If you spend some years just chilling and and are actually happy, then sure, why not. But there are so many retired people who do nothing, and are not happy.
For example, my mother, my mother and father in law, my other father in law, my grandmother - all retired, and all do absolutely nothing but watch TV and moan about other people all day. And they are all very obviously not happy, yet suggestions for things to do or get involved in always fall in deaf ears - they'd apparently rather sit and do nothing until they die.
I really, really don't get it.
When you spend all that time disciplining yourself to work (against your own will) and having little time to develop your own interests, you become hard wired to do what is necessary.
When that necessity ceases to exist you no longer have the machinery to move yourself. A career and kids and church and a house and big yard to maintain can leave nothing left of you. It can erase your very identity as your brain is rewritten to subdue the self and pursue work, chores and favors over all else.
That's just my hypothesis anyway.
Being compulsively tied to income generating work, and then all of a sudden being cut off from that seems like a surefire path towards unhappiness, since someone who has done that their whole life likely hasn't explored the mental space of what else they could be doing with their life.
On the other hand, being totally free from any restraints seems like it could be an almost worse curse. No pressure to complete any projects, to help anybody, to do something useful for the world. That also wires your brain in a particular fashion, and could be it's own version of hell. Perhaps this is sour grapes though :)
I'd like only to add that, what many artists (and in general people who pursue their artistic passions) had, compared to the agerage workin-joe, is TIME.
The only way to understand your passions is by having time to observe your world, to reflect on people's actions, to contemplate nature. If you have to work (because you're the bread-winner and have 2 children already and an house to pay), your only glimmer of hope is to have already found your passion during your younger years.
Finally, your energy levels going on are never gonna be your current ones. Keep that in mind.
And I say that as a man who had a fair number of interests, never had time to really pursue them, and now has to to a work I hate and have no remaining passion at all.
If you are reading this do yourself a favor and take your body’s health seriously right now before it’s too late. Exercise every day, get that 30 pounds of fat you jokingly call your dad bod off before it’s too late, go to the doctor and fucking do what they say instead of nodding and convincing yourself you know better and don’t really need to do that. Oh and brush and floss your damn teeth. The above story doesn’t have to be your story but if you sit at your computer all day everyday and don’t take care of yourself it very much can become your story.
Which is the rub. Passionate people will be busy, all the time. Without it.. well, i can't even envision how to live.
I think parents need to help their children find hobbies. Find passions. Develop passions. You don't _have_ to be excellent at piano or whatever. I don't care what it is, be it games, wood working, farming, etc - but i feel like it is essential to the human experience.
But.. i've got an isolated view. So.. YMMV.
Most people have an idea of what they would ideally do if given unlimited amounts of time. The reality is, in my experience, that most people cannot put the same level of work, focus, and dedication into their own projects that they can into the projects an employer pays them to work on.
For whatever reason, most people need the structure, constraint, judgment, or whatever that an external authority imposes on them. Having the skill and motivation is not enough to bring your highest work to your own purposes. There is a second discipline that involves self-accountability, which runs orthogonal to capacity for the work.
This is exactly why I'm pursuing leanFIRE. Even if I hit the jackpot, I would still be toodling on personal software projects for the rest of my life. Not saying I'm any Michelangelo, but I would have to be trained not to write software. I'm just aiming to set my own priorities instead of working on things I'm not passionate about because I simply need the money.
I keep wondering if I shouldn't quit the day job and start a software shop, but even that sounds an awful lot like work where you trade one relentless taskmaster for another. I sure as shit don't want to have to worry about market share, I just want to make cool (to me) software.
Their dream was to sit around, do nothing, and judge other people. And they have achieved it.
Basically, we live for work and when many people retire they loose the thing to live for and die. It's sad.
Long ago I learned to not live to work. I work but I have so much more to life... retirement is just a point in time where I don't need to earn income to live any longer and I can have more choice in what I do.
Plenty of depressed people will tell you about friends being frustrated at them "not snapping out of it".
It's all explained by one simple fact: the average IQ is 100. In today's society, how many activities are there for 100 IQ people to engage in?
Are there animals to take care of? Is there land? Is there community to partake in? Are there things that need to be done by 100 IQ people?
When you build society optimizing for young people to work 8 hour days or giant factories and supply chains doing everything else, what is there for somebody at 65 to do but watch tv and wait until they die?
Young people barely even have children anymore and when they do, chances are their parents are still working, so by the time they retire, the children are 5-10 years old and playing on their own.
It's easy to blame the individuals for not joining a knitting club or whatever, but people are not built to do pointless activities, they are built to do activities that have purpose and those are not available in modern society unless you have high IQ or a talent in a specific domain.
Also one last point: moaning about other people is what people have always done, especially when you're older and you're almost certainly experiencing chronic pain of some sort. Younger people moan just as much, they just have youth and belief that things will be looking up on their side - old people have neither.
I think 100 IQ people are more capable than you realize - but it comes down to their attitude.
So intelligence is increasing while IQ stays the same, to be pedantic.
Chronic illnesses at any age suck as much as having aging as a chronic illness.
This is the 20-something version of being idle. Minus the travel, which isn't a given.
Being 20 doesn't mean you want to do something productive or meaningful with your life. There's plenty 20 yo that party, socialise, get drunk and never amount to anything. The reason it's just a phase is that it's not all trust fund kids and most need money (a job) to live.
I don't see why working/producing is anymore meaningful than partying / socializing. I think people can find meaning in their life in different ways.
This is what I'm talking about. It's likely much harder to do this when you retire at a normal age after having lived most of your life. But if you retire in your 30s or 40s? Or your 20s!? Good lord.
Think of all the great companies that get started and then snapped up by the big boys because the founders want to become millionaires. Imagine if there was zero pressure to take an exit when offered. I believe our world would be in a better place. I don't want to just highlight companies, but companies can scale and affect change in a way that just volunteering or simple philanthropy cannot in our society.
That's why I think so called "Lean FIRE" is such a bad trap. You're giving yourself very little margin to explore new purposes and passions. It's a much bigger bet that you're going to be satisfied watching TV and going for day trips to Niagara Falls the rest of your life.
Define "of note"
In my experience most retired people do productive things until their bodies confine them to home or an assisted living.
Most retired people I know of keep doing the things they were doing as hobbies before. Gardening, teaching kids piano, racing cars, etc. Most retired people I know are more active on the things they love in retirement. Sure they're not doing Elon Musk things but they don't have that budget either.
This is exactly why I think FIRE is a great thought exercise even if you don't actually care to do it. Given enough money to live for the rest of your life without the need for a job, what would you do with your time?
I’m 37, nearly five years out of the game, and I’m busy, every single day. My time is fully absorbed in building up a homestead, and my list of projects is many, many years long yet, and as diverse as shredded encyclopaedia.
I can’t see myself running out of things to do before I myself run out. I occasionally tell people snippets of what I’m up to here or on Twitter, and people ask if I have a YouTube or a blog. I don’t have time. Or inclination, to be honest. I do this for me.
> It seems like such a nihilistic way to live. You're just floating along the stream of life. Things worked out for you, but you have no further passion or inclination to improve the world? No problems you could set yourself to solving?
You seem to assume or take for granted that releasing music for an external purpose, improving the world, solving problems, etc have inherent value. I would 100% disagree with that. I don't think there's any greater objective value to raising orphans than there is to playing video games for the rest of your life. If somebody wants to make music and never release it, then they should have the freedom to do so. Your comment is on par with criticizing people for living meaninglessly just for not having children, when not everybody values or enjoys having children.
> complete leisure time 100% of the time or picking up arbitrary hobbies.
I'm at the opposite end: I'm surprised how many people care about solving problems or things like that. I couldn't care less. If I were to win the lottery or something, I'd immediately erase my identity and go live in a castle/farm in a forest somewhere, making music I'll never release etc until I die, etc
I agree with you that if your bills are paid and you're harming no one, then you have no moral obligation to do anything more than sit on your butt and play videogames. It's your life.
At the same time, humans are a social species. We have evolved brains and intrinsic motivation reward systems that only give us the real deep kinds of life-satisfaction emotions if we are putting real effort into something that we find to be meaningful in ways that help our perceived family or tribe.
There are of course outliers who can spend indefinite days just binge-watching TV happy as a clam. But most of us are wired like border collies. If we don't have a herd to take care of some real reason to get out of bed in the morning, we go crazy.
> There are of course outliers who can spend indefinite days just binge-watching TV happy as a clam. But most of us are wired like border collies. If we don't have a herd to take care of some real reason to get out of bed in the morning, we go crazy.
I don't think these are outliers, I think these are a surprising majority. It's the classic bread and circuses or Soma concept: as long as people are fed a steady supply of moderate entertainment and material enjoyment, they are content to idle. And I would go further and say that you somewhat contradict your earlier position, which to me came across as being interested in solving problems and improving the world, not just your family/tribe.
I would also point out that binge-watching TV is different from creating music, never to produce it. Kafka created amazing works that he specifically wanted destroyed. So from my perspective it's unclear if you look down on anything that isn't sacrifice for someone else's gain (external reward), created for sharing with others (external reward), or engaging with others (external reward). I'm not sure where you get your data that most humans are like border collies, but at least based on your comments it seems like you really value socially-based activities, so you may be overlooking the many others who don't need social interaction or external reward/response to find meaning and fulfillment.
This is a typical cynical take, but not borne out by reality at all. Yes, people enjoy leisure, but look at how they really live and you'll observe that they enjoy it in the context of a larger meaningful framework. While there are many bullshit jobs, most people still work surprisingly hard at them in large part because they have at least some coworkers they care about and want to support. Even the most jaded employee does so to earn a paycheck that most use to take care of their families and loved ones.
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2mS3uDqQL4
You're right that given the opportunity, many people will just idle and consume media. But if you notice, most of them aren't actually enjoying it much. It's a way to survive, but not to thrive.
> And I would go further and say that you somewhat contradict your earlier position, which to me came across as being interested in solving problems and improving the world, not just your family/tribe.
I said "perceived tribe", which for some includes the entire world.
> it's unclear if you look down on anything
Again, I'm making no moral claims. I'm not looking up or down at anyone. I'm just saying that if you observe humans as a species it is clear that most of them need meaningful social connections and effortful tasks that support those connections in order to thrive.
Imagine you were an alien species building a human zoo. If you gave each person their own cell with unlimited videogames and movies, they would wither and die. Give them community and something meaningful to struggle for to benefit that community and they won't even know they're in a zoo.
> so you may be overlooking the many others who don't need social interaction or external reward/response to find meaning and fulfillment.
I am fairly introverted and as a software engineer, I obviously know lots and lots of other introverts. I many think the emotional experience of introverts in today's society is "I want more solitude". But that doesn't mean their optimal state is hermitage. (True hermits are vanishingly rare in the human species, less common than many severe mental illnesses.) That emotional response needs to be understood in the context of their lives.
Everyone needs solitude to process their experiences, autonomous time to feel that they are the agents of their life, and time away from the draining experience of being surrounded by people we think of as "others" and need to raise some level of defenses of wear masks around.
If you live in an urban area as a lowly employee of a giant corporation and spend all your down time consuming media instead of actually just sitting with your thoughts, then you get little of those. But that doesn't mean most people want an unbounded quantity of solitude anymore that wearing a cast for the rest of your life is somehow healthier than taking it off once the bone has knitted.
What we need is balance, and while everyone has a different prefered quantity of solitude, there are very very few whose ideal is "no social interaction at all".
aside from the farm likely taking up all my time (for however long i'm able to sustain that), pursue all my interests: exercise, language, reading, writing, watching movies/tv, taking photos, making films, lifting weights, kayaking, hiking, rock climbing, cooking/baking, biking, playing video games, drawing, spending time with loved ones, studying, the list is endless.
And I say this as someone who has made a major career change during their life.
When I think of opening a bar/restaurant, I'm actually just hoping for more quality time with friends.
When I think of opening a bookstore, I'm actually just hoping for more time to focus on reading.
When I think of becoming a cook, I'm actually just hoping for more passion and drive in the thing I make professionally.
I like the little bookstore near me. They play classical music during the day and the lady who runs it seems nice. I'd like to work there for a while and see what that is like.
Carpentry (or being a cook which would also be on my list) is about doing something with my hands professionally. Can I make my living by creating something with my hands? What would that feel like? I know I can make a living using my voice. I know I can make a living with my fingers on a keyboard.
What would it look like to make a living building something physical? For me it's more about things that seem like they would be interesting life experiences.
This discussion point reminds me of a Sir Ken Robinson talk (not sure which one, but he has many). After a friend's musical performance on stage, he comments to his friend that he'd love to do what he's doing, being on stage, playing guitar. His friend quickly remarks that no, he actually wouldn't. If he really wanted to be a musician, he would've done it by now. He would've put in the work and toil to get there. Instead, he just likes the idea of being able to perform at a high level in front of other people.
I think so many of our fantasies are like that. We think of the end result and want that, but don't think about all the work needed to get there and whether we're up for that.
But it would be interesting to try. I was a life guard in college. I am probably the worst lifeguard of all time but it was fun for a summer. Same with being a basketball referee. I don't really know the rules well enough to officiate a game. But it was a fun job for a year.
It's things like that which I was able to afford to do in college or early adulthood that seem like they are not possible now. Not without significant financial sacrifice and a large detour of a career in motion.
The reason people want to open a bar when they work in IT or whatever, is because most people don't want to do the same shit over and over again for 40 years.
That's just human nature, we are not robots, but society has been structured to commodify us and make us predictable producers of 'moar money' for people who already have money :)
It's called wage slavery for a reason, and no, a slave doesn't simply want more friend time or whatever, humans want to be free.
This is just antidotal evidence of seeing my partners dad say yeah fuck that job after 6 months.
Everyone gets old. How can we not want a society that would take care of them, including some form of worthwhile employment?
It is an inherently selfish setup as one day you too will be old.
Edit: trying to clarify my thoughts/point.
But that doesn't mean they are all useless and should be in an old folks home.
To more directly answer your question.
Old people don't have to take care of even older people. I mean the whole point is to NOT cut them off from the rest of society.
It needs a social component and simplicity. However, simpler tasks are often more easily automated and people generally avoid social interaction it seems.
I get the feeling that people would rather a hot coffee vending machine than talking to ol' Carol or Bob at the mom & pop cafe.
Some random ideas: - Working the coffee shop on the ground floor of the corporate building. - corporate internal mail - storytime Reader at the local library - non-profit business pushbike/skateboard/scooter store - campus bus service
I rather doubt that you would choose Elon's life either -- especially if you were in his financial position.
(Happy to stand corrected, since I don't know you.)
He plays up the uberworker shtick for the same reason Warren Buffet in his 80s tells everyone he has a coke and Dairy Queen everyday: because it’s part of his brand and very conducive to moving forward his pursuits. Warren buffet definitely doesn’t have coke and Dairy Queen everyday either.
Elon’s days of working to the bone everyday are likely long behind him, by decades.
I understand your point about "waste of his position" and that he could have a more balanced life, but as the books depicts him that's not the case. Nor it was when he was at PayPal or Zip2.
Good (audio) book, btw. I would recommend.
And why should they? I'm no fan of trust fund babies who coast by on life, but really, why does anyone have to justify their lives by doing something to improve the world? What are you and I accomplishing right now?
Maybe it's just the severe burnout talking, but I for one would love to just stop everything and exist for a while with no tangible goals or requirements of me. Besides that, what good is a person who did the leanFIRE thing really supposed to do? The whole idea is to live cheaply, they don't have a lot of money to invest in making the world better. They have all the time in the world, sure, but if you're putting 40+ hours into "making the world better" (Whatever that means to you) then are you really retired? Or are you just doing the same thing as everyone else but living a much more meager life for the sake of it.
There have been a few replies in this vein, and I see where you're coming from based on the way I phrased what I was saying.
I'm not arguing that anybody should be forced by some external entity to do anything. I am advocating for a person in this situation to attempt to cultivate a passion/greater purpose because I believe it's something we need to be fulfilled. The man in this article designed a life for himself that was free from labor, but ultimately unfulfilling in many ways.
And if you need to find that passion, looking to improve society in some way is a great place to start. I can think of a few things in that vein that I would consider focusing on if I was in such a situation, and none of them are as far reaching as "make humanity multi-planetary."
By the way, "making the world better" doesn't need to be large or expensive, at least in my opinion: If I talk to the lone, probably widowed neighbour on my way home, I count that as "making the world better".
I think at the end of the day, it's really about finding meaning in your own existence, and such a large part of that for a lot of us is feeling like we are giving back to society or helping our fellow humans somehow. I think this is where I can see the author's goal of just writing being hollow. He writes about his fears that maybe his writing won't ever be discovered. It makes me wonder if he's writing because he enjoys the craft or he wants the status of being known as a writer.
If he really enjoyed the craft, maybe he would've enjoyed writing more. The status thing would be nice, but maybe he would enjoy having other people read his stories and connecting with them. That could've been something to keep him going and give him some short-term goals, direction, and connection with other people.
I figure that by definition, not everyone can be the 0.1% world changing person. Founder of Google/FB/Ikea or a Nobel Prize winner.
I want to leave the world better than when I came into it. It doesn't have to be gobsmackingly better, just fractionally better is fine. I try to apply this day by day.
Nope! I know who I am and what I’m capable of.
If I could, I would do literally nothing besides wake up, go to the gym, go to the coffee shop, read, watch TV, and surf the internet until I die. I know this because I took several years off and did exactly this until I ran out of money.
Best years of my life and it’s not even close.
There's also tons of subreddits like r/WritingPrompts to practice or r/NoSleep to post short horror fiction. There are huge audiences on both of those. A post from NoSleep is getting made into a Steven Speilberg movie: https://variety.com/2019/film/news/spire-in-the-woods-steven...
RoyalRoad is huge though. Here's the top story from it: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/21220/mother-of-learning authors usually get a following on RoyalRoad and then they can start a Patreon where people who donate get early chapters. Other authors go the Kindle Unlimited route where they self publish their novel on Kindle Unlimited after they've got a fanbase and plenty of people make a decent living from it.
This is all the modern version of how older authors got started: by submitting short stories to be published in anthology magazines. You have to love writing and be willing to do it for a long time before you pop off though. The way he was describing it didn't resemble that to me.
It seems like such a nihilistic way to live. You're just floating along the stream of life. Things worked out for you, but you have no further passion or inclination to improve the world? No problems you could set yourself to solving?
As much criticism as Elon Musk gets (he's certainly not perfect), the path he took is the only thing that makes sense to me in that position. He didn't take his wealth and begin doing angel investing in new CRUD app startups, he wanted to solve real problems humanity faces.
Not everybody has that amount of money or skill, but it's surprising to me how many people's alternative to having a day job they're forced to do is just complete leisure time 100% of the time or picking up arbitrary hobbies.
In this guy's post, like with writing, it sounds like he wasn't actually passionate about it. There are plenty of places to post serialized fiction as you write in online and get feedback (Royal Road, Substack) but it sounded like the measuring stick he was judging himself was becoming a very popular/famous author, not actually writing great stories. It seems just like a different version of the treadmill he was talking about with other people.