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Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?
131–140 of 305 posts
Re: Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?
#132A depressing reality to this question is to just look at the current crop of billionaires. None of them need money, yet many of them spend their time pursuing more. I know all of us have these quaint answers about all the noble or fulfilling things we would do, but the data doesn't seem to support that.
I mean, I think it is a different scenario. The kind of person who makes a billion dollars has something going on in their brain that makes them want to keep going. Think about it: by the point where they've made a billion dollars, they've long since passed on the opportunity to retire comfortably. They already had all the money they needed, and, faced with the chance to stop, they decided to stay in. They flew past…
Our CEO is obsessed with "engagement." He has a problem where older employees are not engaged and are retiring in droves, and the incoming employees couldn't give two shits less about the company. They keep begging retirees to return.
I think this is microcosim of our wider economy. If it is, output is going to fall off a cliff, soon.
Re: Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?
#133> basically what would your ideal job be, in an ideal world?
But that's a completely different question from the one in the title. My ideal job and what I'd do if I didn't need money are two very different things.
If I didn't need money, I'd have more time to do the things I already do when I'm not "on the clock", so I'd do more of them.
> would you contribute towards making society more rational, healthy, and well-coordinated?
Yes, absolutely. I already do. But I'd also be able to spend more time expanding my knowledge and skillset, having fun, and other such stuff with no direct connection with improving the world.
Re: Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?
#134This is me. Fortunate to be able to retire at 55, programming my whole life, I love my career even when particular jobs had their issues. So now I work on projects I want to work on, no commute, no 20-person meetings. I'm currently working with a team that's recreating the Prodigy online service servers in Elixir. Having a blast, and I have my next project already in mind, also in Elixir or some other BEAM language.…
Tell us how you retired.
Re: Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?
#135At this point I’m kind of bored of programming and I’d probably leave if it didn’t pay so well. If I had enough money I’d probably take up sewing full time and make furry cosplay stuff. Seems much more rewarding than building corporate tech junk.
I'm bored too. I got into programming young so I'm only about 15 years into my career and it's been my hobby for 25 years.
Not only will I never learn everything about software, but I hit the point of negative returns a while ago. Every hour I spend on the computer is an hour I'm not spending on myself or my friends or on making new friends
I just want to travel, exercise, practice non-monogamy, do stuff like that I didn't do as a teenager because I was busy programming. The computer will be there when I'm done.
Re: Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?
#136I would (I will?) become a politician. We gotta have a few honest ones after all.
Re: Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?
#137I would work on a Computer Algebra System. Maybe one day, who is to say. That being said I'm pretty close to my dream job
That one can definitely be a hobby in the meantime.
Re: Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?
#138I would devote my time to building high quality, durable, and energy efficient 3bd 2ba homes in the rural areas surrounding major metropolitan areas, which I would then sell at material cost. Buying my first home (mobile/manufactured) has been a combination of the best and worst thing I've ever done. The house cost nearly 3 times what my grandparents paid about ~30 years ago in the same neighborhood (on the same stre…
Good answer! It's a massive societal failure that so few people are able to own a good house these days. It's 2024, we can build microchips virtually atom-by-atom, we can have plain English conversations with our computers about almost any topic, the number of billionaires has grown 20-fold since the 1980's, but the basic human need for shelter is a problem that is getting less solved by the day. It's perverse.
Re: Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?
#139Gardening and Dog training. You can get pretty deep into gardening, it's quite a rabbit hole, when you go into hydroponics and scientific approach.
For dog training, most people have no idea how to treat their animals (lots of shitty "folk wisdom" and pseudoscience in that area), so I would be doing both them and their owners a service.
Would probably run a dog-retreat and charge enough for some beer money, but that's it.
> would you contribute towards making society more rational, healthy, and well-coordinated?
Can't really do that, unless society is willing to do so themselves. It's hard enough to change 1 person's mind on an issue, and nearly impossible to help someone who doesn't want the help.
Re: Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?
#1401. Science 2. Philosophy 3. Art I am currently factually volunteering to a project in CERN that needs full-time attention, but unfortunately I need to feed myself and my family so I work at daytime as a full-time Software(Data) Engineer. I spent whatever time I find (mostly nights) doing science. I do hope I will manage to deliver new NN method I experiment now. This has a lifelong meaning for me.
How do you "work on" philosophy? Asking because my web developer wife, who happened to have majored in art and philosophy, is currently unemployed and kinda bummed about it.
It seems like there isn't any hobbyist philosophy right? Either your in academia or reposting stoic quotes on Instagram it feels like lol