Retirement seems like a good deal to me. It's not an inability to do things greater than yourself, it's the freedom to choose your pursuits without economic constraints (ideally).
Owning a boat, and sailing for pleasure sounds like a lovely hobby. I don't see anything wrong with aspiring to spend time that way.
At the end of the day it's just indulgence, not actually using your potential to the fullest. Going through life simply for pleasure is the sure fire way to have no lasting impact.
If that's what you want to do, then great, but I get annoyed when mediocrity is touted as the greatest good.
What's the point of working hard to make the world better, if the only thing you're working hard for is to enable more hard work?
I want my children to work hard, to challenge themselves, and to do something valuable. I also want them to have a good time, and not become worker robots.
There's a place for everything. Retirement is the place for entertaining your own hobbies and interests, even if that means working on your boat and going out on the lake.
Fully agreed:
"But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself" - Camus
Not everyone wants that. Some people have had their run "making impact" and want nothing more than to spend time with their loved ones and enjoy their hobbies. I strongly doubt they'll be on their deathbeds thinking "I regret wasting all that time spent with family and doing things I love; I ought to have made a bigger impact at work instead"
Sure, in which case they shouldn't be complaining about not having impactful work.
I strongly doubt they'll be on their deathbeds thinking "I regret wasting all that time spent with family and doing things I love; I ought to have made a bigger impact at work instead"
This is a false narrative and not mutually exclusive with doing important work. Most people die suddenly without a community surrounding them, family or otherwise. I'm dubious about the number of people who have great end of life with a loving family surrounding them.
It seems like you're noting a weakness in your original argument as you set up the dichotomy. In reference to aspiring to life on a boat in retirement, you had said:
>> At the end of the day it's just indulgence, not actually using your potential to the fullest. Going through life simply for pleasure is the sure fire way to have no lasting impact.
I do! Not necessarily a boat, though; I'd rather have a nice house in the woods, and spend a lot of time traveling the world. But you seem to think it's a "waste" if someone doesn't want to spend their whole life working. For what? So I can spend most of my waking hours in the sheer hell which is the modern open-plan office? Why TF would I want to do that if I didn't have to? The sooner I don't have to put up with open-plan offices, the better. And what are you contributing to the world while you're working anyway? You really think that working on yet another Javascript framework, or building yet another re-spin of some website is improving the world in a substantive way? Out of all the HN readership, I'd guess that less than 5% actually does anything that's lasting and useful to society.
Out of all the HN readership, I'd guess that less than 5% actually does anything that's lasting and useful to society.
I'd put it at closer to 1% - and that's the point. You have the causation backward though. If the purported goal is this mundane, hedonistic "retirement," then nobody will ever do anything lasting and useful because you can find an easy niche to fall into that lets you maximize your "leisure time."
You said before: "Do that many people want to retire - literally have nothing greater than themselves that requires their input on a daily basis"
What else would people be doing if they don't retire, than working? And working means having to deal with all the crap that goes along with working: the open-plan office, meetings, the daily stand-up, office politics, etc. Why would anyone sane want to put up with this crap if they can afford not to? I sure wouldn't.
>I'd put it at closer to 1%
Yeah, I was being charitable.
>If the purported goal is this mundane, hedonistic "retirement," then nobody will ever do anything lasting and useful because you can find an easy niche to fall into that lets you maximize your "leisure time."
Yeah, but I don't see any alternative. Sure, I'd like to spend some of my time working on something really useful to humanity, and in fact that's one reason I got into engineering. The reality has been entirely different; nothing I've worked on has been important at all, and very little has even gotten any use. Most stuff just goes nowhere, gets canceled, etc. It's not like I can just go pick exactly what I want to work on. Notice how many applications NASA gets for the astronaut program, and how few of them are accepted. And even if I could pick some great project to work on, I don't want to do it if I have to work in an open-plan office, and I don't see office environments ever becoming a place where I'd be really excited to go every day. (i.e. cubicles were better than today's open-plan offices, but still pretty miserable.)
So it's pretty simple: if I can afford to not work, I'd rather just do that than to put up with the annoyances that are unavoidable at work. If that means nobody ever does anything lasting or useful, then so be it.
If that's all it takes to deter you, then I don't have much else to offer I suppose other than those annoyances are everywhere in life.
Sure, a retired person may still have to deal with some annoyances, like the local government placing restrictions on what they can do with their property, having to pay taxes, etc., but they can sure minimize the number of annoyances they have to put up with in their daily lives a lot. They can even move somewhere else if they want, without having to worry about that new location being close to a paying job.
It's really weird how dead-set against retirement and freedom you are.
Retirement means you have taken yourself out of the power dynamic and limited your wealth potential.
... well, assuming you, like me, aren't fabulously wealthy, anyway. ;)
Because that's not freedom. That's some middling low rent outcome.
Freedom means I don't have to wait in line if I don't want to. That if a hurricane comes through and destroys my house, I can just move to another one without trouble. That if I get Liver cancer, I can buy a house in Tennessee and skip the donor wait list in California (Like Steve Jobs did). It means the local cops won't bully me and my family because I paid for all of their fancy new equipment. Etc...
Freedom is not sitting idle in some garage fiddling with some bullshit. It's about being able to act with as wide as options as possible.
The point is that we shouldn't be advocating for middling outcomes and some fake version of freedom defined by leisure. It's not about being a millionaire its about leading an impactful option filled life. You can do that without money.
There is a whole trend of bucking the idea of having a huge vision and working to make that happen. Rejecting the idea that our work shouldn't be the most important thing in our lives. Your work, is how you engage with the world. Your job sucks, ok then do something else, move, shed the restrictions keeping you from doing it.
People lock themselves into these cycles aka rat races where they are working bullshit jobs for inefficient exploitative markets. Stop, and go and make an impact. Stop with the idea that working for 20 years and then taking the rest of your life off is the best use of your talent.
Oh but they say I have a family to feed, and I have health problems etc... Guess what, they'll figure it out. Kids are tough and resilient. Move somewhere with better health care, restructure your life to minimize the impacts. There are ways to do it.
Hmm, well my bio would indicate otherwise.
After working for decades in bullshit jobs, no one cares about making the best use of their talent, they care about enjoying their life, or what little is left of it.
Yea, sad isn't it?
The California Lottery's current TV spot shows a youngish guy on a yacht, with a pony.
It's perhaps inspired by the old Lyle Lovett song, "If I Had a Boat", which says:
"If I had a boat
I'd sail across the ocean
and if I had a pony
I'd ride him on my boat."
God that sounds terrible anyway. Do that many people want to retire - literally have nothing greater than themselves that requires their input on a daily basis - and go sit on a boat? What a waste.