alt Hacker NewsOr 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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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?
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.