Turns out the grind isn’t always the villain.
My husband went back to work today.
And I mean WORK WORK.
The good old trading-time-for-money kind of work.
The fixed hours.
The location-based joint.
For the past five years, he’s been working for himself. No boss. No commute. No set schedule. We never made millions, but we had enough. We valued the freedom more than the extra dollars.
Until recently.
It got quiet.
The clients stopped calling.
The launch that always worked… flopped.
Month after month, the numbers slipped lower, and we started dipping into our savings.
First month: “This will pass.”
Second month: “It’s just a dip.”
Third month: “We can’t keep going like this.”
Fourth month: “Time to start job hunting.”
This week, he started a new job.
And I finally exhaled.
You see, I’ve been in a 9–5 grind all along. And while I carry the weight of a steady paycheck, I’ve also carried the secondhand stress of variable income.
It’s one thing to manage your own uncertainty. It’s another to watch the person you love wrestle with it every day.
So bad-mouth the 9–5 all you want but it has been our family’s saving grace these past few months.
It kept a roof over our heads.
It kept food on the table.
It kept our kids blissfully unaware that anything was wrong.
There’s a lot of talk online about escaping the grind, about quitting your job to build something of your own. I get it. We lived it. And there is real beauty in the flexibility, the creativity, the independence.
But here’s what I’ve learned: stability is a form of wealth too.
A boring paycheck can be a quiet hero.
Sometimes, the thing you once wanted to escape is the very thing that carries you through.
Freedom is wonderful.
But stability is steady and dependable. Unglamorous stability is deeply underrated.
Wherever you are on your own work journey, I hope you find your version of enough.
