced back into long hours at dead-end jobs, often working late into the night, that I looked back on this year and realized…

That year was the happiest year of my life.

Someone explained to me once that when you’re looking for jobs, you have three resources you must balance: money, time, energy. You can work backbreaking physical labor for long hours and make some decent money, but the little free time you have is dedicated to recovering just enough to get back to work. You can work an office job that pays well enough, but takes a lot of time and it saps you of your mental and emotional energy. Then of course the tradeoff many of us have had to make is work that drains us of our energy and time, and only pays just enough to make our living expenses.

Yet somehow, I had struck gold. It was quite the unique position to be in, being only 21 years old and having a steady job that paid well that also left me with time and energy to do things I wanted. Plus, my parents were letting me live at their house and only pay minimally in room and board, so I got to keep most of my paycheck.

Most days I would be home from work by 3pm. I got to set my own schedule, so some days I made my calls slightly later in the day so that I could participate in church activities in the morning or even just sleep in. I didn’t have a boss constantly down my neck. In fact, the only times he reached out to me was to tell me how good of a job I was doing. I worked Monday through Friday and never weekends, so I always had those wide open. I had paid holidays. I had health insurance.

Aside from the fiscal benefits, the real thrust of this story, was how the newfound freedom and flexibility of this job let me really dig into my religious community. I had friends from church with whom I spent every night of the week hanging out. Monday was beer and carne asada night with some friends. There was “golf Tuesday” with my then best-friend. Wednesday was meeting nights at church, which I enjoyed themselves, but we also would almost always go out for drinks afterwards. Thursday was video game night with another one of my buds. Friday was video game night with a group of buds. Saturdays and Sundays I did church activities and filled in the rest of the time with friends from my church community, and my parents and grandparents.

Both of my degrees are in community psychology. What we keep learning over and over again is that what makes a happy and psychologically healthy human is being enmeshed in a community that provides safety, comfort, and purpose…

10 years later, and I’m wishing I had now what I had then.

I remember having conversations with my former best friend about life. I wanted more than my small orchard hometown could give me at the time: adventure. I wanted to travel the world, meet people from everywhere, have friends and contacts in every country. I wanted to do, see, hear, learn, experience everything. He was perfectly content to work his family business and live a quiet life in the valley in which we had both grown up. He loved the community we had with our religious friends and wanted to spend his time building everyone up until Armageddon came. I was not as enamored with this course of life. I argued that God didn’t want us wasting our lives away. I guess even then my psyche knew that there was something inherently wasteful to let this life pass while waiting for the hypothetical next.

It turns out, I was right about one thing, but I was dead wrong about the other. Now, after losing my faith and family, and struggling for the past 5 years to regain it, if I could do it all over again, I would go back to 2012 and take full advantage of the quiet life nestled inside community