Recently my wife and I watched a movie called “I’m Fine, Thanks.” It’s a documentary about several people who reach a breaking point in life and respond by doing something unconventional.
Several of the featured people achieve financial success but realize they’re miserable. One couple decides to pay cash for a 300-square-foot house and focus on simplicity. One man decides to ditch a prosperous career as an attorney to start a yoga studio in New York City. A family decides to drop everything and start riding their bikes; they ride from the Pacific Northwest to South America.
Themes in the film include having the courage to pursue your dreams, downsizing, not delaying your dreams until retirement, getting away from the tyranny of material possessions, unconventional living, and the importance of spending time with one’s children.
See the trailer below.
I’m Fine, Thanks – Trailer from Grant Peelle on Vimeo.
It was the kind of film that makes you think—about your life, about the choices you’ve made, about the path you’re on. It’s the kind of film that compels you to ask, Is this the life I want?
The film reveals the enormous pressure we are under to live a certain way. The difficulty of coming into awareness of this pressure cannot be overestimated.
It’s like a fish becoming aware of the water it swims in. Fact is, if that water becomes really polluted, the fish becomes aware of it very quickly and, I suspect, does all it can to find clean water. But if the water has a low level of pollution, the fish probably just lives with it, right? It swims on, does the aquatic equivalent of coughing every now and again, and that’s it.
That’s what I do. That’s what we do. We sense the life we’re in is slightly messed up, slightly off center, but it’s not terrible. We can manage it. Cough. It’s okay. So we settle. Cough. We get up the next morning. Cough, cough. Brew the coffee and do what we have to do to pay the rent or mortgage.
But there’s this little voice in the back of our minds. It’s subtle; it’s inaudible most of the time. But it’s there. And it whispers, “You don’t have to do this. There is another way.”
I’ll ask you the same question I’m asking myself: What’s one thing you can do today to turn the volume up on that little voice?
