Permanence in Change

As regular readers know, I’m not good about being stuck in one place, or in one job, for too long. In the eleven years since I started D4D, I’ve moved house no less than eight times – and had more jobs than that, by quite a margin.  (Not too surprising, being an IT contractor, but all the same)

At the moment I’m quite happy with the little house I’m renting. People are forever telling me that renting is Bad, that it’s dead money, all I’m doing is paying my landlord’s mortgage, I’ve got nothing to show for it, etc. etc. ad nauseam. But for me, renting works. I’m happy with it, and that’s really all that matters.

I like change. I like new workplaces, new living locations, etc. – but even more than that, I like having the ability to change. I don’t have to do it (although if everything is stable for too long it starts to scratch in the back of my brain, and I know something needs to be different) but I like being able to do so.  Being locked into something – or even the feeling of being locked in – makes me feel kind of claustrophobic, pressured, weighed down.

With renting, I know that if I want, I can move anywhere else, and just find somewhere to live. I don’t have to worry about selling the house, going through all the legal processes, waiting for chains of people to sell and move. I can give my notice, find somewhere near, and move on. If I got the offer of a dream job that’s not manageable from where I am now, I could easily move.  Equally, if something goes wrong, I can call the landlord, and it’s their problem for fixing it. I don’t need to source workmen, get estimates, take time off work, etc.  I’m happy with that situation.

In my head, ‘dead money’ is the interest on a mortgage. I look at the loan illustrations, the “If you borrow £200,000, the total amount repaid will be just over £370,000” (and yes, BW,I did check – £200,000 90% mortgage over 25 years, monthly payment of £1,238.94 =£371,682 ). I see that extra £170,000 of interest as dead money, cash that’s gone to a bank instead of wherever I want to have spent it.  Yes, a house could be “an investment”, if I come out after [x] years having made it more valuable and so on. But there’s no guarantees of that, and for whatever reason, my brain just doesn’t work on those timescales.

In the current workplace, everyone else has worked for the same company for at least five years. That just brings me out in shudders, I can’t deny it. The idea of being in one place, one company, listening to the same people for five years? Jesus.

It’s coming up to time to renew my tenancy on the current house – and the odds are that I’m going to take another 12-month tenancy on it. If I get through that without needing to move, I think it’ll be one of the longest-term places I’ve stayed. I’ve already been there 18 months (well, 18 months at the start of November) so another extension will put it at two-and-a-half years.

Of course, in that time I’ve changed jobs/contracts a few times, which is probably how come I’ll be happy in one house for longer than usual. So long as there’s change within life, I can live with it being in one bit or t’other (or even both). It’s just stability and stagnation that freaks me out for whatever reason.

I don’t know why my brain works in this way, I don’t know why I prefer change to stability. All I know is that it’s how I work.