So much of our life is consumed by work. Seeing your lifespan laid bare like this, there's a perverse instinct to optimize what remains. Have to be more productive, more efficient. But it's a bit like seeing you're bleeding out and deciding to optimize your blood donation schedule, isn't it?
The older I get the more I realize that the most effective and productive things I can do are not at all what seem to be productive or effective on the surface.
One of the most mentally and physically crippling things I’ve ever done was work too hard, for too long. I worked and earned more money than I thought I ever could but… All I truly got out of it was a lesson. To never do it again. I would have earned enough but also enjoyed my life had I just calmed down a bit.
I’m sure you know as well as I do, if not better. It seemed worth noting though.
Yes! It’s slow going. I grow and sell plant tissue cultures. Sometimes I get fairly large orders (hundreds of units), but usually I sell a few or a dozen at a time to hobbyists who are into aquaria, terraria, or they want stock to start cultures on their own more easily. I also grow and sell some other stuff, but that’s the bulk of it.
I got started on some discord channels with other hobbyists, but I’m in the process of creating a store front that’ll hopefully boost revenue a bit. I’ll likely need to learn a bunch of boring stuff like marketing to actually get traffic to it, but we’ll see.
It’s at an awkward stage where I need to devote more time to it in order to allow it to grow more, but I’ve also got a full time job, kids, a wife, etc. But I really enjoy it. I hope to make the leap to doing it full time eventually, but that would be a while off still.
No kidding. It blows my mind how bad e-commerce is. And how expensive it is. I had to accept that no payment processor would ever be ideal, no cost structure would ever make sense, I’d have to relinquish access to my own money to a degree, etc. I thought it would be better by 2025 but it’s the worst part of the business I’ve worked on so far, haha.
In this Lex Fiedman video, they talk about how life is short, and a visualization as a spreadsheet is shown that makes one very concerned:
Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #440
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg
[ironically, the podcast is very long - over 3 hours - speaking of not wasting time, but after initial annoyance I'm glad I watched it all.]
The positive insight that can come out of that is use every week and don't waste it, and and if you can, move your long-term dreams closer to the here and now.
I made a version of that spreadsheet for "the rest of my life" to hand it into my office as a reminder. (Even if I will live until 90, it fits my laptop screen without scrolling...)
Should everyone make it? On one hand it’s awareness, on another- at cause endless anxiety that you now visualised how little it is and still can’t do anything..
This is something one says on their deathbed when they have had a good life.
Maybe some people who have wasted half their life being completely unproductive say “I wish I focused on relationships more” on their deathbed. But many others might say “I wasted my whole life, I wish I got it together.” The thing is, those people don’t write books or give seminars on how to live a good life. They die alone and are quickly forgotten.
> This is something one says on their deathbed when they have had a good life.
I can assure you the reaction at hand is not limited to those you suggest.
I know because I faced my own mortality, if only for a brief moment of time, far earlier than I ever expected and earlier than most would prefer I think. And when I did, this exact realisation hit me like a freight train. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a more profound, visceral moment.
What also may have helped, is developing quite a deep and close relationship with an individual who would later go on to pass from cystic fibrosis.
Now one of this is to say I may not now have an entirely different reaction when again it comes time for my card to be punched. However I feel like this has been somewhat tested by the SCI that would follow five years later. It's also not to say that what I felt had been a waste vs what is important will be applicable to all of us, in fact I am sure that realistically, it will be deeply different, personal and particular to each of us as individuals.
When I have particularly bad days as a result of my unlucky medical outcomes, I remind myself of what I experienced that night, and how lucky I was ultimately to be able to experience something like that, and then actually have somewhat of a "second chance" at taking a look down the second fork in the road.
TL;DR
I give 100x times less of a shit about a "career/being productive/min-maxing" than I once did. Your mileage may vary.
I was briefly diagnosed with "99.9% sure it's cancer" before it turned out to be benign. Say about 2-3 weeks.
In those few weeks my main regrets were a) not having done many of the things on my bucket list, and b) not having children or not going to be live long enough to see them grow up.
I'm someone with recurring nightmare about career goals and such. However at that time, work only crossed my mind briefly and was easily dismissed.
> I was briefly diagnosed with "99.9% sure it's cancer" before it turned out to be benign. Say about 2-3 weeks.
This is similar to my situation, except I was told, “We’re 99.9% sure it’s not cancer, so relax bro, don’t even worry about it.” Apparently, my age made it incredibly unlikely. “We’d be far more concerned if you were an older gentleman.”
Imagine my surprise when I got called back and they told me the complete opposite.
It worked out in the end as apparently they caught it so early that it had only just turned into cancer. If they had found it even weeks or months earlier, it would not have been cancer yet, just precancerous apparently. This claim seems dubious to me, I mean, how do you tell that? However, I am not a doctor, so what do I know. I do worry sometimes though that perhaps they overstated it and blew up my life over nothing.
I was told to consider myself lucky it was caught when it was as apparently it almost never happens. Again, a claim...that I don't know is accurate, or just something they told me to get me to relax.
You also might think that after something like that, that if something else occurred with my body, people might pay me more heed when I raised it? Well, you would be mistaken. Because I walked right into a goddamn spinal cord injury (incomplete at least, you gotta take the small wins) because they did exactly the same thing again. "Its just stress, probably working too hard, just dont think about it."
Turns out no amount of relaxing is going to walk back severe central canal stenosis resulting in severe cervical myelopathy with significant spinal cord signal change.
That’s the conventional wisdom but I think it’s worth challenging it. Or at least, if by “productivity” you mean “work” (I think there’s an important distinction there).
There is nothing wrong with your work being the focus of your life. Many people derive great pleasure and satisfaction from, and make a positive impact on the world with, their work. Life without relationships would be a hell of loneliness, but life without work would be a hell of boredom and meaninglessness. (I’m aware that much work is drudgery, I refer mainly to the kind of work one can derive joy from, which I suspect many of us on HN have in our lives.)
The question “is it okay to work all the time” is explored rather well here:
>Life without relationships would be a hell of loneliness, but life without work would be a hell of boredom and meaninglessness.
There are plenty of people who don't work such as children, students, carers and retirees. They find meaning in all sorts of activities outside of work.
Most people on their deathbed who would counsel you would counsel you to focus on relationships. The ones who had the insight "people can fuck right off, that's the key to it all" aren't interested in telling us about it.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve shifted to: learning how to find enjoyment and purpose from whatever situation you find yourself in should be an important priority.
Finding work that is inherently enjoyable and purposeful to you is still great if you can find it. But that’s not always possible, and I’ve been increasingly interested in the ideas in books like “Flow”, which details the ways people in all manner of circumstances find purpose/enjoyment from the work in front of them.
That's completely unrealistic though. If you have a job that allows you to support yourself and doesn't make you want to veer into oncoming traffic daily that's about as good as it gets for the vast majority of people.
There's so many reasons why purpose should be found outside of work.
Like others replying to this comment, I disagree because there is much work that needs to be done which cannot truly provide purpose to most people.
However ... I do believe that any job should provide dignity and "purpose" in the narrower sense of something the person doing it believes needs to be done. Any job done full time (however a culture defines that) should also make a reasonable lower middle class life possible.
I think you mean that there are a lot of jobs that while serving a good purpose, aren’t necessarily enjoyed by many. I’m not sure how much that has to be the case. In any case, we should strive to maximize the jobs that are both sufficiently enjoyable and purposeful.
The problem I see today is that there is a lot of “bullshit” work being done that doesn’t really serve any good purpose, or even makes things worse in the world, and not enough people rejecting that state of affairs.
There's a difference between personal purpose and community purpose. I don't expect a city trash collector to consider their work to be their life's purpose, even if they do experience the work as having some purpose/value to the community.
The BS jobs hypothesis, popularized by David Graeber, is IMO quite flawed. It's a way to look at the world without having to get your mind dirty understanding how stuff actually works. Sometimes that can be a good stepping stone to asking "just why are we doing it this way?". However, the broader observation that Graeber makes (essentially: "everybody, especially the people doing them, know it is bullshit") points instead to the disconnect people experience between the work being done by <their organization> and the actual stuff that they do. No doubt there are some true BS jobs, but I think far less of them than is often supposed. You and/or the person doing them may not see why they are there (and that is a problem), but that doesn't make them BS.
Though, I'd argue it should be 18 years free by their math. They lump a subset of leisure activities into another category as if those are beyond your easy control.
Commuting, working, grooming, etc - sure, you could optimize those, but it's harder to deviate from the norm. But TV/video games? Doesn't seem like the same discussion.
Exactly. I have thought about it for a while, I think I have to get rid of work or family to be substantially happier. Apparently getting rid of family is morally wrong, so the only option is to get rid of work, somehow, anyhow.
I fully understand why people buy lottery tickets. Hope beats probability on every single instance. I, a Master of Statistics graduates, buy them too.
Maybe, or maybe not. Now that I think about it, it's difficult to say. But let's say I would rather get rid of work than family, and I don't want to get rid of both.
BTW changing job is still a lot easier than changing family :)
I guess I'm just not a family person. I don't have too much to complain about my family but I don't (net) gain much. Of course I'm as responsible as your usual parents on the street so I don't want to get rid of my family.
Me too. I’d have more freedom to do certain things I love, but they’d quickly lose their appeal and I’d have no one to share any of it with. My family are literally the only people who give half a shit about me. Life would be quiet and hollow without them.
This is why I have interest in the FIRE movement. Our lives are short and fleeting. If there is even a small chance I can become financially independent before traditional retirement age, I am going to optimize for that.
We spend so much time optimizing for productivity that we sometimes miss the bigger picture: the quality of life itself, not just the quantity of tasks we can check off
My biggest failure has been not getting an extreme income ( 300k TC a year +) before 30.
I had planned to retire by 40 and be done with this work nonsense. Now I'm in my mid 30s and that doesn't seem possible.
However I will say if you have a highly variable income ( one year you make 100$ an hour, the next year you have no work), you should max out your 401k during the good times. Having 30k in retirement funds that you'll get smacked for drawing on is better than nothing.
Too late now. I'm comfortable, but I think the era of 300k TC is done.
Yup. My advice to young people is -- if you can't figure out what to do in life, make more $$. With enough $$ you will have a world of time to ponder what to do.
I also regret that I gave up a FAANG level opportunity because my faily doesn't want me to go to another city. I would hit well over 200K TC by now -- a very comfortable salary in Canada.
Quite the irony that the thread started with reminiscing about life and purpose and needing time and valuing relationships and you guys go into the "need to make more money" spiel.
Here comes a secret: It will never be enough for you. It's not the money that counts. It's the ratio of income versus expenses, if anything. And if you grow one and don't stop the other one from growing in unison, then you have gained nothing.
I know lots of people with 5x the income of me, but their expenses and lifestyle overcompensate, so they are much deeper into the hamster wheel than me.
I could retire any day (late 30s). I currently don't do it cause my work is fun and I like the people, and the more I keep going the higher my expenses could become if needed. But the finances don't keep me in my job. And if anything comes along that looks sustainably more fun I will quit in a heartbeat.
Why is parent's advice ironic? I, like probably most people, would have more time for relationships I value now if I had followed their advice. Your first sentence reads as if their advice was "earn money at the expense of relationships and well-being" and that isn't the case at all.
You can't be certain of that, though. If you had (for example) pursued work and money more ambitiously in your 20s, maybe those relationships you value now would never have formed in the first place. Maybe then-existing relationships would have suffered to the point of estrangement.
I'm lucky: I worked very hard and did decently well in the startup lottery, but I still left myself enough time to forge valuable relationships. I've witnessed people who chase higher and higher salaries but aren't that lucky, and end up using the years of their life where their mind and body are at their peak of their ability for work instead of play, and regret it.
I'm in my 40s now, and see some younger friends and acquaintances doing things like taking multi-month world trips, diving head-first into new hobbies/skills that take hundreds/thousands of hours to get good at, and I wish I'd done things like that in my 20s and 30s. In part because my responsibilities today make it difficult to do now, but also because I just don't want to do some of those things anymore, because they sound kinda exhausting at my age. But I still wish I had those experiences in my past to look back fondly upon.
I guess what I'm saying is that nothing is certain, and we can't reliably look back and say "if I'd done X 15 years ago, today I'd be able to do Y". Life just doesn't work that way. I think we should do what makes us happy whenever we have the ability to. Sure, look hard for and always be open to opportunities to take on work that could make a big change in your financial life. But be careful with those sorts of choices, because there's always opportunity cost.
I want to retire early and make music and games for 40 years after I turn 40.
I don't want to wait until I'm 69 to retire for at most 11 years.
Plus none of us know how much time we actually have. A lot of people plan to retire at 68, die on the job at 67, and your replacement is in your chair next week.
> Plus none of us know how much time we actually have
Precisely because of this, you should be making music and games now. You never know if once you reach the amount of money you desire, death will knock on your door.
If you are already doing it, that's great. But so many people defer the enjoyment and overwork themselves waiting for that future where they hit the number.
That's a good point, I make plenty of music, and every now and then I release a really small game. I can't imagine more than 100 people have played them, but in a strange way that's okay. It was never for other people.
I'd love to check out your games, if you'd be willing to post. I've spent 10 years dabbling in indie game dev when I was young, there's something nostalgic about seeing people's projects. Never published anything myself btw, it always stayed firmly in demo stage haha.
> Here comes a secret: It will never be enough for you. It's not the money that counts. It's the ratio of income versus expenses, if anything. And if you grow one and don't stop the other one from growing in unison, then you have gained nothing.
> I know lots of people with 5x the income of me, but their expenses and lifestyle overcompensate, so they are much deeper into the hamster wheel than me.
That's not a good assumption to make for everyone. There are many people who do grow income without growing expenses (see the whole financial independence movement).
I spend about as much now as I did 7 years ago when I made 4x less.
The issue is that for many FIRE people optimizing everything becomes THE main game.
You retire and then you are constantly thinking "how could I do if XYZ happened?".
It's probably better than having to write your own performance review or grind through a job you don't really enjoy, but it's still not what "live your life" is generally supposed to be.
What would that look like? Do you have kids or a family to support? I'm one of two gainfully employed breadwinners among an extended family of 13 adults and 2 kids (my own).
On the other hand, there are opportunities that are only open to you when you're young. Squandering those opportunities by working so you can be retired at 40 or 50 isn't free.
Meeting people in travel hostels would be one example. Being a young single on a beach abroad is another. Traveling in general is another.
Wandering around Prague with some beers and friends you made 6 hours ago hits different at 26 than it does as a retired 55 year old that waited to live their life.
I live on a beach in Mexico in my 30s and see both ends of the spectrum.
Yup, exactly. I know someone in their early 30s who just quit their job and went abroad to spend a month living on a beach learning how to surf. I'm in my mid-40s and can't fathom doing that. I could do that; have the finances and professional flexibility to support it, but the main thing is I just don't want to. The idea of living on a beach in somewhat uncomfortable conditions just doesn't appeal to me anymore. Some things I'd enjoy or tolerate 15 years ago are things that I just don't want to do today. But at the same time I'm disappointed I don't have experiences like that in my past to look back on fondly.
Don't get me wrong; my current situation is fantastic, and I'm in a much better place than I ever would have expected if you asked 25-year-old me where I'd be in nearly 20 years. But I'm still aware that there were paths I didn't take, paths that would have also made me happy.
I think it really depends on what people want. Some people want meeting others in hostels and that's perfectly fine. But I'd still say for the majority of us getting the FU money early has tremendous advantage.
I earned over 200k base in Canada and it didn’t make that meaningful of a difference. I gave up chasing money and went to work for an NGO I care about, earning slightly more than half as much as before, and… I love it. I wouldn’t trade incomes if it meant trading the work.
I thought the money would help, but with family, something will always suck it up. A trip, furniture, house, extracurricular, etc. I wasn’t getting much closer to any semblance of independent wealth, but I was burning myself out.
I’m glad for anyone who can pull it off, but I haven’t met them personally. I have met people who ground themselves down trying, though. It’s a risky endeavour.
You don’t have to go FAANG to earn over 200k here, either. But people will expect you to work for every cent of it, every working hour… and then some. It’s gruelling.
But would you work for an NGO if you don't have the savings from the 200K job? Maybe it's just me, but I never feel safe without the FU money, especially under this market.
BTW getting 100+K working for an NGO is fantastic! I thought they mostly just pay for meagre money. I only earn some 130K and would definitely love to switch to an NGO job with lower pay.
That’s a great question. If anything I at least have the benefit of knowing what it’s like on the other side, right? Without that I’d very likely still be pushing for more. It’s all I did for 15 years or so. I didn’t even realize I was doing it. It kind of became who I was, always simmering away either up front or on the back burner.
I’ll be candid. I spent a lot of my savings on a home that cost way too much, and burned a lot of it on… Burning out. I was unemployed for some time after a layoff and good god, the timing was awful. It was only months after getting my mortgage. So it goes though. Buying the house did a number on me. I thought it was going to matter. I thought it would finally feel like I did something important. I think it was a net negative, though paradoxically, it was the kick in the pants I needed to start to realize how futile my goals and methods were, so it was good in some ways too.
I get what you mean about not feeling safe without the money. I grew up pretty poor and a lot of my motivations were essentially “never be poor again”. I’m still insecure about this, but much less compelled by it. I think going through a rough stretch of essentially living on lentils and water made me realize that the thing I was afraid of wasn’t actually practical so much as status-driven. In a weird way I actually enjoyed aspects of having to watch every dollar again. Having to be resourceful is engaging and interesting. Making good food with less makes cooking more exciting and rewarding. Solving problems around the house with fewer tools and supplies teaches you so much stuff you’d otherwise miss. I was confronted with the fact that I was previously comforted by money more from an ego rather than a practical or survival perspective.
Well, everyone is different, but that made me feel like a complete moron and I began reconsidering my relationship with work and money.
Which landed me here. Knowing what I know now, and without my savings, I’d totally take the route I’m on now. Without knowing and with the option to earn more? The idea of working this job would fill me with dread. Weird, right?
Hey, it’s pretty cool to hear who went through a similar thing! Had around the same base in Canada, let it go after a couple of years, and trying out something a bit different. Well, with the hopes that it’ll feel good after a little while.
It's sounds vain, but money is probably one of the most important things.
At my (our ?) level it's more a luxury of early retirement, but I had a friend who could never afford to move out. Her parents were pretty bad to her to say the least. She was stuck in a pattern of dating guys, moving in with them, getting kicked out and retreating to her parents.
Unfortunately agreed. Money can't buy happiness, but it sure greases the wheels. Money opens up opportunities and possibilities that you just aren't going to have without it.
And not having money is a great way to suffer at least low-grade anxiety on a regular basis. Or a great way to actually be destitute.
Yeah. Money is something that doesn't necessarily bring you happiness, but lack of which would almost surely bring sorrow. I heard some people can live happily without money, but I don't know any of them.
Reliable 5% yield while keeping the base the same value (rising with inflation)? Possible, but not without risk. And if you want to protect against that risk, i.e. accept that some investments will fail [0], you need a bigger amount, imho. Or accept that you will get less, not 35k per year.
That's a good point. But if I'm realistic with my own mortality I'd be happy if I reached 70.
Assuming I retire at 40, and need to make 700k last 30 years, that's 23k per year with no yield. Even a modest 3% yield slows the burn rate so my money would still outlast me.
Or I'll be 73 writing Python which might not be so bad...
