I've had no other than job than Hive for several years now, and I've put great efforts into this platform to now finally reach the post payouts I feel I deserve, but it's no longer sustainable when combined with all the other things I must do each day.
🚫 No More Burning The Candle At Both Ends 🕯️
For the past three years I've been "burning the candle at the both ends," an expression we use in the USA to mean doing too much or overly exerting oneself in an unsustainable way. When we were stranded in Suriname there was no method to withdraw our crypto, so I spent my life savings to survive while stranded abroad during the pandemic during Suriname's economic collapse. Every day there I was working full-time on Hive while also spending hours and hours each day searching for food at nearly empty markets, waiting for hours and hours in Western Union cues, and countless other things that completely consumed my time.
Fast forward to now, we're back in Cambodia finally, have purchased land in a kind of environment that I am more accustomed to living in, but I still have not been able to find more than 3 or 4 hours of sleep per night. This way of life has been going on for far too long, and I've noticed negative changes in my health like the loss of hair, a weaker immune system, and many other negative consequences as a result of simply not sleeping enough.
During this time I have also remained an active and involved parent, homeschooling, taking the kids to school, cooking, and doing various household chores, but it's come at a high cost to my health, plus I really don't feel I've been as involved as a parent should or could be. While in Suriname I helped my wife to start a Hive blog in order to help us earn some much-needed extra income, and was hoping she could eventually learn to manage her own Hive account, blog, and crypto independently, but I still spend a bit of time each day managing her Hive/crypto tasks. I
I also started an account for my daughters so they that they could begin to build a savings nest egg of their own because I regretfully have no financial assets for them to inherit. I didn't realize at the time that this would add several hours of extra work for me each day on top of an already busy work day. Three years later my oldest daughter is able to run her blog 75% independently, manages a wee bit of her Hive account and crypto, and even does one ASEAN Hive post per week on Sunday to help me enjoy the only day each week I don't spend 6 hours in the tuk-tuk. She still doesn't curate yet, but I've been teaching her a little bit about what it takes to run the ASEAN Hive Community and all the duties involved.
I've tried for years to teach my wife how to manage her own Hive account, but it usually ends after a few days of studying. ASEAN Hive has been slowly growing during this time, and by having my family join me on Hive, I thought it would reduce my workload because we could eventually share the responsibilities, but instead the opposite has happened, and I am now responsible for their accounts in addition to ASEAN Hive. All these circumstances have led to me having no time for sleep, and the only way to keep my personal blog alive was to be a house-husband during the day and pursue my personal Hive blog after 8pm when the family has gone to sleep, but this obviously isn't sustainable or healthy.
⏳ Life Is Dynamic
My wife's health has also gone downhill over the last three years, and it's common for her to be sick 3-4 days a week. I also suspect she suffers from chronic fatigue, so I've taken on more and more of the responsibilities of a stay-at-home parent through the years to help her, and the only place to steal this exra time from was my sleep schedule. For the past several weeks I've been making an effort to be in bed by midnight, and this allows me about 4-5 hours of sleep before I wake up at 5:20am to take the kids to school 6 days a week, working in the tuk-tuk until returning home around 12 in the afternoon.
These past weeks I've been the stay-at-home parent I feel that my daughters deserve, making them lunches to take to school instead of giving them money to buy something unhealthy from a package. I've also been trying my best to make sure they have a homemade lunch and dinner, keeping the house a little tidier, being more involved in their education, playing games and doing projects with them, making conversation, offering life advice through personal stories, watching movies together, etc. The girls have made it clear they prefer they prefer this version of Dad over the one that is overworked and underslept.
So, for me the choice is clear, because of my wife's health issues, she's unable to be this kind of super-involved and active stay-at-home parent, but I think the kids deserve a commitment like this. I grew up as a latchkey kid with both parents working 60 hours a week, so I only ever saw them for a few minutes in the evening, and on their day off they were too exhausted to be very involved with me. I was always jealous of kids that had a stay-at-home mom because they always had better grades, better snacks, and better stories of projects, travels, and adventures they shared with this parent or parents.
🤔 Pensive About The Future
I really thought Hive was going to be this tool that would allow my wife and I the economic freedom to share the role of a stay-at-home parent. I must be honest, if I didn't need money, I'd be a fulltime stay-at-home dad, spending my days with my daughters, doing things to prepare them for the future and giving them as many life-skills as possible. Life isn't this blissfully easy though, and we all need some form of income to survive and provide for ourselves, and when I function as a stay-at-home parent there isn't enough income for us to survive.
It is truly regretful though to finally to be able to meet our family's financial needs by myself, but also to realize this leaves a lot of things out of order in the home. In order for me to continue working full-time and earn the money my family needs to survive, someone else would need to do all the cooking, cleaning, supplemental homeschooling, taking the kids to/from school, and just generally being an active and involved parent, but I'd still have little time with the kids like this. I really wish my wife would learn how to drive the motorbike so she can help me by taking the kids to school, but I think I will soon pay our neighbor $200 per month to do it in his truck, hoping the extra time this will give me will allow me to start blogging again and split transportation costs with Srey-Yuu.
Although Hive is awesome, if I was my wife and my husband earned more than enough to take care of the family, I would spend all my free time cooking, cleaning, hanging out with my daughters. I actually love domestic work, especially cooking, but unfortunately we can't change roles because my wife doesn't have the computer skills to take over ASEAN Hive, and even after years of being on Hive, hasn't showed much interest in learning more skills so that she can manage her Hive profile independently.
I personally would love for us both to know how to do each other's work so that we can equally share responsibilities. I once tried to teach my wife how to curate in ASEAN Hive, but that experiment ended after 30 minutes when she became extremely bored with the learning process. As the years have gone by, ASEAN Hive has grown and also the time it requires each day, and along with this my wife's chronic fatigue and health have gotten worse, and now it's to the point where I can no longer split myself between earning enough money for the family to survive while also taking on 50% of the responsibilities of a stay-at-home parent.
I haven't been posting lately due to a lack of time, but also because I have been saddened by the realization that life in the mountains may not be the right choice for my family and I. Working this many hours a day on only a handful of hours of sleep has finally caught up with me, and we now are losing several hundred dollars a month, not a good formula to pay back $40,000 USD that was borrowed to purchase the land we are on. If we can't sort out the transportation issue, my ideas are either to move to a small rental room in the town where my daughters attend school, spending 6 days a week there so that I can gain a few extra hours of sleep each day, or stop taking the village kids along with us in the tuk-tuk, allowing me to ride the moto with just the three of us, cutting costs, traveling faster, and returning home each morning instead of working in the tuk-tuk.
If I have to live in the town, I would rather choose life in a more interesting place elsewhere in Cambodia and sell the land and let this dream die. The last idea I have is to try and hire a caregiver/assistant for the family. I would be willing to let them stay in the cabin rent-free, provide free food, pay a modest salary, and only task them with learning my recipes, taking the kids to/from school each day, and helping me with a little ASEAN Hive work.
If I did this we'd lose the potential ability to earn income from the rental cabin, and also would be losing at least 40% of our ASEAN Hive income. This would still leave me unable to repay the loan because we honestly need every single dollar I can earn. In short there is no way out of this, and I've had a very hard time seeing the future lately. I've tried to focus on living day to day, sleeping a few more each night and waking up in a zombie-like state to take the kids to school, but this has taken away my lust for life, my passion, my drive, and the joy I used to experience when working on Hive.
These are the reasons that have kept me from posting, I'm not enjoying life to the fullest these days. I seek change, and I'm heartbroken at the thought of losing the dream of what life could be here in the Cardamom Mountains. My daughters deserve a stay-at-home active parent, and I've been busy the last few weeks being that person while also fulfilling my ASEAN Hive duties, but I've missed posting and interacting with Hive friends because it was really a passion for me, and also the majority of our income came from my blog.
This post probably feels like an incoherent rant, but I'm sorry, the last few years I've been so busy that I haven't been able to maintain physical friendships. You Hivers have become my closest friends, and at this point likely know me better than anyone else in life, so that is why I've posted these feelings and worries. I apologize and hope to find myself in a better mental state soon, but it likely won't come until I figure out a way through this mess. I feel as though my personal paradise has quickly become a burden on my shoulders, and although I am used to life in the mountains and love it here, the only solution I have is to return to an urban area and live in a tiny apartment while trying to sell the land to repay our loan. A life like this would create less daily responsibilities for me and have less monthly living expenses than our diesel costs here, but it's not really the life I want to live.
Rant over, I soon hope to be sharing some content and posts again soon just like in the olden days, so I will try to keeping working towards finding a balance so that this is possible.
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