Here's an interesting thought, fully credited to my dear friend snoopy.
How much of a pay cut would you be willing to take for the freedom of going home on time and spending more time with your love ones? It is quite an interesting thing for me because, all this time I was thinking the opposite way. I thought that in the auditing line, "freedom" is very scarce, in fact I always thought that if you have too much of it, there's probably something wrong, i.e. your being lazy or your not putting enough focus on your work.
So my approach has always been to get the most out of my freedom. If I am not supposed to have it, I might as well make the most out of it. If I didn't have any freedom, but I have valuable experience that would help me in my career or in the future, then that would be worth it.
A breakdown of my thinking is roughly something like this:
At my age, freedom is bountiful, as they say all you have when your young is your youth. So it is worth less, because if I had all the time in the world, there isn't a lot of things that I can do (financial restrictions). In contrast to that, the youth do not have any experience, making it all the more valuable. So a trade-off of my freedom for stronger experience would definitely be a good thing to me.
But if you look at the other side of the story:
Your family and your friends aren't going to wait for you forever. Everybody's lives moves on. Someday you won't be a part of a friends life, today I am already experiencing that. There isn't anybody else to blame other than yourself if you grow old lonely. I certainly know I am the one to blame for losing touch with many of my dear friends.
There is no absolute answer to many questions in life. I know that I have already made this decision. I sold my freedom, I can't help it, I'm a workaholic. Maybe all the terrible tales of OT-ing for weeks after weeks aren't entirely true, but if it is, I'm entirely ready for it.
I remember a friend used to tell me that it's not the quantity of friends you have, but the quality of friends you have. I'm glad I have a bunch of friends that really put up with me throughout all these years. I can be a lousy friend sometimes.
I can only hope that next week will be a good start for me. After a half month hiatus from auditing, I can feel the rust in my brain, my thinking is a lot more slower and I'm missing a lot of stuff and making a lot more mistakes than I should. I'm really lucky to have two weeks to warm up and prepare~
