I’ve asked myself the same question, because before taking the break I also had visions of working on important/meaningful/undervalued things on my own terms.

I think there were multiple factors. I hadn’t accounted for how much I relied on the work environment for social contact, and I didn’t have the social habits in place to maintain a healthy social life. This felt fine at first because I was also recovering from burnout, and solo road trips and adventures in the mountains felt great.

But every time I’d think about working on something, it felt insurmountable to my brain, and I just got stuck. I’d led huge projects in enterprise environments, but felt incapable of getting something going without some of the structure surrounding that.

I suppose it boils down to a skills issue. Had I realized I’d get so stuck, I may have prioritized a different set of activities. But one thing led to another and I was sliding down the depression slope at which point everything got exponentially more complicated.

I have to conclude that I could have done things differently and that could have led to a better outcome. But all of my professional success hadn’t prepared me for the personal habit changes I needed to implement to have a better outcome.

> especially since 99% of them don’t even have a sliver of a chance at “fuck you money” like you did.

I didn’t have “fuck you money”. Just enough to live a moderately frugal life on the equivalent of median income as long as the market didn’t tank.

The thing about your point that doesn’t make sense to me is that you’re describing a scenario in which 99% of people suddenly are in the same situation I was.

We have found out, it's just that the people who do the finding out generally have money, so their opinion is automatically discounted.

It's a bit like forever single people getting so lost in the ideas of a relationship, intimacy. That everything will be great once they have someone, once they have connection, that life will be amazing and nothing else will matter. Their life sucks because they don't have a relationship. People in relationships don't know what it's like and their opinion is invalid.

Then they get in a relationship and learn that it's actually comparatively banal and requires a lot of work and compromise, and definitely was not the insanely-built-up-over-many-years-magical-life-cure-all.

There are -endless- stories of people who made it rich early on, retired, and ended up in a mental health crisis despite having everything. That fact should be taken as a reality check to calibrate your own perceptions.

My point is that I was firmly in the “I want to retire early” category, found myself with the means to do so, and that this wasn’t theoretical for me.

But the thing I imagined is not the reality that I found.

I realize “they” have other motives for convincing people such a future is a problem. But that doesn’t remove what I truly believe would be a hellish reality for many.

I’m all for pushing society in a less work-centric direction and think current work culture is toxic. That’s a big part of the reason I burned out and went on sabbatical.

But I’m also pretty worried about what a sudden shift without careful planning may bring about. I know I certainly didn’t have the habits/skills in place to navigate it in a healthy way.

This is not what I took away from the experience or what I’m trying to communicate with my comment.

I’ve elaborated in various sibling comments, but my point is closer to this: regardless of what is possible, many people simply don’t have the skills for a rapidly and drastically altered social arrangement.

To your point, people can gain those skills. Society will adapt. But the worrying thing to me is the rate of change. Whatever we can imagine about a future in which we’re not bound to our jobs, there is also the harsh reality that we have to collectively agree about an awful lot of things to get there, and that agreement isn’t happening at the same rate as technological progress.

If anything, some forms of “progress” (social media) are grinding healthy collaboration and agreement to a halt while big tech ushers in a new era of tools despite the fact that we haven’t adapted to the last major advancements.

None of this is assuming this is how things must be. It’s more about the very real problems that will come with such a transition and the fact that we’re already doing a pretty bad job of ushering in such a future in a way that is actually beneficial to people.

The thing I would tell my former self is this: pivot now. Waiting may make things harder. Don’t assume it will sort itself out. And if you can find a good therapist, it can be extremely helpful.

Actively seek out something that provides structure and consistency, even if that’s not work. Something that keeps you in regular contact with other people.

I had started to look into various volunteering opportunities but didn’t take action before my major slide. In retrospect I think I’d have been better off if I did.

I do think people will learn/adapt. I’m in the middle of that now. The question/concern is more about what happens during that learning process, and whether or not society has structures in place to facilitate it at scale.

e.g. my journey involved quite a bit of professional psychological help, and I feel lucky that I found good care given the shortage of good care in this category.

Absolutely. But most retirement planning doesn’t cover 40-60 years of time. Most retirement planning also assumes a period of time when a person is gradually losing their ability to fully engage with society.

It’s a whole different ballgame when the period of time involves a person’s “peak” years. Many people have a drive that they haven’t yet satisfied in their 20s/30s/40s. This isn’t to say this drive can’t be channeled into something other than a traditional job. I’m just saying we don’t currently have societal structures and norms such that an entire population will know what to do.

I think the idea of a society where work is optional and people having their needs met by the society they live in is actually well explored. It's a Utopia. The problem is human nature is competitive and just being provided with everything you need to live, even being given ample time to create art and enjoy life, is not enough for many people. Utopian ideas all look great on paper but when meeting reality you cannot build Utopia around greed and elitism and you can't abolish them either.

That's an interesting take. Is there any historical precedent for an international change that started with a UN resolution? Because my cynical take is that UN resolutions are typically either ineffective, or made post-hoc.

And as a result of "we" being divided, we have the resurgence of many vaccine preventable diseases, because that achievement was flat out rejected by part of humanity.

Helping people is not desperate work. It’s meaningful.

"For free" implies no forced labor or time commitment. So yes, they're suggesting no-one has to work.

That's the point, there's no automated solution to my laundry but apparently there is now an automated solution for my musical passions.