Here’s an interesting trend I’ve noticed.

People who go hard for a while with their financials and then have an “eff this, life’s too short, I’m doing what I want moment.”

But they fully embrace the eff this. They’re like, “I got this, yo.” They know they can make more money. They know how to budget. They know what their expenses are. They know what they need to get by.

They know money isn’t everything, but it can buy you a lot of freedom. Or it can buy you a little freedom and then you can just go make some more.

They see that no spend weeks and budgeting and watering down your soap and buying from thrift stores and living in smaller homes and saving large chunks of your income and prioritizing how you want to spend and figuring out side hustles are a big investment worth making – for a little while.

That if you dive in 100% and learn how to do these things and buckle down and do unpleasant things while you have the strength and mental fortitude to do them, when you don’t want to do them anymore, you’re actually quite ahead.

A story I’ve been full out lurking on over the last few weeks is over at The 76K Project. I’ve been following her bad luck with a new job that she was super psyched about. I read about how it was all a giant, steaming pile of lies. I was horrified over how badly her job was ruining her life and completely wrecking her mental state.

And I about screamed in victory for her when I saw her tweet that she just flat out walked away from that toxic environment without even two weeks notice and was all about living life for a bit.

How did we become such a society where coming up for air makes us feel guilty?

I 100% understand.

I was recently a guest speaker at a college and the professor of the class and I got on a tangent about work hours and life in the arts when one of the students asked me about how I handle work/life balance and I pointedly said I don’t.

I was shocked when he started going on about the passion of doing what you love and how people in the arts strive under stressful environment and get a high off the adrenaline rush, blah, blah, blah.

I pretty much was like, “our work environment is pretty much toxic and totally unacceptable and you’re not weak if you feel this way about it. It’s wildly unhealthy and we have ridiculously high burnout rates and we really need to start standing up for ourselves and stop letting producers and the people with money short change us and push for insane schedules in the name of passion.”

But I was horrified to hear it still be romanticized to these poor, unsuspecting kids. There should be no excuses for this nonsense.

I know this isn’t contained to just the arts by a long shot. I think as Millennials we’ve really pushed too hard on the 24/7 productivity thing and it’s biting us all in the ass.

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

But what does that rant have to do with financial yo-yoing?

I’m starting to see this fairly great trend among the financially literate where we go really hard for a while.

But then we come back to rest for a bit.

We use the literacy we’ve built, and the money we’ve stashed, and the debt-free freedom to reconnect with our lives. This doesn’t even necessarily mean we put the brakes on fully.

Over at The 76K Project, she’s even planning to look for some contract work, some stuff to make some money to pay the bills and stretch their funds, but it’s not at 100%. Her career is just not the focus right now.

And that’s ok.

Because you can always yo-yo back again, once you’re actually recuperated from the burnout. Which is a very real thing.