Twelve Week Year

I recently saw a blog posted from a casual writer friend who said she was starting her first 12-week year.

Color me curious!

The term comes from a book by the same name, and it refers to a challenge to accomplish a year’s amount of work in the span of twelve weeks.  Obviously, an attempt at becoming more efficient and getting more “stuff” done.  There are even workshops you can sign up for, and one-on-one coaching you can pay for. This is, quite frankly, growing into a huge business.

What follows is simply my opinion of this movement as it applies to me. I make no judgement regarding the desire, by other people, to squeeze fifty-two weeks of work into a twelve-week span.  To my way of thinking, at first thought, for me it would be ludicrous, but that’s just for me.

I just rekindled my love of simple living, minimalism, intentional living, and slow living. There is nowhere in my immediate future for some movement which flies in the face of my chosen lifestyle, but I do find it curious in an analytical and philosophical way.

It is my opinion that we humans are far too busy as it is; we live hectic lives of working one or two jobs, taking care of children, keeping up with the Joneses, doing chores, running errands, with nary a moment spent smelling the roses, and any attempt to squeeze more into each minute will only lead to anxiety issues, stress issues, unhappiness issues, and ultimately health issues.

I can also see how this movement would be quite popular with employers. Work the poor bastards into an early grave, all for a better profit line. Who cares? There is an unending stream of worker bees who will work for peanuts so the CEOs can dine on caviar.

Too harsh? I think not!

I recently took a trip back in time, back twelve years, to when I first started publishing articles on a site called HubPages. It was interesting to note that almost immediately, say within the first three months of writing on that site, I was writing articles about Simple Living and Frugal Living.  Interesting and a bit surprising, truth be told. I didn’t realize I had hopped on the Simple Living bandwagon that long ago but, as I’ve pointed out before, this lifestyle has always been comfortable for me. I have never needed things to make me happy, never craved “the latest or newest,”’ never even so much as thought about what the Jones family was doing.  It just ain’t my thing and never has been my thing.  My ex-wife did not agree with that philosophy and that just touches the surface of the problems we had in that marriage.

But I digress!

For twelve years now I have been writing articles and now shooting videos about the positives which can be found from simplifying one’s life. I would love to report that my articles have started a large movement towards simplification, but that just wouldn’t be true.  I am not a leader in this movement. I do not have thousands of followers who give a damn what I write about.  On any given day I might have a couple dozen who give a rip whether I’m upright or pushing up daisies.  And yet I write, and I make videos, and I, like billions of other people, hope my life will have meaning when it is all done.

What I can guarantee you is that when I die, people will not think back upon my lifetime and say “wow, isn’t he the guy who learned how to work a full year in twelve weeks?”

Not going to happen in this lifetime! Not with this boy.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, some new chicks just hatched, and I need to welcome them into my simple life.

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