I prefer "gainfully unemployed" or "willfully unemployable". Those are the labels I have become comfortable with.

I've started using the term "Mitt Romney unemployed" for "not working but no pressing need to", as a reference to his famous gaffe about "I know all about unemployment! Heck, I'm unemployed, myself!"

https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2011/06/17/romney-ribbe...

Why not just stick to the classic "idle rich"?

It’s for when the person isn’t necessarily idle. I mean, in the namesake example, running for President is, like, the opposite of idle. It’s just not generating wage/salary income.

Edit: and even if “idle” in that sense is assumed to mean the previous sentence, that’s still counterintuitive and misleading.

That's a good alternative!

Personally, I don't even go there. By all measures, I haven't been "employed" since the late 90s (when I was briefly an employee of an investment bank for a summer internship). I've run my own businesses, helped others build theirs, worked as a consultant, and done nothing at various times for the past 20 years.

Rather than describe my state of being as "employed" vs "unemployed", I always break it into "working on a project for someone else" vs. "working on my own project" (and sometimes both, and sometimes neither.) Some of those projects generate money. Some of them don't.

It's taken some time, but people get it! I just refuse to play the game :)

What are your thoughts on simply “self-employed”?

The German word for "self-employed" is "selbstständig", which can also mean "independent". That would be the perfect word for describing nih's situation.

I think that's probably the best to explain to others. Easy answer, truthful, and fits into the mold that many people think about.

I had a friend once refer to it as “funemployed”. I loved the term, though I still prefer to refer to intentional and willful breaks from employment as sabbaticals.

Interesting that your alternative to the socially acceptable work status, is a socially acceptable non-work status that still implies you're doing something.

It's that underlying implication that you must always be striving for something, even meditation is in service to being a better self, vacations aren't fun, they're recharging the batteries / destressing, all of the implied 'be working toward something or you're worthless' assumptions that just frustrate me even more.

The term is interesting. In some circles it seems to have a message of "yes the economy sucks but I'm not worried about being unemployed because I'm in a stable enough situation for some amount of runway/indefinitely, so please don't stress yourself by worrying about me."

It's a privileged term to use in some ways because of the so very many in dire financial situations right now. But among friends or family or certain situations, it has its uses.

Sabbatical implies you are working on something else though, so seems to me quite different than "funemployed".

I didn't realize there was that connotation.

If that is the case, funemployed would be the more appropriate term.

To me sabbatical meant, taking time off to focus on oneself or ones own pursuits, however I didn't realize there was a work or growth related connotation to the word.

Sabbatical is often still associated with universities where students or professors take time off from their regular duties to pursue some other activity in a remote region. This is typically, but not always, associated with their normal duties, such as a biologist that lives in the rain forest for a year to conduct research. This made more sense in the past, when travel was long and expensive.

It can mean just an extended break from work, but the connotation to most is that the break is used to engage in another project that your day job constrains in some way. It also implies that you will return to your previous duties afterwards.

The trend is to call a temporary leave of absence from your job to do whatever a "career break."

Does it? I always thought of it as a burnout recovery (sometimes paid) with guaranteed reinstatement.

It does in my experience.

This may be biased by my academic background where a sabbatical year is typically one where you would have no teaching duties so were free to travel to another university to work with a new group, explore a new field, finish a manuscript, etc. Expectation is that you are working, but not your routine work.

I've heard it used similarly outside academic contexts and when it was not something you were contractually guaranteed - e.g. "I took a year off my job to finish my book" , but never in the sense of "I took a year off my job to go surfing".

So i guess I think of it as a formalized break from your work routine where you do something else productive with the expectation of going back to that work afterwards.

Of course "productive" here is a bit slippery.