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.
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.