Really? How did you spend your time?
Martial arts, strength training, social dancing (I also gave lessons occasionally), reading fiction, going out to concerts/pubs, dates with my GF, video games, watching tv shows/youtube, hacker news.
Daytime coffee dates with friends - if both don't have to work those can easily stretch to 2-3 enjoyable hours. Lot of sleeping (9 hours/day, sometimes more). Weekend hiking trips - much better if you don't have to wake up for work on Friday and Monday.
Travel would have been great, but I didn't want to overspend since I didn't have any income. If all of that got boring I would have tried to join an amateur band (used to play guitar long time ago).
I guess I'm just describing a student life without the classes, lol.
That's one big problem right there. Everyone I know works. I don't know if this is because they all have to, or because, like me, they choose to. All I know is that they all do. (Actually, that's not quite true. I know one couple who is retired. But I don't know anyone my age (mid-fifties) who doesn't work.
One thing I do is take jobs with flexible schedules, so mostly consulting gigs nowadays. If I want to take a Monday off, I just do it. But I find that if I'm out of the loop for too long, I want back in. I find it tremendously valuable to have someone counting on me to deliver something precisely so I dont spend all day watching YouTube, which I could very easily do. But when I do that, I feel useless, and I don't like feeling useless.
But that's just me, I guess.
One other thing that makes it work for me (no pun intended): I don't have kids. If I did, I would probably be focusing a lot more energy on them.
Damn. I read the same thing from a lot of people on HN over the years and I'm envious.
I think I could easily and happily just not work for the rest of my life (in my 30s). I did exactly that for more than a year, living off my savings after being laid off. It was fantastic.
For six more months after that, I worked a couple of hours a week contracting, as the savings started to dry up. But I wasn't even close to wanting to work again. Maybe it would happen in 3-5 years? Who knows, but I certainly wouldn't want to do it full time. Which is where I'm back at, currently (working as a software engineer).