by milkcircle on 7/13/21, 2:03 PM with 421 comments
by zoba on 7/13/21, 3:27 PM
My biggest insight has been a mindset change. Previously my underlying approach to life looked like: "I will do X which will enable me to do Y so that I can finally do Z." I now approach my days with "What will make me happy?" This is an experiment I'm performing. A structured life feels safe and orderly - but what if living life and letting things unfold more 'organically' is better?
It is a weird/uncomfortable shift because I can't predict what is coming. As an example, turns out I really enjoy building dams. A couple months ago I would not have been able to tell you that I'd be building a dam.
I have no idea what it is that drives my own interests or affinities, but now instead of attempting to manipulate them for whatever X, Y, or Z goal... I just roll with wherever they take me. And they always seem ready to take me somewhere.
My point is: In a life without work (in my experience) stuff will come up. Follow what arises, see where it goes. It certainly feels better.
by kevinwang on 7/13/21, 2:20 PM
by PragmaticPulp on 7/13/21, 2:13 PM
It’s actually a common failure point of FIRE post-mittens that didn’t work out. Especially with couples, where it’s more likely that at least one person will realize that maybe jobs, and the sense of purpose and social life that comes with them, aren’t so bad.
The other big issue is that people underestimate their spending in a post-work FIRE lifestyle. It’s tempting to subtract out costs like commuting and work clothes and assume your costs will go down. In practice, if you plan on traveling and spending more time on hobbies your costs are likely to go up.
by SavantIdiot on 7/13/21, 3:03 PM
Some of us are just naturally full of panic, others can jump into the mist and be OK with that.
EDIT: Added this scene from Indiana Jones (#3) that has stuck with me my whole life (and I'm an athiest!):
by giantg2 on 7/13/21, 3:12 PM
Finding passions outside of work and approaching ideas as a child would is the simplest way to phrase the solution. As a child everything is new and exciting, it's easy to entertain yourself (quite cheaply too), there is less aversion to doing new things than someone who has spent decades being conditioned via a familiar and habitual routine.
by vessenes on 7/13/21, 2:59 PM
One thing I think the FIRE folks can miss is the sense of worth, improvement in personal power and confidence that comes from struggling. Struggling could be making things, building a business, learning job skills, writing a novel, whatever. However, 5 years of just 'I checked my investments, I'm in within 1% of nominal, I guess I should feel no stress right now!' shouldn't be the end; many people interested in this lifestyle seem to feel like they have arrived when they can do that. As a launch point, it has its benefits. But to my mind, it shouldn't ever be thought of as a goal in itself.
I read the follow up post as a sort of tacit admission that the FIRE lifestyle can lead to this huge gap in personal development, and often during really key years for relationship and brain development, 30s and 40s are super prime years for learning and applying learning. It seems like a terrible waste to spend it sitting on one's metaphorical porch, sipping tea.
by BayAreaEscapee on 7/13/21, 5:39 PM
One of the things that I didn't expect (but that this article and some other sources hint at) is that I would fall into a trap of consuming a lot of alcohol. I recognized my problem and dealt with it. Now almost every day is alcohol-free, and I only drink when with other people who are also drinking. (For anyone struggling with a drinking problem, I urge you to try something called the Sinclair Method, which involves taking naltrexone or nalmefene. [1][2])
I don't really have much of a fixed address and spend 95% of my time abroad. I usually like to stay in a place for several months or more at a time. This sometimes involves long-term visas. Throwing money at immigration attorneys will solve a lot of those kinds of problems. Many countries have visa programs for self-employed or self-sufficient people. If not, you can always enroll in a language program and get a student visa to study the language of your host country.
I also spend several months a year just traveling around to new places and visiting old friends.
I enjoy my life. Sometimes at moments I miss my job in Silicon Valley. Then I realize how much grief and pressure it was, and I'm thankful for the life I have.
At this article's author states: you have to know what you are going to fill your life with once you leave the working world. If you don't fill it with something positive, negative things will fill in.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Cure-Alcoholism-Medically-Eliminate-A... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EghiY_s2ts
by zamfi on 7/13/21, 7:06 PM
1) People derive a lot of meaning from their interactions with other people.
2) For most people (at least, most people reading blogs like this) today, that meaning comes from employment, from the exchange of time for money in the service of others.
But pre-television, and in many parts of the world still today, people gather socially for many reasons other than the strict definition of work above.
The rat in the race doesn't know what to do when the race is over, because all the other rats are still in the race, and he's never been outside before.
The list in this post is about how to make the outside world look like the race you just left: Do things! Find people to do them with! Get out of your comfort zone!
These are mechanisms for people without strong social and community ties to fill their time.
I would encourage anyone in this situation to consider what aspects of their prior race-like lives they would like to lose first, and to find communities they would like to belong to. Some of those many be activity-oriented, and there's nothing wrong with that, but they don't have to be interesting activities.
by ModernMech on 7/13/21, 2:57 PM
work - noun - activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.
The flip side to this is, as a society, we should probably start paying for all the unpaid societal work people do for free. IMO this is the best argument for something like UBI.
by locallost on 7/13/21, 4:51 PM
But anyway, an interesting thing happened. I am in talks to buy a small cheap piece of land that needs a lot of work. And suddenly I had all these ideas of what I could do there once I clean it up. Not only gardening again, but hobbies, learning new things etc. Basically all the things I want to do now, of which I just occasionally get to some of them, but am otherwise to drained to really get to it. So it's not about not working, it's not about not doing anything, I think I would die if it was like that. It's about doing something meaningful or at least something I don't feel is 60% BS.
by kebman on 7/13/21, 3:10 PM
How many of you really have a problem answering that? Am I the only lucky one who's got a gazillion projects I want to finish all at once???
by mwidell on 7/13/21, 2:31 PM
by nabbed on 7/13/21, 4:51 PM
What I really learned is that my digestion problems and benign heart rhythm issues got a lot better during this period. I also just enjoyed parking my car in various locations within 20-40 minutes of my home and just reading, or studying, or listening to music.
by kaycebasques on 7/13/21, 3:45 PM
> Let’s talk a bit about the idea of loss. Having a sense of loss is not restricted to things that you like or love.
I don't feel that much yet, but intuitively I see how it might creep up in the coming months.
> When most people ask you what you’re going to do with your free time, they typically see you sitting at home, alone, in an empty space.
Personally, I absolutely do not have that problem and is probably why I knew I could take the leap. There is SO much that I want to do and work on, I don't even think a year is enough time.
> folks who cruise into post-employment life with a firm vision of how things are going to look tend to do better.
One thing that's helping me a lot is that I pick a focus for each week. Last week I worked on my grandpa's autobiography (he told me stories and I turned it into a coherent chronological text and I'm now in the process of making a website out of all the stories, supplemented with historical photos). One week is a decent amount of time to make progress and then by the end of the week I start to get bored and get to transition to something else which keeps it exciting and fun. I also lined up a long list of goals before the sabbatical started.
> My favorite method was created by Ernie Zelinski, author of several early-retirement lifestyle books.
I'm not seeing anything on this author. Does anyone have a link to his most popular work?
> We sort of know what we want to do, but when given a full day with no obligations, it’s common for us to fritter hours away.
So far, this is not as much of a problem for me as I expected. It's not hard to focus on things that are interesting to me. I'm actually more aware of wasteful habits (Instagram, HN) because I know that I only have a year to really do all this sabbatical stuff.
by clipradiowallet on 7/13/21, 2:14 PM
by danbruc on 7/13/21, 5:08 PM
by ChrisMarshallNY on 7/13/21, 4:54 PM
That's me. I'm working for free, and happier n' a pig in poop.
by michalf6 on 7/13/21, 3:20 PM
by mgh2 on 7/14/21, 2:34 AM
Work, if executed correctly, has a purpose: personal development. It is hard to fulfill this endeavor by spending your most productive years in retirement.
The "freedom" and "F the man" movements (crypto, 4HWW, FIRE, MLM, Kiyosaki, etc.) are all missing this essential ingredient of the human experience.
by Vixel on 7/13/21, 5:00 PM
by hsnewman on 7/13/21, 4:26 PM
by chrisweekly on 7/13/21, 5:39 PM
> "Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) Definition
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/financial-independence-...
Followers of FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) plan to retire before the traditional retirement age of 65 by dedicating up to 70% of income to savings while still in the workforce."
by heurist on 7/13/21, 4:48 PM
by xor99 on 7/13/21, 3:31 PM
by dqpb on 7/13/21, 6:14 PM
by madmaniak on 7/13/21, 2:45 PM
by silexia on 7/15/21, 5:16 PM
by dade_ on 7/13/21, 4:39 PM
by fallingfrog on 7/13/21, 3:08 PM
by LesZedCB on 7/13/21, 7:39 PM
by agumonkey on 7/13/21, 3:51 PM
It's always a blend of:
- bad or absent hierarchy: bosses that never come down, that have no idea what's going on or the way things are done, that mostly only talk to you to send back more stats (on paper, with stick marks, no one will setup a shared spreadsheet to at least avoid pencil accounting every week)
- absurd lack of material support (you need a table god damn wood tablet extension for your desk... hell no, it's 2020, come back when alien technology landed on earth) no-one hired to fix stuff, even in large offices, absurd stuff breaks, people only complain
- incredibly bad division of labour: no training (people struggle with every tool interaction), no notion of efficiency (let's rewrite everything on another post it or file, with new doc IDs), desk/office structure is obsolete to the bone, the amount of paper flying between rooms is astonishing. imagine doing databases by moving db rows to another computer and waiting to reintegrate it back when (if) it comes back. For that reason only I do more to avoid justice problems because I don't want my life hanging in the hands of a bored-out secretary that forgot who took my file to where.
- causing as bad human interactions: people don't understand shit, they walk on eggs, nothing has value to them, everyone is slightly adversary and will reject blame at the slighest possibility of an issue. Of course one can end up in a good-minded team where people are chill and communicate nicely and work together .. but it seems a low prob event.
coming from computing, I cannot help but to see things as processing steps.. and the amount of work in most jobs is minuscule now that everything is digital. Computers / clusters are mostly waiting for sad humans to press the button. I kinda ballparked that my last company (retail store) entire operation could fit on a single machine (granted people stopped duplicating excel files with bad content causing them to all be over 3MB for instance) and a few programs (in terms of computation there was nothing going on, a few figures updated here and there, gameboy level arithmetics.
when the world is gonna shift to humanless operations it's gonna be a cold day
[0] not talking about ping pong tables and cloud shape cushions, more like having good ergonomics, good interactions with coworkers, and more importantly good understanding of the process and value of what you're doing.
ps: I said "two jobs" because, at least for minds like mine, food production (or similar very linear, production-chain like ops) felt like a job. You had to prep 100 tunafish sandwhich, someone showed you the right way to perform, it was clean and fast, then you sell, then you clean. It's almost lubricated.. you sweat but there's no drag, no confusion, no hidden state.. very zen in a way.
by k__ on 7/13/21, 3:57 PM
So much, in fact, that I couldn't imagine going back to work ever again.
I couldn't imagine living polyamorous with more than two partners when working 40h a week. Let alone having some hobbies on the side...
by PicassoCTs on 7/13/21, 4:35 PM
No more throw-away decoration bought at ikea. No more physical products like books, any stone with a small piece of cloth, could be a book.
No more displays of status by buying advertised products - instead, status is what you create, growing out of your footsteps as you walk down a public street.
If all those products fade to grey, lots of work will become unneeded. And we are almost there.
by double0jimb0 on 7/13/21, 3:52 PM
The felt sense of Agency is VERY different between a) still making some income, feeling like your hand is still somewhat on the wheel and b) sitting in the back seat, with nothing to do but continually recalculating if / how long your nest egg will last (this quickly turns pathological)
I believe the slow build up of stress in B) is unmitigable (probably goes against our species’ DNA). Doubly so if you’ve attached lots of self-worth to making B) happen.
And if the author reads this comment: you need to get over yourself if you want to become a ‘writer’, I don’t know if there is an equivalent term for aspiring writers, but you are firmly in the equivalent “wantreprenuer” category. Be bold, fail, then learn, then fail some more. Don’t surround yourself with other wantreprenuers and blame them. Suck it up buttercup.