And then I realized there are second order effects. Double my pay actually means much more than double my savings per year as my costs are more or less fixed.

So then I changed the formula to scale with respect to the amount I am saving versus the discretionary free time. Maybe a 30% raise would actually double my savings.

And by discretionary free time I am subtracting time spent doing chores. I live very close to work and even getting a job that requires a 1 hour commute each way makes a huge difference in my discretionary free time and should be compensated accordingly.

And then I took it one step further. I decided to take an Excel sheet and map out all the discretionary free time I think I will have for the rest of my life. And then I evaluated job offers based on which one will maximize that free time. So maybe cutting short free time right now is okay if it is more than compensated by having me retire a lot earlier. Of course then you may want to factor that free time while young is perhaps worth more than free time when your body is not that healthy.

And of course you may not live long enough to retire and you do want to take that into account as well and not put all your joy off towards the end.

It's a bit of a rabbit hole.

How can you tell which jobs will give you how much free time? Besides commuting (I hope to work remotely forever), at many big companies, amount of free time greatly depends on the team you land on. Either way, there seems little insight into true work life balance of a company.

But there are things one can know such as the number of vacations you'll have.

But yeah commuting is where you have the most certainty.

Similarly, having more money hits serious diminishing returns. Watching a 500$ TV vs a 5,000$ TV doesn’t actually change much in the moment. Jump all the way to a 500,000$ home IMAX and watching a terrible movie still sucks.

1: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/27/how-research-shows-you-can-l...

I still enjoy life in the present but I do sacrifice a bit of it so I can also enjoy life when older.

If you don't want to completely sacrifice today for tomorrow you simply adjust the age related weight in the Excel sheet :-)

GF does not like it at all, but it works very well for me.

  echo $(expr '(' $(date -d 2070-01-01 +%s) - $(date +%s) + 86399 ')' / 604800) " weeks until I turn 80"

For example, I'd bet most people would be unwilling to smooth over their 40 hour workweek over the course of the full week of 7 days, working 5.7 hours a day. Of course that's nice in a way, but having no fully free days and perpetually working forever, is agonising.

In that sense you can't just compare cutting a working day to simply having more discretionary time (which you have after workdays, too). Fully free days count a bit differently.

The worker interviewed in the article said, "Also being on call can be a challenge, but it's nothing that's not fixable."

I understand that to mean that he's not truly working a 4-day week. He's working 4 days + on-call day(s) at times.

But culturally, it also encourages a lot of automation, redundancy, and conservative DevOps decisions.