How to Recover The Joy of Life Debt Took Away
I’ve been physically unable to do anything for fun unless, in some way, it contributed to my financial recovery. Here’s how I fixed it.
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2019 is the last year of a tough decade for me. And it is coming to an end.
I finished my mandatory service for the Israeli army on December 31st, 2008. My debt grew even before then as I was trying to build a life on about 100 dollars a month — the salary for mandatory service during my time. I was not allowed to work in a regular job, and I got a credit card from my bank with a very high limit — a recipe for disaster.
As the years passed, I accumulated more and more debt for making remarkable things happen. Paying for my degree in three different academic institutes, trying to start an online business, wasting money on ads that brought fake followers, website hosting, and the list goes on and on. Needless to say, I always had a lot of motivation to start things.
Somewhere by half of this decade, I understood that time is not on my side. My parents are not getting any younger; I’m not married, I don’t own property, I don’t have any savings. I’m basically a nobody. Not only was I a nobody, but I was also a nobody that owed money to the bank — the worst kind of a nobody.
So I started working towards fixing it. The last few years have been crazy tough. Even my initial reason for writing on Medium was the money. I was not aware of how much the community I found here would change my life.
Lately, as I struggled with health issues that I’m sure are related to my self-induced stress like sleep-deprivation, dark circles under my eyes, and a lot of mental fatigue, I realized I’m destroying my life. That was not happening in reaction to some outside force — that was me doing it with my bare hands.
I had to stop this. There had to be a better way to change my life than hustling every day like I’m the latest victim of a pyramid scheme trying my best to succeed — and failing.
The last few weeks had been instrumental in teaching me how to change that. I’ll explain what happened and how you can use that.