Building a vision of life without work (2015)

> 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.

[1] https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical/prologue

Great insight that is worth repeating.

One of my biggest problems with FIRE discussions is how much they reinforce the idea that retirement is a prerequisite for achieving happiness. This leads a lot of FIRE-minded people to double down on jobs they hate that consume too much of their time and energy, only because they think it will better enable them to be happy later.

For the lucky few who can be early employees at unicorn startups, that might be true. For the average FIRE person working a $100-200K/year job, they might be better off scaling back to a sustainable 40hr/week job and making a point of taking vacations and doing activities in their off time. Even if that means taking a paycut and delaying their target retirement date.

You don't have to wait until FIRE to start taking vacations, doing hobbies, or working on projects. If a job is consuming so much of your life that you feel you don't have time to do anything else, it's time to reevaluate the job.

The TL;DR is that it was great for the first few years. He started diving deep into his writing passion and notes that he was very happy. Later, his writing hobby slowed and his partner became increasingly dissatisfied with their retirement lifestyle. Sadly, he talks about slowly losing friendships, losing interest in his writing, and eventually losing his marriage over FIRE-related lifestyle choices. I'm sorry it didn't work out for him, but it's an interesting contrast to this prior post about how he imagined his FIRE lifestyle.

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.

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.