Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?

Thank you! My near-term goals are to build a new home for myself and then re-purpose as much of the raw materials that make up my current manufactured home to build 'tiny homes' for each of my two children (young) on the 2 acres I currently live.

After that, who knows what life will throw my way :)

I retired in my late 30s and had kids. So I’m a full time parent as is my partner. I guess that’s my revealed choice for what my ideal job would be? Sometimes I’m not completely happy with my choice, but mostly I am.

If I had more time, or more energy, I’d program for fun more often.

I don’t especially believe in “changing the world.” Not that you can’t (though really, you can’t, to 3 sig figs) just I don’t care to.

Same old scientific research like I've been doing for over 40 years.

Back then if you wanted to do something where you actually "needed money" you might as well give up right away.

I guess it's a little bit like it is now that inflation has pushed anything like that out of reach for so many people who were closing in on leveraging those type abilities just a few years ago. Fortunately it's not as bad yet as it was in the 1970's.

There was no other option but to get more progress accomplished using less resources.

Especially monetary resources, this can be some of the hardest to come by, even well-heeled people can just sometimes be so greedy.

One cost that was skyrocketing so badly was energy, and it doesn't even move the needle if you can't get your consumption down to about 10% of what average consumers use. It's not easy and it takes years living within your means, working within your means, even when you do not have the cash flow of an average consumer, you can end up quite early not feeling at all like you need more money to make maximum progress compared to some very well-financed operations.

Of course some money is essential but it's good over the long term not to have an ongoing perceived feeling of shortage over what you don't have, that can be the more limiting factor.

I would say questions like this "Ask HN" are something that comes up often for more mainstream technical operators. So many are mainly working for a paycheck and money is always on their mind.

It's been so many decades and times of less-than-average money have not been a limitation on my rate of progress, operating within my means.

At the other end of the spectrum, for those who might be interested in energy projects that people would love, no matter how much money you have, I've got something you can't afford ;)

I’m figuring it out and I fully expect that to always be true. One thing I tried to do was be as honest with myself as possible about what was important to me. I concluded that being fit and healthy and maintaining financial independence were the most important because they are the enablers for everything else but they need balancing between each other. A lot of people work too long for more money and find themselves in a position where they are less capable mentally or physically. And some people sacrifice their health for money. You can have all the money in the world but it’s much less use to you if you’re unhealthily and unfit. After that are the things that take advantage of you health and the time financial freedom gives you. Spend more time with the people you love, particular those who are closer to not being here. Do things for other, help people out, not just financially. Carpe diem, do things while you can. Go and climb that mountain. Make the places you live beautiful places to be. Travel. Make the most of your time through being highly productive. They are the tenets I follow. Then I have a million things I want to do. I use Obsidian to record these things and what I need to do to make them happen then organise those things to create schedules for each day. So I know each day what I need to do to make progress towards the things I really want to do.

Uncharted Tiny Homes is the only one that builds small homes, but I was looking into tapping some college resources (they have competitions on sustainable container houses) and some talent there in terms of what it takes to build one out.

You can get shipping containers pretty cheap, and the trailer doesn't even have to have wheels for it to be considered not a permanent residence.

The short of building out a house is basically you cut holes in the container for all the inteface to the outside world, do insulation on the inside, facade on the outside, run all wire/plumbing stuff in cut channels in the insulation, then build out the walls and furniture from treated wood. A lot of the existing RV stuff (shower, retractable beds, e.t.c) can be reused.