> The reason people go from work to nothing on retirement is because work fills up the nearly all of the productive hours of a person's life. If it were to take, let's say 4 days, or six hours a day, people would be so bored, they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering.

I don't buy this construction of the workday where spending 50% of your awake hours at work leaves people so exhausted they can't do anything else with their lives, but if we changed that to 38% of their waking hours they'd be so bored that they be starting businesses and volunteering all over. That's not even consistent with your own experience of being exhausted halfway through the work day. Two extra hours per day isn't going to translate to launching a new business or volunteer effort.

You hinted at the real problem: Most people don't have the time management skills and motivation that they think they do. Remove a couple hours of work per week from most people's lives and those hours will get redistributed to mostly leisure time. Some of it more productive than other options (socializing with the community, working on hobbies).

> they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering

This is not what actually happens in practice. There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time. If this was going to occur there would be mountains of empirical evidence for it by now because this situation isn't rare.

I know many people with a lot of free time. In the vast majority of cases, people spend their free time in almost exactly the same way they spent their free time when they had less of it. Binging on social media, television, or games? Now they just do more of it for longer. The people that volunteer more were already doing it, and they are in the small minority.

People should probably work less but the idea that this will generate productive activity is a rationalization against all evidence.

It's hard for me to even contemplate having "nothing to do." I haven't had paid work for many, many years, yet I don't feel like I have any spare time at all.

I've been doing a 4 day work week and it certainly helps quite a bit. I worry I have gotten too used to it now though.

Also ADHD here, I have the same problem.

The only way I can get anything meaningful done outside of work is to do it before work.

Those first few hours of the day are precious, as far as energy goes. Or attention, or will.

On a related note, I put Q2 of Eisenhower Matrix (important but not urgent, i.e. the stuff you want to get done "someday" but keep putting off indefinitely... i.e. your hopes and dreams) at the front of the day, because Q1 (urgent and important) basically forces you to do it and requires no special attention.

To put it bluntly, the long term stuff needs to be scheduled and consistently acted upon, or the default outcome will be very depressing.

I schedule it first thing, every morning.

Ever try waking up early and doing your work stuff before work?

> We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market

Modern society arguably has more opportunity for play–and evidence of adults playing–than ancient socities.

We also have a larger fraction of labor that one can genuinely like doing, versus being forced to do.

In my experience its really hard to find something that connects people of different age groups in a meaningful way, that doesn't involve a workplace-like setting. Older and younger people often just don't compromise enough from an intrinsic motivation to make it work.

If they are somehow forced to work together, and have to make compromises, it suddenly works much better. They also benefit and enjoy it.

It doesn't have to be paid work. But it has to be something with a defined structure and some kind of management. Money is a really good motivator for people not to quit on the first frustrating experience.

This is the outcome of everyone working. There's no alternate, complementary system (mostly women) of interesting, society-strengthening activities. Everyone works because they have to, because otherwise they won't afford a house when competing against two-income households, so everyone's busy, so everything's a rush and far more activities that used to be done are now monetised.

No time for baking treats; just buy some perma-plastic-wrapped ultra processed sugary snack. No time for being a governor at the local school or taking turns looking after each others' kids. No time to look after aging parents. Just don't do it or buy it in.

No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee.

The only winners are boomers and banks, for whom the second person works half their lives to pay back for the inflated house price.

I don't understand why someone would FIRE and not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do. And the "won't you be so bored?" people. No, I'm not bored. You might be because you need someone else to tell you how to spend your hours.

Between learning new hobbies, tackling my backlog of projects in my old hobbies, taking care of my health, and spending quality time with my family, I still have more to do than I have time for. The awesome part though is that now I can do all the "must do" (family time, personal health) and "should do" (hobbies, socializing) things, and pick and choose between the "nice to do" things. When I was working, I struggled to even do the "must do" things.

The largest FIRE sub on reddit is aptly named 'financial independence' because FI is much, much more important than RE.

The first post they link to on the sidebar is 'Build the life you want and save for it'

https://old.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/comments/58j8...

I honestly don't know how someone gets to the position of being able to retire without having thought long and hard about it. Even if you get an unexpected windfall, it's probably best to keep working until you know you're mentally prepared to retire.

I’ve noticed some people with seemingly fulfilling hobbies stop doing them after quitting their job as well. It’s entirely possible all those hobbies are valuable precisely as something powerful to latch onto and disconnect from the day job, and seem pointless the day after quitting. Seems like you had a strong sense of identity outside of your job already before quitting. Building that could be a lot of hard work for other people (and it sometimes comes as a surprise that it even needs to be built).

I think the FIRE crowd is even more likely to fall into this trap than the average wage slave. In addition to finding meaning in their day job, they're also more likely to forego short-term costs (like recreation/socialization/travel/whatever). Plus the FIRE planning itself becomes a hobby. So when they retire, they "lose" even more than the average person who might have more side interests.

Those people are wildly un-creative.

Very common story for a relatively minor injury or disease in an old person to snowball to their death when they lose mobility and independence. You gotta stay active if you want to keep living.

I’m going to say there’s some mixup of causation and correlation here

My fantasy is maybe to start a one person cafe operation and manage overheads.

Unfortunately most retail space in the US is way too oversized to make that kind of operation work.

Honestly when given downtime I generate more computer problems than I could ever hope to solve. I cant even fathom being bored with a computer. My mother used to accuse me of breaking the home PC just to keep myself busy and it was not far from the truth.

Love computers outside of ${dayJob}!

Work on some open source projects and dig into some bugs, become that crazy but fun neighborhood guy always building some contraption in his garage, volunteer as a mentor for advanced STEM programs like FIRST FRC, volunteer at/run a local computer reuse program where you help take used computers and get them into a state people in need of one can use, build those things you always thought sounded fun to work on at ${dayJob} but could never "justify" to management, build and operate a retro computing collection.

Some of these scratch the tinkering itch, some of these scratch the community itch, some of these scratch the meaning itch, and so on, but all allow you to have a goal, sense of purpose, and to love computers however much you want without having to make money doing it.

Getting initial momentum on this can seem tricky, same as for careers, but once you get going the time at ${dayJob} starts to feel like it gets in the way of loving computers instead of the other way around.

Hear me out: you would get to choose which problems to solve!

But I get you; a job finds well-scoped problems and spoon feeds them to you, it can be daunting to look for a worthy problem to solve on your own. Think of it as a new skill you'll have to develop.

There's a big ocean of problem solving on computers that doesn't require a day job! I find it very fun. I mean I started on computers for fun when I was young and it turned into a job so being retired means I can just go back to working on the stuff I like in particular.

Hey I’m in the same boat! (Except the grad school.) feel free to email (in profile) if you want to chat.

I mean, we're about to enter a demographic reversal and to hear economists talk of it, corporations are going to really struggle to find the workers they need.

I guess we're about to find out if they're desperate enough to offer genuine flexibility or not.

If I could work 2d/wk remote as a software developer, I'd probably do it the rest of my life. Something tells me that most CEOs are still gonna insist on 50+hrs/wk RTO though...

They shouldn’t just feel useful, they need roles that actually are useful. They’re not dumb.

They were specifically talking about a commercial labor-for-money transaction though. Not just any useful work.

Multi-generation households - which also can keep older people active like you noted -are mostly gone. You can't do much for your tribe from a retirement home on a random Saturday afternoon every few months in summer, so work or hobbies are the remaining activity centers, but you now which of the 2 is lionized as a virtue in American culture. Some hobbies are unfortunately only discovered in retirement, so perhaps some criticism of the economic system as imperfect is due.

Sadly, polarization pushes people towards either wholesale “burn it down” anti-capitalism or full throated corporate bootlicking and I don’t think either tact is particularly useful. There’s a more subtle critique about our indoctrination in the west towards concepts like the “efficiency of the free market” demanding that we overlook rampant alienation among the working population that is more what a lot of people are vibing on, but it’s being expressed as diet anarchism because that feels more poignant online.

I think most folks do, in fact, want to “perform a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe”, but find themselves railroaded into bullshit office jobs full of performative nonsense, soul crushing frontline service work, or body destroying blue collar work with no safety net, all of which are recipes for burnout later in life. Compare Keynes’ “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” [1] to what we ended up with and you’ll find the root of the discontent is perhaps warranted.

[1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

Absolutely!

But also: with age more and more doors are closed to you. Many hobbies become inaccessible. You may end up with a bunch of choices that all just sound outright depressing. Losing a job is losing one more choice, restricting yourself to the possibly more boring options that you can still physically pull off.

It's just not fun being old.

It's definitely polarizing, I think a lot of people feel that work is your life's purpose.

Authoritarian hierarchies (Which is precisely what your workplace is) rarely have dignity to spare for the people building the pharaoh's pyramid.

Do you have anything more interesting to say on the topic than "No U wrong"? The OP had a lot of thoughtful comments about the issues with having things to do after retiring.

It sounds like a problem with a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus for their entire lives

Or maybe it’s a problem of spending all your effort working a job for 40+ years, and having your curiosity atrophy into nothingness.

I retired last year in my late 30’s and it’s just such a life upgrade. I study Mandarin, go to the gym, cook fun meals, volunteer at our community garden, volunteer at our food pantry, go to board game nights, brew beer, DIY house maintenance, write some software for myself for fun, etc. I have so much more time to spend learning new things, it’s ridiculous. I just can’t even fathom continuing to do a job I don’t particularly enjoy just because I’m too unimaginative to figure out what I’d do with the extra 40+ hours of weekly freedom.