Forgotten Employee (2002)
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Forgotten Employee (2002)
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Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)
#2Love this story. So nostalgic.
Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)
#3I read it a while back. The story is probably fiction, but I have no trouble believing there must be shitload of people who must have worked an arrangement like that for themselves—taking paychecks without work. What surprises me is that almost always these people don't use their free time to do something productive—like picking up a hobby or up-skilling, they squander most of it. Ex: a programmer who outsourced his job to China and used his free time to watch cat videos and Reddit[1].
I am not deriding that choice, just that it's a curious thing. We all blame our day jobs for eating most of our time. But when we do get total freedom, we hardly remain as productive as we imagined ourselves to be. I thought I was different. But no! Recently, I took a career-break and I thought I would use the newfound free time to learn all the things I was putting on the back-burner. Instead, I found myself to be dramatically less productive compared to when I was working. Lacking objective, or structure in the day, I found myself playing video games or surfing web pretty much all day.
I realized maybe 9-5 isn't as bad as it sounds and early retirement isn't as good.
Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)
#4I read it a while back. The story is probably fiction, but I have no trouble believing there must be shitload of people who must have worked an arrangement like that for themselves—taking paychecks without work. What surprises me is that almost always these people don't use their free time to do something productive—like picking up a hobby or up-skilling, they squander most of it. Ex: a programmer who outsourced his…
I noticed the same thing in myself. Free time, especially a long block of it can just be wasted. Sometimes that’s a sort of necessary mental reset but it made me think about what I’d do when i retired.
I came to the conclusion, like you, that structure is good. Without structure it’s really hard to get started on things or feel a sense of progress.
Now if i take a long break i treat it like i used to back in college days. I have a schedule, high level goals and daily to-do lists. Those lists have productive things as well as free time or gaps of a fixed length to fill with whatever i want.
Sounds hellish when i write it out but without it I’m all about cat videos and noodling around on my guitar. Suddenly a month has passed.
Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)
#5Reads like a Chuck Palahniuk novel
Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)
#6I read it a while back. The story is probably fiction, but I have no trouble believing there must be shitload of people who must have worked an arrangement like that for themselves—taking paychecks without work. What surprises me is that almost always these people don't use their free time to do something productive—like picking up a hobby or up-skilling, they squander most of it. Ex: a programmer who outsourced his…
"The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be the ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument. Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning. Your choices outweigh your substance." - The CryptoNaturalist
We think ourselves as a stone monument "I'm productive" "I'm this or that", but the truth is what we do daily defines who we are, without the forcing procedure of work we lose our daily rituals and just become something else. People see this at retirement as well when they lose the structure of a regular job and need to manage their own time.
You are what you eat, and you are what you do regularly.
Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)
#7I read it a while back. The story is probably fiction, but I have no trouble believing there must be shitload of people who must have worked an arrangement like that for themselves—taking paychecks without work. What surprises me is that almost always these people don't use their free time to do something productive—like picking up a hobby or up-skilling, they squander most of it. Ex: a programmer who outsourced his…
I'm curious: how long were your breaks? I've had two rather long (>6 months) breaks in my career, and I've enjoyed them immensely and have been very productive: finished personal projects, made music, YouTube videos, learned new skills.
However, both times it took at least a couple months of passive life before I could do anything productive at all: I just slept, cooked, read, played video games, and scrolled Reddit. Almost as if I had to first flush out all the accumulated stress and get rid of the "muscle memory" around work.
Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)
#8I read it a while back. The story is probably fiction, but I have no trouble believing there must be shitload of people who must have worked an arrangement like that for themselves—taking paychecks without work. What surprises me is that almost always these people don't use their free time to do something productive—like picking up a hobby or up-skilling, they squander most of it. Ex: a programmer who outsourced his…
I wonder how much of it is because people start out wanting to not do anything too big because they feel like they could be confronted about it at any second and that just becomes the norm. Random screwing around is easier to justify as a temporary thing you were caught in than some other activities. If you had a work area and it's been turned into a study area for your BAR exam prep with books and papers spread all around, that's a bit harder to explain away as them just coming at a bad time than you watching cat videos would be.
Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)
#9I read it a while back. The story is probably fiction, but I have no trouble believing there must be shitload of people who must have worked an arrangement like that for themselves—taking paychecks without work. What surprises me is that almost always these people don't use their free time to do something productive—like picking up a hobby or up-skilling, they squander most of it. Ex: a programmer who outsourced his…
In the dot-com heyday my team had nothing to do. A manager explained that they had hired extra developers “just in case they needed them later”.
I couldn’t take the boredom and quit to do a round the world backpacking trip.
My co-worker stayed and wrote a novel. It was a perfect setup: he got payed to come in and sit at the computer all day typing, and always looked busy. I think he played his hand well.
Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)
#10I remember reading this for the first time in like... 2005? I think.
It was as good then as it now.