Stop and celebrate our achievements

We celebrated my wife’s 29th birthday this weekend with a dinner at Waku Ghin. Fine dining has always been one of our favourite shared interests & activities and that’s how we celebrate our special occasions. We have been wanting to try the dining experience at Waku Ghin for a long time since we enjoyed our past visits to Tetsuya’s restaurant in Sydney. However, the price of the degustation menu at Waku Ghin was a real showstopper and we couldn’t bring ourselves to spend that kind of money even for fine dining.

I’m not sure what changed this year. It could have been a combination of increasing work stress, satisfaction with our financial progress, or maybe even lifestyle inflation. But we have been much more willing to spend upwards to engage in travel and dining activities that we enjoy. Especially when it comes to new stuff we haven’t tried before. So here we find ourselves staring at the amazing seafood we are about to eat and you should have seen the excitement on my wife’s face.

It was just the two of us in the room while having the savoury dishes probably because I had informed the restaurant prior that it was for my wife’s birthday celebration. And we went to a separate room to have the desserts where a nice chocolate mousse birthday cake was presented to my wife with a candle. She made a wish and blew out the candle. It’s the happiest I have seen her in a while, which is why the entire experience struck such a chord and made it so memorable to me.

Because we also had one of those deep and reflection conversations that come up when both of us have time to actually sit down and talk to each other for hours. We were talking about how far we have come financially from the days of graduate pay, budgeting for our expenses and watching out for excessive spending. That we could actually afford a meal like tonight while only denting the monthly budget slightly was surreal. But it was the next part of our discussion that stood out for me. We reminisced about how carefree we used to be in our graduate roles. Even though we were earning less, life was a lot less stressful and we had much less worries of any kind. Life was simpler and less complicated.

Fast forward to today whereby our pay is higher but we are constantly burdened with high stress, pressure, expectations and more complicated relationships with our families and friends. And I have noticed she’s not sleeping as soundly as before, which is a worrying sign. We are always being told to stop and celebrate our achievements. But every time we do it, the costs of those achievements surface as well. At some point in time, we are going to wonder whether it’s worth all that. And when we start having more bad weeks at work than good, we start to think whether the time for change is now. In fact, my wife pondered aloud whether it’s time for us to put a stop to our chase for career & financial progress and do something else like live in another country or have kids. And if you know her like I do, it is a significant development to even have kids in the picture.

I guess the point of this post is to show that everything comes with a price. Honesty on this blog about the good and bad parts of our life is something I value highly. We do what we can to navigate the ups and downs but will never lie to ourselves that all is going well when it’s not. This birthday celebration is almost like an epiphany to me. It’s time to relook, review and reassess our goals and direction.