As a survivor of a recent heart attack, I would like to make a rather surprising suggestion. If you live in big city, get a job as a bicycle courier. If near a college campus, get a job as a bicycle pizza delivery person. Get someone to pay you for getting healthy exercise. Then you can spend your spare time on sedentary intellectual activities without damaging your health.
If you are like Mitchell_Porter, and wish to spend your spare time on serious math-like creativity, then you definitely need 4-6 hours of mindless physical activity in the middle of your wake cycle, with intense intellectual activity at the beginning and end of the day. No one can maintain peak intellectual productivity for long periods without some scheduled downtime.
A good job for mindless physical activity: cart-pusher at Walmart. I did this in high school, and it is still easily the best job I’ve ever had. You work at your own pace, you’re outdoors, the managers usually ignore you (so you don’t even have to obey dress code). Mostly I just screwed around with my coworkers.
Basically you just spend all day walking (with occasional bursts of hard physical exercise). I lost 40 pounds in the first 6 months and got into the best shape I have ever been in. There’s also a kind of pleasant exhaustion after putting in 8.5 hours.
ETA: These jobs are extremely easy to get: even though I lived in an economically depressed area, I was hired without even an interview. A woman from HR called 90 minutes after I submitted my application.
A good job for not even that: in high school I worked summers as night-watch at a local suburban pool. 40 hours a week, $9.20/hr, or ~$4000 a summer. There was zero demand on my time during it since I worked overnight. I got a lot of reading done.
The only downside was that it was seasonal (so you couldn’t just do that job), and you could be profoundly mentally screwed by the sleep schedule.
I think I could do better now than I did before with melatonin, modafinil, blackout curtains, etc.
It doesn’t seem like the seasonal basis of the job is inherant in night-watchmen idea—there must be lots of warehouses, etc., that need nightwatchmen. I can imagine worse things than being paid to read.
Right. In my case, the seasonality came from it being a pool—it was only worthwhile to pay nightwatchmen when it was actually filled and multi-million dollar liability existed for accidental drowning (read: middle-class teens holding drugged parties).
In a more ‘real’ nightwatch job, seasonality might not be a problem. On the other hand, you might have more supervision than I did. (Which was none. I saw my nominal boss once at the beginning.)
In any event, the free time was what you made of it. Akrasia was a major issue.
A job in a similar vein which I know of but haven’t personally held: Night shift at a funeral home. Someone needs to do embalming prep for bodies that show up at 2:37 AM, and they’ll generally pay well for you being on-site and on-call.
Is it possible to put in enough hours at WalMart to get enough pay to rent an apartment with internet access and have a healthy diet? Also, can you specialize in just cart-pushing and not something annoying like customer relations?
My brother works at WalMart at nights. He stocks shelves and the like.
He has zero debt besides the house he owns. He doesn’t own a car, and walks to/from work 5 days a week making a little over $10/hour.
He has plenty of money to do anything he wants (within reason). He has thousands in the bank and spends his time surfing the internet and playing video games.
When I started at walmart I was making $8/hour. I quickly was moved up to 8.50 (I think) within the first 6 months. This was several years ago, so wages may be higher now (of course it varies by region).
Working close to full-time, I could easily make $1200 a month (take-home), which was plenty to live on where I lived at the time (greater Detroit area). If you live somewhere where the cost of living is higher, you might not be able to manage it, but of course, wages will tend to be higher in places with high cost-of-living.
Yes, usually recently built walmarts (which are much larger), will have a dedicated staff of “courtesy associates” (the corporate euphemism for “cart-pusher”). Courtesy associates only do the highly specialized task of retrieving shopping carts. Sometimes you have to do the door-greeter’s jobs while they are on break, but I usually got one of the other courtesy associates to do it, since I preferred to remain outdoors, and they liked the opportunity to get out of the sun/cold/rain.
Thanks for the info. Did you get much chance to think about things during work hours, or was the job slightly too cognitively costly for real contemplation?
For me, at least, it was in that sweet spot of cognitive demand that allows for deep reverie, but is demanding enough that I didn’t become bored with just thinking.
Personally, I find I can’t slip into deep thought while just sitting on the couch, I need some kind of other stimulation to meet my optimal level of arousal. When I really need to think about something, I always wind up pacing, cleaning, running errands, playing minesweeper, etc.
Of course, this is after you get used to the job, which takes several days to a few weeks.
Story: Eastern European accountant dude moved to the US, took a 4 hour accounting job and a 4 hour stacking heavy boxes at DHL warehouse kind of job, he said getting paid for practically going to a gym was the best idea ever and 4 hours of bookkeeping is really enough a day.
I know I am off topic, but I was not aware of this and just wanted to note that I’m glad you’re still around. Of course, I enjoy most of the commenters here.… but still.… (cue sentimental music and single tear drop)
Thx. But it wasn’t all that recent. Coming up on the 3-year anniversary. Scared the sh.t out of me, though, and convinced me to finally quit smoking and start exercising.
I listened to a This American Life episode about campus pizza delivery (via vehicle) at a notorious party school which didn’t sound very fun, but I’m guessing non-party schools are more reasonable.
I’ve also read a few really good blog posts about being a bike courier. It sounded fun but kinda scary. Make sure to calculate how much quantum (edit: or any kind of) measure you’re losing before going that route.
“Make sure to calculate how much quantum measure you’re losing before going that route.”
When you say it this way, Will, you needlessly exclude readers not yet familiar with the scientific content of this site, and you give the superficial impression of subscribing to Deepak Chopra or other New Age woo-woo.
If I removed the word ‘quantum’ I think that’d be enough: after all, spatially infinite universes still force us to reason in terms of measure, and way more people accept spatially infinite universes than the no-worldeaters interpretation of quantum mechanics. You make a fair point that invoking the Q-word was needless.
rather surprising suggestion
4-6 hours of mindless physical
Surprising, because the opposite of not healthy isn’t bike riding all day? How about healthy died and 1⁄2 of good exercise? Personally I do 1.25 hrs, but that’s because I read on the (stationary) bike.
As an aside, what got me into back exercise after some years was a weird medical episode where I was suspected of stroke 2 years ago. Fortunately a false alarm, but I sincerely recommend having something like that “mid-life”. I’d give some of my friends fake heart attacks if I knew how.
As a survivor of a recent heart attack, I would like to make a rather surprising suggestion. If you live in big city, get a job as a bicycle courier. If near a college campus, get a job as a bicycle pizza delivery person. Get someone to pay you for getting healthy exercise. Then you can spend your spare time on sedentary intellectual activities without damaging your health.
If you are like Mitchell_Porter, and wish to spend your spare time on serious math-like creativity, then you definitely need 4-6 hours of mindless physical activity in the middle of your wake cycle, with intense intellectual activity at the beginning and end of the day. No one can maintain peak intellectual productivity for long periods without some scheduled downtime.
A good job for mindless physical activity: cart-pusher at Walmart. I did this in high school, and it is still easily the best job I’ve ever had. You work at your own pace, you’re outdoors, the managers usually ignore you (so you don’t even have to obey dress code). Mostly I just screwed around with my coworkers.
Basically you just spend all day walking (with occasional bursts of hard physical exercise). I lost 40 pounds in the first 6 months and got into the best shape I have ever been in. There’s also a kind of pleasant exhaustion after putting in 8.5 hours.
ETA: These jobs are extremely easy to get: even though I lived in an economically depressed area, I was hired without even an interview. A woman from HR called 90 minutes after I submitted my application.
A good job for not even that: in high school I worked summers as night-watch at a local suburban pool. 40 hours a week, $9.20/hr, or ~$4000 a summer. There was zero demand on my time during it since I worked overnight. I got a lot of reading done.
The only downside was that it was seasonal (so you couldn’t just do that job), and you could be profoundly mentally screwed by the sleep schedule.
I think I could do better now than I did before with melatonin, modafinil, blackout curtains, etc.
It doesn’t seem like the seasonal basis of the job is inherant in night-watchmen idea—there must be lots of warehouses, etc., that need nightwatchmen. I can imagine worse things than being paid to read.
Right. In my case, the seasonality came from it being a pool—it was only worthwhile to pay nightwatchmen when it was actually filled and multi-million dollar liability existed for accidental drowning (read: middle-class teens holding drugged parties).
In a more ‘real’ nightwatch job, seasonality might not be a problem. On the other hand, you might have more supervision than I did. (Which was none. I saw my nominal boss once at the beginning.)
In any event, the free time was what you made of it. Akrasia was a major issue.
A job in a similar vein which I know of but haven’t personally held: Night shift at a funeral home. Someone needs to do embalming prep for bodies that show up at 2:37 AM, and they’ll generally pay well for you being on-site and on-call.
Is it possible to put in enough hours at WalMart to get enough pay to rent an apartment with internet access and have a healthy diet? Also, can you specialize in just cart-pushing and not something annoying like customer relations?
My brother works at WalMart at nights. He stocks shelves and the like.
He has zero debt besides the house he owns. He doesn’t own a car, and walks to/from work 5 days a week making a little over $10/hour.
He has plenty of money to do anything he wants (within reason). He has thousands in the bank and spends his time surfing the internet and playing video games.
When I started at walmart I was making $8/hour. I quickly was moved up to 8.50 (I think) within the first 6 months. This was several years ago, so wages may be higher now (of course it varies by region).
Working close to full-time, I could easily make $1200 a month (take-home), which was plenty to live on where I lived at the time (greater Detroit area). If you live somewhere where the cost of living is higher, you might not be able to manage it, but of course, wages will tend to be higher in places with high cost-of-living.
Yes, usually recently built walmarts (which are much larger), will have a dedicated staff of “courtesy associates” (the corporate euphemism for “cart-pusher”). Courtesy associates only do the highly specialized task of retrieving shopping carts. Sometimes you have to do the door-greeter’s jobs while they are on break, but I usually got one of the other courtesy associates to do it, since I preferred to remain outdoors, and they liked the opportunity to get out of the sun/cold/rain.
Thanks for the info. Did you get much chance to think about things during work hours, or was the job slightly too cognitively costly for real contemplation?
For me, at least, it was in that sweet spot of cognitive demand that allows for deep reverie, but is demanding enough that I didn’t become bored with just thinking.
Personally, I find I can’t slip into deep thought while just sitting on the couch, I need some kind of other stimulation to meet my optimal level of arousal. When I really need to think about something, I always wind up pacing, cleaning, running errands, playing minesweeper, etc.
Of course, this is after you get used to the job, which takes several days to a few weeks.
Story: Eastern European accountant dude moved to the US, took a 4 hour accounting job and a 4 hour stacking heavy boxes at DHL warehouse kind of job, he said getting paid for practically going to a gym was the best idea ever and 4 hours of bookkeeping is really enough a day.
A Coder in Courierland.
I know I am off topic, but I was not aware of this and just wanted to note that I’m glad you’re still around. Of course, I enjoy most of the commenters here.… but still.… (cue sentimental music and single tear drop)
:D
Thx. But it wasn’t all that recent. Coming up on the 3-year anniversary. Scared the sh.t out of me, though, and convinced me to finally quit smoking and start exercising.
I listened to a This American Life episode about campus pizza delivery (via vehicle) at a notorious party school which didn’t sound very fun, but I’m guessing non-party schools are more reasonable.
I’ve also read a few really good blog posts about being a bike courier. It sounded fun but kinda scary. Make sure to calculate how much quantum (edit: or any kind of) measure you’re losing before going that route.
When you say it this way, Will, you needlessly exclude readers not yet familiar with the scientific content of this site, and you give the superficial impression of subscribing to Deepak Chopra or other New Age woo-woo.
If I removed the word ‘quantum’ I think that’d be enough: after all, spatially infinite universes still force us to reason in terms of measure, and way more people accept spatially infinite universes than the no-worldeaters interpretation of quantum mechanics. You make a fair point that invoking the Q-word was needless.
Surprising, because the opposite of not healthy isn’t bike riding all day? How about healthy died and 1⁄2 of good exercise? Personally I do 1.25 hrs, but that’s because I read on the (stationary) bike.
As an aside, what got me into back exercise after some years was a weird medical episode where I was suspected of stroke 2 years ago. Fortunately a false alarm, but I sincerely recommend having something like that “mid-life”. I’d give some of my friends fake heart attacks if I knew how.