1. More volunteer time at the dog shelter.
2. More reading.
3. More music playing, and finally really spend time on that violin that is currently a secondary instrument.
4. More time at "church" (read: Zen practice), yes, just like other old people.
5. Might finally have time to hike the Appalachian Trail, or at least large parts of it.
6. Finally find the time to sit down and decide what I want to do when I retire, 'cuz there's no way this list is complete.
All but #5 should be able to be done by all but the most feeble. I hope I live so long as to get bored in retirement.
Loads of folks derive personal value and meaning out of their work, and I'm one of them. I've been out of work once for a few months, and that was with a job waiting for me at the end of the tunnel.
It was eye opening how depressive it was, to be robbed of your big "thing." I'm saying this as someone with a boat load of little "things," reading, outdoorsmanship, sports, etc. The second that surety of purpose is gone, so goes my wider motivation.
This is all predicated on not needing money too much. I can see how someone who doesn't have a financial cushion would feel depressed about not only having to spend savings, but also not making money to cover the living expenses. That was the hardest part to come to terms with (at least for me), even though I'm not in any way struggling financially.
I'm kind of close to a point where I'd be fine to not ever even search for another job. I got plenty of other things (perhaps too many) to derive meaning from, and I don't need to get paid to properly derive it.
US tech workplace is super unfriendly to part time work, unfortunately, so instead I just "part time" by not working for a while every 3-4 years. My wife does the same thing. She left her job over a year ago, so she's not working at the moment, though she's more of a social animal, so she'll start looking in September. Me? If the tech industry disappeared today, I'd breathe a sigh of relief, and switch to brewing beer (which is something I'm pretty good at as well). As things are right now, tech is the easiest possible way for me to make the most money per hour (and therefore maximize my downtime).
The comment reads far better without that sentence. As it is, you and mikestew appear to be in violent agreement.
Not a lot of room for uncharitable misinterpretation when one starts off with "I can only assume..."
> The comment reads far better without that sentence.
It certainly would!
You had the choice to interpret charitably yourself, however ;-)
Though the initial bit on the culture of charity (see link in my previous comment you're replying to) seems generally on point.
Watching people talk past each other rubs me as tedious. I'll mention it occasionally.
Most people would define "retirement" as "no longer working for money, while using savings or other existing means of income to pay for living expenses"
There absolutely is a reason that it can't be my "thing," it's because it isn't!
If it's "doing work that changes the way things are", once you've reached a point where you are able to retire and no longer need to work for money, there's plenty of options in just about every sector (I'm assuming yours is tech or tech adjacent being on HN and all that) where you can do meaningful work and which people would gladly accept the help of an expert on even if they can't pay them.
If it's some other 3rd thing that you feel differentiates jobs from non-jobs, I'd be interested to hear what you think that is.
Society is built on division of labor. I enjoy the fruits of so many people's labor in uncountable ways all day long. It's only fair that I too participate in this wonderful system and give something back.
You're right that the payment is important. Calling that "greed" is a misunderstanding of that word, aside from the attempted insult. Among several things, it does serve as a check that what you do is important. That someone is willing to pay you money, shows that the work is important to that someone!
It's interesting to me that you wrote the payment is important to you because it shows that what you are doing is important. My outlook is that the thing I am paid to do is arguably the least important activity out of any I do in the world. I'm paid to ensure that a particular set of bits are turned on and off in the appropriate way so that other people can manipulate those same bits to influence how data is represented elsewhere. In essence, I feel as though I'm the digital version of a paper-pusher, merely moving reports from one end to the other. It's not bad, as such, just not something I imagine as an important thing. But, it's what the market / society / the invisible hand has decided is deserving of almost outlandlishly wealthy levels of pay, so I do it.
On the other hand, the things I find most important are the activities I either don't get paid to do or I actively pay to do them. Volunteering at my library showing kids and older adults how to read and find information. Being a guide at the zoo, hanging out with animals and encouraging others to see them as worth conserving. Knocking on doors for my preferred candidate in local elections. These are all things that, should I deduce some way to continue to pay my usual bills without having to digitally-push-paper, I would happily do for the rest of my days and let someone else occupy my chair at work. That I don't get paid to do them is almost part of the charm, though I wish society valued the work highly enough that I could get paid to do one or more of those instead of dealing with the latest wrinkle in "site reliability engineering."
But what I am saying is that it shows what I'm doing is important to other people. It's not just something I'm doing for myself.
> it's what the market / society / the invisible hand has decided is deserving of almost outlandlishly wealthy levels of pay, so I do it.
That's true, but I prefer to deabstractify it a bit. There are real people, who have decided to spend substantial money on paying you and me to do what we do, because they think it's important. That makes it very real to me. And confirmed by an independent outside "reviewer", so to speak.
I came into this way of thinking after being a stubborn youth who hated work and dreamt about never having to do it. But I couldn't get the ethics of it all to add up. So this is how I made sense of things.
Of course, what you describe sounds like working for the benefit of others as well.
-Direct comments from people saying as much -Visible effects of your work changing things around you -People providing you with physical, yet solely sentimentally valuable tokens of their thanks
The money is one way of keeping score, but it's not the singular way of keeping score. It's only important if you feel it's important. You can volunteer at an old folks home or help maintain an important, widely used OS project, and pretty easily understand that what you're doing is valuable to your society. There are all sorts of tasks that you can perform that have an overt and direct impact but which will not provide you with any financial income. Within the context of the discussion, being retired (which we earlier defined as existing in a state in which you no longer need additional financial gain in order to support your lifestyle) you could still perform meaningful task that aren't jobs.
OP hasn't commented on what it is that makes "working jobs for money" his thing. We can only speculate what his answers would be. I'm still of the opinion that it's either avarice and a love of money as a way of keeping score of your life, or a misunderstanding of what non-work activities look like.
How do you define greed? What do you feel I'm misunderstanding about the concept? Just so we can further this discussion, I'll put down my thought: Greed is the desire for money for money's sake. Using money as a way of proving that something is important. It is the desire to posses more than one needs. The crux of our disagreement here is likely that, defining what "needs" are. I believe capitalist societies are inherently greedy and therefor flawed. I'm not singularly condemning OP, I wish a pox upon the whole enterprise.
I would add "at the expense of others" to clarify that.
Getting paid to work is making money by helping others, which to me is the opposite of "greed"!
The trade of exchanging labor for money is one of the cornerstones of civilization, and everything that's good in the world, as I see it. So we seem to have some discrepancies in our world views :)
I have no quarrel at all with your other ways of knowing your work is appreciated. They all sound good and healthy.
No quarrels though. You seem like a nice enough person.
I'm trying to figure out what OP feels provides him meaning at work. If it's the money, and he gets depressed when he doesn't make money, I'm fine calling that greedy. If it's the lack of meaningful "work" you can do the work without the money. If it's a 3rd thing, I genuinely don't understand what it could be since to me work is simply "doing a task for money".
2. Do you mean Braille? Yes, large print can suffice sometimes... Audiobooks if your hearing is adequate.
3. Add some motor coordination problems and this is not happening.
4. It is boring for many.
5. Sure, with failing healthy and being less able to move. Not impossible, just not likely.
6. Too late for many things.
Most people forget that were talking 70 years old people or so. Some remain spry, but they are a minority.
6b. And what makes you think you will have better ideas then? Or have any actual energy?
By the time they're 60, most people attain at least one chronic health problem. If they're lucky, it's manageable for normal full energy life without such excesses.
Some fade much earlier than that.
Finally, the main problem is gradual loss of connections, friends, family etc.
And if I slip up and get tracked, and I hear the law breaking down the door to get in, I’ll just swallow a pack of pills and be done with it, by the time they get to me, they’ll just find a deflating old corpse sunken into a bed, while thousands of compromised machines stand by to execute their final orders once the dead man’s switch goes off.
This is how I fade.
I enjoyed them.
If you were being sarcastic then I'm sorry and I'll feel like a total idiot.
If you are really passionate about driving racing cars but you can't afford to do so, people telling you that you can play games or instruments doesn't really help.
Take for instance my dad....
- He was offered an early retirement package at age 55, hated being idle, and six months later returned to full-time work as a consultant.
- Fast-forward 15 years, to age 71, when he finally decided to properly retire, ...
- ... to do a full-time Masters of Mechanical Engineering. He just graduated, at 75 the univesity's oldest full-time student.
- After a six month's break (to focus on gym circuit training and boxing classes), he has returned to university again, doing a 50% Masters of Aeronautical Engineering.
During the course he got two concessions:
- He was given 4 hours to do the 3 hour exam papers. After all, it had been 53 years since his undergrad math days.
- Exemption from the engineering work experience requirement. Instead in the Project Management course, he did a guest lecture slot on 'real-life project management in the offshore oil and gas industry'.
That is the most awesome thing I've read all week! Congratulations to your dad.
P.S. One other thing I just remembered is he and my mum live in a country town 90km outside Melbourne. They weren't just round the corner from the university... It was a 90 minute trip by public transport each way. That's a major effort each day just to get to class if you are 18, let alone 75.
Well, the common pattern seems to be for those who retire early that it was preceded with a lots of work. That was also my case. At some point I just realised that I want to do something else, and I had enough savings for lifetime so money wasn't any kind of motivator any more. So, previously I was working 24/7, then suddenly I was working only couple of hours a week. Slowly I started picking things to do, but it takes a lot of time to find hobbies etc.
When I had the luxury of taking the last year off I found out that the idea of doing those things was far more appealing than actually doing them. I started to go a little crazy.
Now I’m looking for work, not because I have to right now, it because I’m bored.
But to answer directly: yes; money is no longer the motivator, and one does not have to do those things to eat. Which, I suppose, a jobby-job once you have enough saved counts as "retirement". But as much as I like my work, there's a lot of other things I like, too, and don't do them as much as I'd like because I'm not yet "retired".
Personally, I'm at least 15 years from retirement, and one of my plans is to hang out at either hackerspaces, libraries, or other areas like that.
Why this idea is not a first class citizen in the first world is beyond me.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/palaces-for-the-peopl...
If we have beer someone might pull out an actual bottle opener (I worry about that guy).
I wouldn't worry about either of you, but if anyone were casting such aspersions I'd expect it to be someone without 'tools' about them.
Later on I had several conversations with him about how I hoped he would not bite off any more bottle caps. I didn't see him much after that but I hope his teeth are okay.
I'd love to see more programs that pair retirees with young people to tackle local problems, there is a clear trend regarding increasing lonlieness among young adults and retirement age folks.