The Older I Get, the Richer I Want to Be

The older I get, the richer I want to be.

Just not in the way I once imagined.

I want to be rich in mornings I don’t have to rush through, in time outside, in long dinners and conversations full of depth and meaning, wonder and laughter. I want days spent making things with my hands or refining new skills, afternoons in the garden, time to read without feeling like I should be doing something more productive, and the freedom to disappear into the hills or go diving in the sea when the weather is too good to waste.

I want to travel slowly. I want to make photographs simply because something moved me.

I actually can’t tell you the last time I created a photograph just for me.

I want to swim in all the rivers, grow a ridiculous bounty of food, sit around a table with people I love and not constantly be thinking about the next thing I need to do.

More than anything, I think I want a life with space in it.

Maybe one of the greatest forms of wealth is simply having enough of your own time to actually live your life.

Don’t get me wrong, the bills still need to be paid and I still want financial stability. We’ve bought a house and we want to build equity in it, improve it over time and make good decisions for our future. I want my career to create substantial wealth. The kind of abundance that gives us freedom, choice, generosity and the ability to build a beautiful life without being owned by the pursuit of it.

I want to adventure, create, invest, contribute and live well.

I’m not interested in pretending money doesn’t matter, because it absolutely does.

But what I’m questioning more and more is what all that work is actually for.

If I’m working harder and harder, building more and more, creating more offers, more projects, more responsibilities and more things that need maintaining, but the end result is that I have less time to enjoy my actual life, then at some point I have to ask whether I’m moving in the right direction.

What am I actually buying with all of this work?

Because if the answer isn’t eventually more freedom, more choice and more of my own life, then I’m not entirely sure what the point is.

Taking inventory of a life

Lately, I’ve found myself taking a bit of an inventory. Not so much of the things I own — although I’m definitely becoming less interested in accumulating things too, unless we’re talking home renovations, apparently 😂 — but more an inventory of my time and energy.

What am I giving myself to? What am I maintaining simply because I started it? What still feels genuinely meaningful to me? What is taking up space in my life because at one point I said yes to it, even though I might not make the same decision today?

And then, probably the most important question of all:

What do I actually want more of?

This kind of reflection has always been at the heart of what rewilding means to me.

Rewilding is a nonlinear process. It is equal parts healing, unearthing, evolving, remembering and, occasionally, burning the whole bloody framework down and starting over again.

It’s taking stock of what deserves a seat at the table of your life.

This is your kitchen.

You choose who you eat with.

At the same time, I don’t think rewilding is a destination you arrive at where suddenly you know yourself completely, your values become some perfectly fixed north star and you never get lost again.

If anything, I think it’s the opposite.

Sometimes getting lost in it all is the point.

It’s an ongoing process of noticing. Checking back in with yourself. Being willing to admit when something that once felt right no longer does. Pulling yourself out of the trees for long enough to see the forest again.

The life you consciously created can still become a life you unconsciously maintain.

It’s incredibly easy to get caught up, even when you’ve worked hard to create a life that feels like your own.

Autopilot has a sneaky way of finding its way back in.

You start a project because you care deeply about it. An opportunity comes along and you say yes. Then another one comes along. Something grows, which is wonderful, but growth brings more responsibility. You take on another client, another idea, another business, another commitment.

Then you buy a house and suddenly there are approximately nine thousand things you want to do to that too.

None of those things are necessarily bad. In fact, many of them can be beautiful things you actively chose and perhaps continue to choose.

But things accumulate.

And not just physical things.

We accumulate responsibilities, expectations, projects, subscriptions, goals, identities and ideas about who we are supposed to become.

Before long, you can find yourself incredibly busy maintaining a life you haven’t actually stopped to question for a while.

That doesn’t mean you built the wrong life.

It might simply mean you’ve changed.

And it’s time to assess.

Stop moving the finish line

One of the things I’m recognising in myself is just how easy it is to continually move the finish line.

I’ll have more freedom when I earn this much.

I’ll slow down once this project is finished.

I’ll take more time off when the business is more established.

When these debts are paid.

I’ll enjoy the house once we’ve finished this part, and then this part, and then this other part.

I’ll rest when I get through this busy period.

Except there is always another busy period.

There is always another project you could start, another income target you could reach, another bill to pay, another room you could renovate, another level your business could grow to.

And if you’re not paying attention, the life you keep promising yourself becomes something permanently waiting in the future.

At some point, we have to stop moving the finish line and allow ourselves to live inside what we have already created.

I don’t want to spend the next twenty years telling myself that freedom is just on the other side of one more thing.

That doesn’t mean I stop dreaming or building or wanting to grow. I don’t think ambition is the problem.

I think unconscious ambition might be.

Growth without ever asking why.

More without ever asking whether more is actually what we want.

I want to become much more intentional about what growth is for.

Is it success?

What even is success?

Maybe success isn’t reaching some mythical point where there is finally nothing left to do.

Maybe success is knowing when there is enough.

A different definition of wealth

I’m beginning to realise that I still want more.

I just want more of very different things.

I want an obscene amount of time.

I want freedom. I want afternoons where I can work in the garden because the sun is out. I want long stretches of creative concentration where I’m not watching the clock. I want road trips, ocean swims, hikes, photography and little adventures that don’t necessarily need to become content or make me money.

I want meaningful work, absolutely. I love what I do. I still have big creative ambitions and visions I want to bring to fruition.

But I also want enough space around that work to have a life outside of it.

And that balance is beginning to feel far more important than endlessly expanding for the sake of expansion.

There is such a strong societal message that growth must always mean more.

More revenue. More clients. More followers. More offers. More reach. More possessions.

More everything.

That’s how you get ahead, apparently.

But I’m starting to question the hype.

Because strangely, the more I pull back, simplify and put a premium on my time, the more I seem to get back of the thing I was chasing in the first place.

Freedom.

We’re constantly encouraged to scale up, add another thing and keep moving towards whatever the next level is supposed to be.

We can literally be standing in the middle of bringing a dream to fruition and already be talking about the next thing on the bucket list.

We barely give our dreams room to breathe.

We barely give ourselves credit for how far we’ve come, or for all the work that has already happened to bring us right here; which is exactly somewhere a past version of us once desperately hoped we might be.

What if we stopped for a minute?

What if I already have enough of certain things?

And what if what I actually want more of isn’t stuff, status or productivity at all?

Maybe I want more time. More presence. More experiences. More creativity. More freedom. More connection.

More room to actually enjoy what I’ve already built.

What if wealth isn’t about having more things, but having more freedom to decide how your days are spent?

There’s an interesting contradiction in the way we often think about success.

We work incredibly hard so that one day we can have more freedom. We build bigger businesses so that hopefully, eventually, we can work less. We accumulate things that require more money and more maintenance, which means we need to keep earning more in order to sustain them.

Somewhere along the way, time becomes the thing we have the least of.

And yet time is probably our most finite resource.

To have time can feel luxurious.

We can make more money. We can replace possessions. We can change jobs, build new businesses and reinvent ourselves many times over.

We cannot accumulate more time.

We can only decide, as best we can, what we do with the time we have.

The baggage of hustle

I think part of why this feels so poignant for me now is that I grew up in a culture where working relentlessly was completely normal.

My dad worked seven days a week selling real estate and seemed to believe the only worthwhile career options for me were becoming a lawyer, a doctor or a rockstar.

My mum has only more recently started really finding herself through her own adventures out in the world, while still trying to wedge those experiences around a full working week.

That mentality threads its way into your DNA.

Especially growing up in America, where time off often feels like something you have to earn rather than something that should simply be part of being alive.

You work and you work and you work.

My mum said something to me not long ago about potentially having to work six days a week for the rest of her foreseeable life, and I remember thinking: I cannot fathom that.

Something in me has always pushed back against that version of life.

I think that was part of what drew me to New Zealand in the first place.

And yet I brought the baggage of hustle with me.

I changed countries and somehow managed to create my own little rat race anyway.

For the better part of fifteen years I built, created, worked, launched, travelled, photographed, facilitated and filled every single available pocket of time with something.

Then we moved to Reefton.

This tiny town on the West Coast that sometimes feels like it sits at the edge of the lost world.

There’s something about this place that feels slightly outside of time. Wilderness in every direction. A town of a little over a thousand people, full of interesting characters and strong opinions. History sits right alongside everyday life. Out here, it really does feel like the last frontier.

And the West Coast itself has a feeling that is difficult to explain until you’ve spent time amongst it. There’s a wildness to it that you don’t just observe from a distance because you become immersed in it.

It grabs hold of you.

You don’t really get to stand outside of the landscape and observe it. You’re in it.

The rivers, the mountains, the forest, the weather, the ocean.

I felt incredibly drawn to this place years ago, and the strange thing is that I think I moved here, at least partly, because I wanted to slow down.

Now that I’m here, I can actually feel my body learning how.

There are moments when I settle into it and think, yes, this is exactly what I wanted.

Then some deeply conditioned part of me braces up and goes:

Hold on. We can’t stop. We need to get shit done.

And I find that fascinating.

My nervous system is almost titrating between the life I have spent decades learning how to survive in and the life I’m now trying to allow myself to experience.

Which keeps bringing me back to the same question.

When is it enough?

The simplicity of enough

I’m becoming increasingly interested in the simplicity of enough.

Not settling.

Not shrinking my life or abandoning ambition.

Enough.

There is a difference.

I still want to make extraordinary photographs. I want creative work that excites me. I don’t want to romanticise financial struggle. I have bills to pay and I want financial stability, adventures, a beautiful home and a future that feels expansive.

But I don’t necessarily want a bigger life.

I think I want a deeper one.

Fewer things I care about only marginally and more time for the things I care about enormously.

Fewer obligations that exist simply because I once agreed to them.

More room to change my mind when something doesn’t feel right anymore.

Less rushing through my days towards some imaginary point where everything finally settles down and I can breathe.

I need to breathe now.

Deeply.

Because life is already happening.

This is it.

And the strange thing is, when I think about the moments when I genuinely feel wealthy, they are almost always embarrassingly simple.

A rustic hut somewhere in the backcountry. Wood stacked beside a fire. A fire bath waiting outside.

Food that nourishes more than just hunger.

A home that feels like ours.

Being outside.

A body that can take me places.

Creative work I care about.

The people I love.

My dog beside me.

Something growing in the garden.

Water to swim in.

An adventure on the horizon.

Enough money that I have choices, and enough time to actually experience the life those choices are meant to create.

Maybe simplifying your life isn’t about wanting less from life. Maybe it’s about removing what gets in the way of experiencing what truly lights you up.

That feels important to me.

Because simplicity can so easily be mistaken for smallness.

I didn’t say I want a small life.

I want an expansive one.

I just don’t think expansiveness necessarily comes from how much I can cram into it anymore.

It used to.

For years I outsourced far too much of my self-worth and validation to how much I could do, how much I could hold, how productive I could be and how many things I could somehow keep moving at once.

Now expansiveness looks different.

It looks like depth.

Presence.

Having enough room in my day to follow curiosity, spend time outside, make something slowly, change plans because the weather is beautiful or there’s a perfect opportunity to go diving.

Or just sit somewhere for longer than I intended.

One of my favourite things to do these days, actually.

That feels rich to me.

That is where real wealth is beginning to live for me.

Time, my friends, is the ultimate luxury.

Letting ourselves change

Maybe this is another season of rewilding my own life.

Not dramatically reinventing everything or burning it all down, but paying attention to what has accumulated and asking what still belongs.

I can feel the need to strip things back a little.

To take stock of what is taking up precious time in my life and ask whether I still want to give it that time.

I think we sometimes imagine self-development as continually adding things.

More knowledge. More practices. More goals. More healing. More versions of ourselves to become.

But maybe some seasons of growth are actually about subtraction.

Creating room.

Deciding that some things have served their purpose and can now be put down.

Maybe even letting someone else carry the torch.

Recognising that simplifying your life doesn’t necessarily make it smaller. Sometimes it gives you the capacity to experience it more fully.

The woman I was five years ago wanted things I no longer want.

The woman I am today will probably make decisions the woman I become five years from now will see differently again.

And I think that’s a good thing.

The point was never to construct the perfect life and then hold onto it forever.

Maybe the point is to remain awake enough to keep choosing it.

You are allowed to love what you built and still decide you no longer want to carry all of it forward.

So that’s the question I’m sitting with at the moment.

If I took everything I’m currently doing and laid it out in front of me, what would I consciously choose again?

What do I want more of?

What can I have less of?

What feels alive?

What feels complete?

Where have I been telling myself, just one more thing, then I’ll slow down?

And what might become possible if I stopped believing the answer always had to be more?

Because the older I get, the more I think real wealth might be surprisingly simple.

Enough financial steadiness to have choices.

Enough purpose to feel connected to what I’m doing.

Enough adventure to keep me curious.

Enough people around me who matter.

Enough freedom to change direction when life asks me to.

And enough time to look around at the life I’ve created and actually be there for it.

Maybe the work isn’t always about reaching the next finish line.

Maybe sometimes the work is recognising that you’ve already arrived somewhere worth staying for a while.