| ▲ | breezybottom 7 hours ago |
| That sounds exactly like it's a problem with retirement. |
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| ▲ | tensor 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | bluefirebrand 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It sounds like a problem with a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus for their entire lives |
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| ▲ | CydeWeys 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Or maybe that's just the human condition? Retirement is a pretty recent concept anyway. Back when people were hunter/gatherers or subsistence farmers, you didn't have the option of retiring. You either kept working or you starved, perished from the elements, etc. | | |
| ▲ | tensor 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's not true. There were always different roles for older people. They didn't just keep doing the same job their whole lives. | | |
| ▲ | pavel_lishin 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | And people who were injured to the point where they couldn't "work" anymore were still cared for by their community. | | |
| ▲ | weirdmantis69 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I mean, that just isn't true. There are amazon tribes today where they just send them down the river to die... your ideas are a disney-fied version of a false past that never existed. | | |
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| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus Modern American society really doesn't force anyone to do this. Targeting work-life balance requires making trade-offs. But in a country where the median wage is around $45k, some significant fraction of half of Americans can dial down their work if they reduce lifestyle and consumption. | | |
| ▲ | bluefirebrand an hour ago | parent [-] | | Not when basics like rent, food, and healthcare eat up the majority of that 45k There's only so much you can reduce your lifestyle before you're literally just living to work anyways |
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| ▲ | breezybottom 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's literally every society |
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| ▲ | the_gastropod 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | ravenstine 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | My thoughts exactly. Maybe I'm just wired differently, but if I couldn't work anymore or didn't need to I'd be like "Finally! I can spend as much time as I need to make yeast glow with CRISPR, collect microscopic things, build a chicken coop, learn to fly planes, build a bigger coil gun, actually get proficient at speaking German, go to more pub trivia, build a new Dobsonian telescope, yada yada." And I'm bet someone would say "you're not really gonna do all those things." Well, you're wrong. Those are the sorts of things I've done since I was a kid. I would just have so much more time to do them. There is no way I would retire and have nothing to do. | | | |
| ▲ | jcgrillo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I've been doing sort of a temporary version of that :). I quit working for the next year or maybe some more to focus on a big house renovation project, among other things (a few major car, truck, and tractor projects too.. some welding.. building some other machinery..). I figured why wait until some indefinite future to do work that is actually personally meaningful rather than what an employer tells me to do? I guess financially this year of negative income has some opportunity cost associated with it, but I'm building a bunch of stuff that cannot be bought, and I'd rather take the time now when it's definitely good than wait for a "maybe". And frankly the tech treadmill had pretty well erased the interest I used to have in computing. I'm also quite happy to be sitting out the current AI insanity. I've been working on some personal coding projects as well--as well as playing with local LLMs--to stay current and hopefully rekindle the interest in computing that the industry beat out of me. The work used to be fun, where did that go? |
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